(37) Antidote the diving catch culture of heroics and privileged roles

“Many SET cultures place a high value on risky behaviors: They celebrate heroic diving catches made at the eleventh hour to rescue a failing project”

(38) Problem statement

“Why don’t we just build the system right in the first place? Women are much better at preventive medicine. A Superman mentality is not necessarily productive; it’s just an easy fit for the men in the sector. Because it is generally men who are making the promotion decisions, they recognize this behavior and reward it.”

(39) Collective ownership

Supporting that sentiment are the following Agile principles: “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.” “Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.” What I’m getting at here is an emergent property like self-organization called collective ownership It’s an outcome of teams that embrace Agile values of self-organization, quality and simplicity.

(40) What collective ownership feels like

“Collective Ownership encourages everyone to contribute new ideas to all segments of the project. Any developer can change any line of code to add functionality, fix bugs, improve designs or refactor. No one person becomes a bottle neck for changes[50].”

(41) Practices that support collective ownership

Collective ownership is the engineering expression of self-organization. To achieve collective ownership, a self-organized team should explore disciplined, collaborative engineering practices: pair programming, evolving architectures with refactoring, frequent integration, unit testing and test-driven development[53].

(42) Why is collective ownership an antidote to heroics?

A diving catch implies a single set of eyes on code. It implies haste and a need for emergency intervention, i.e. poor quality. Emergency code is not unit tested, it is not elegant. It also implies a team that is not pulling together to deliver the goals of their iteration.

(43) Why is collective ownership an antidote to special job assignments

Collective ownership discourages the use of specialists which represent bottlenecks and opaque stores of tacit knowledge. The Scrum guide includes as the basic definition of team, “There are no titles on Teams, and there are no exceptions to this rule. Teams do not contain sub-Teams dedicated to particular domains like testing or business analysis, either[52].”

(44) Agile values in an enterprise context

I’ve described two examples of how Agile principles call upon practitioners to battle hostile workplaces. My paper has several more. But let’s talk about how Agile teams instill Agile values into the enterprise. As a development team matures impediments become consistently rooted in the surrounding organization. Continuous improvement becomes an effort directed out into the larger company. Where an organization fails to support a team adopting an agile practice, the teams needs to drive for these changes in the organization by first building trust and influence by producing results in spite of their impediments and then using that success to win support for removing the obstacles that lay in their path.

(45) A principled Agile enterprise

In response the larger organization will begin removing impediments to team performance by, for example, adopting a retrospective type review process, rewarding collective over individual performance, compensating for span of influence over span of control.

(46) How values create change from small networks to large

But how can small change within companies produce large order changes across an industry or society?

(46) Ba

To model this, I’ll use Nonaka’s concept of Ba, or “a shared context in motion, in which knowledge is shared, created and utilized[65].” Sectors that thrive off innovation do so by sharing knowledge across direct and extended-relationships among people. Each set of relationships exists within a physical or virtual space. Each of these spaces at any given moment in time is Ba.

(47) Ba in knowledge work

Knowledge workers interact within their local communities, interest groups. They graduate from school and change jobs. Companies are distributed across locales. Consultants travel among companies and conferences bring individuals together from across the industry. In sharing, creating and synthesizing knowledge one Ba influences the other, fostering change on the small scale to the large and back. The broad adoption of Agile practices is itself an example of knowledge occurring first within individuals and teams and then spreading across an industry.

(48) The challenge

But widespread Agile adoption has been a mixed blessing for principled agilists. Agile values are not permeating as well as the practices themselves. To invert Alistair Cockburn’s dictum, the industry is valuing agile practices over agile principles.

(49) Snowbird

This threat is on the minds of prominent Agile thought leaders. Enough so that the notes from the 10 year reunion of the initials signers of the Agile Manifesto contains “four things the community needs to do in the next 10 years”: demand technical excellence, promote individual change and lead organizational change, organize knowledge and improve education, and maximize value across the entire process[66].

(50) Conclusion

Agile is not about doing “Agile” things. It is about continually improving ourselves, our teams and our organizations to create better software for our customers and our end users. If we embrace that on a wide scale, we will recognize we are driving away an incredibly valuable source of talent and an incredibly valuable contribution in our effort to create products relevant to over half of our end users. We can use the principles underlying Agile practice to guide our efforts to remove this impediment.. Successful embrace of agile principles within teams will instill a more social and engaged view of the software developer role that can shift companies and the larger industry, driving beneficial change into academic institutions and the perceptions of the greater public. This change in our workplaces, in the common perception of our work, and in the institutions that educate software developers would encourage more girls to pursue computer science and help the industry recruit and retain larger numbers of talented women.

Thank you.