Tag Archives: values

Antidote the diving catch culture of heroics and privileged roles

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These are notes from my presentation at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) #45.

I’ll link to my full paper when it is available and to subsequent posts as I publish them.

Agile values, product innovation and the shortage of women software developers Part 6 of 7

(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].”

Next: How values create change from small networks to large…

Previous: Antidote to hostile workplaces and the alpha geek

All slides published to date.

There is abundant research on the problems women face in our field. I would love researchers to jump in on whether Agile principles and Agile practioners can really make a difference.

I’d also love any suggestions of organizations, institutions and individuals I might reach out to for more information, collaboration, or to take up the cause.

Please comment on my proposal to Agile 2012.

The full citation list for my paper.

Antidote to hostile workplaces and the alpha geek

Posted on by

These are notes from my presentation at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) #45.

I’ll link to my full paper when it is available and to subsequent posts as I publish them.

Agile values, product innovation and the shortage of women software developers Part 5 of 7

(29) Antidote to hostile workplace and the alpha geek

“Alpha male techies have minimal social skills and can be awkward around women, but this awkwardness coexists with enormous arrogance[45].”

(30) Problem statement

As an example, at a recent Ruby on Rails conference, a presenter contrasted using particular document oriented database to performing like a porn star: In reaction to the controversy Martin Fowler wrote: “The nub is that whatever the presenter may think, people were offended… It doesn’t matter whether or not you think the slides were pornographic. The question is does the presenter, and the wider community, care that women feel disturbed, uncomfortable, marginalized and a little scared.” 63% of women in tech report they experience sexual harassment

(31) Value statement

Agilists should be a voice in opposition to the alpha male in their midst and here’s why: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Not chest thumping individuals.

(32) Description of self organization

Self-organization is a fundamental value in Agile. A performing Agile team organizes itself around the work collaborating in high trust according to a set of mutually arrived at expectations and norms of behavior.

(33) What does self-organization feel like?

Another quote from Jeff Sutherland: “Team members share a sense of purpose, vision, and passion for their work. Teams that recognize that we are not simply individuals working in close proximity, but a team where we must all be engaged with one another’s work. (Jeff wrote He) tells teams looking to achieve amazing results that each member of the team must care as much about their neighbor’s work as they do their own.”

(34) Enterprise support for self-organization is also an Agile value

“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

(35) Practices that support self-organization

In emphasizing Agile values, I’m not saying the practices are not important. They support the values. A company instilled with the value of self-organization should: keep team size between 5-9 people, provide communal workspace, rely on the team to do its own estimates and form it’s own iteration commitments. The team must frequently and consistently reflect on what it can do and what it must ask of the organization to make itself more effective. They must drive incremental improvements into the organization based on this.

(36) How is self-organization an antidote to alpha geeks?

A self-organized team will not tolerate a hostile or demeaning attitude towards co-workers or the business people upon which it depends for work. They will deal with each other with respect and a great deal of honesty. They have difficult conversations with each other and they address their own bad behaviors in order to fit into the norms of the team in order to maximize team performance. So, the ultimate answer for the alpha male who breaks the cohesion of the team, is he either modifies his behavior based on frequent and regular feedback from his peers and coaching from his leads or he is off the team.

Next: Antidote the diving catch culture of heroics and privileged roles…

Previous: What Agile principles demand we confront this problem?

All slides published to date.

There is abundant research on the problems women face in our field. I would love researchers to jump in on whether Agile principles and Agile practioners can really make a difference.

I’d also love any suggestions of organizations, institutions and individuals I might reach out to for more information, collaboration, or to take up the cause.

The full citation list for my paper.

Do Agile principles demand we confront the shortage of women developers?

Posted on by

These are notes from my presentation at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) #45.

I’ll link to my full paper when it is available and to subsequent posts as I publish them.

Agile values, product innovation and the shortage of women software developers Part 4 of 7

(23) Agile Software Development

Now let’s incorporate Agile Software Development into this. What unites the different agile methodologies is a shared set of values and a shared cause to change the way software is made and delivered to customers. These values are declared in twelve principles and summarized in a four line manifesto…

(24) High level principles

We value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.

(25) Agile values are the foundation of agile practice

“These values are not just something the creators of the Agile Manifesto intended to give lip service to and then forget. They are working values. Each individual agile methodology approaches these values in a slightly different way, but all of these methodologies have specific processes and practices that foster one or more of these values.” – Jeff Sutherland

(26) Agile values as a standard of conduct

Agile principles and the ongoing discussion of them form the basis for a normative standard of conduct informing how practitioners should behave towards our work, our peers, our employers, our customers and our end users. They challenge practitioners not to a narrow definition of success on a task but to craft with quality, to collaborate in high trust, to cede authority to individual contributors, and to work with the customer’s interests in mind, to make predictable progress at a sustainable pace, and to make problems and opportunities visible.

(27) Agile values as a call for beneficial change

Agile principles urge us to inspect our actions, confront impediments, and drive towards beneficial change. And the means to this is, as Alistair Cockburn suggests, we “…value agile principles over the agile practices[38] Or as Bob Martin says, Not simply to execute but to take care.”

(28) What Agile principles demand we confront this problem?

So if Agile practitioners recognize the shortage of women in our shops is an impediment to value delivery – that it is an obstacle to our mission as agilists – then we will work to remove this impediment. The question becomes “What Agile principles demand we confront this problem?” In the interests of time I’ll highlight two hostile cultures described in the literature and the agile values that challenge them.

Next: Antidote to hostile workplaces and the alpha geek…

Previous: Can women devs help software better address the needs of women end users?

All slides published to date.

There is abundant research on the problems women face in our field. I would love researchers to jump in on whether Agile principles and Agile practioners can really make a difference.

I’d also love any suggestions of organizations, institutions and individuals I might reach out to for more information, collaboration, or to take up the cause.

Please comment on my proposal to Agile 2012.

The full citation list for my paper.

Can women devs help software better address the needs of women end users?

Posted on by

These are notes from my presentation at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) #45.

I’ll link to my full paper when it is available and to subsequent posts as I publish them.

Agile values, product innovation and the shortage of women software developers Part 3 of 7

I. Nonaka and H Takeuchi. The Knowledge Creating Company. New York, NY. Oxford University, 1995

(20) How would having women on dev teams help software better address the needs of women

For this, I’ll lean on the research of Nonaka Ikujiro and Takeuchi Hirotaka . This slide is an illustration of their concept of the product development cycle in serially innovative companies. It requires the creation and sharing of two kinds of knowledge within the organization. Explicit knowledge – that which we can explain in words – and tacit knowledge – that which can best be expressed by doing. This concept of knowledge creation and techniques for forming teams that support it are the roots of the most widely adopted Agile process framework, Scrum[39]. Nonaka and Takeuchi emphasize that an enabling condition for sustained innovation is, requisite variety, having a product team made of members with different backgrounds, perspectives and motivations. Requisite variety applies to cross-functional teams but also to team members with diverse life experience. Because it is through life experience that we acquire tacit knowledge.

T. Oshita, et. al. Bread Baking Machine. US Patent Office, 2004

(21) Matsushita Example of Tacit Knowledge

The classic example of the incorporation of tacit knowledge into a disruptive product design is the first Matsushita bread machine. It took a hands on experience of baking bread by one of the product engineers (a woman) to crack how to implement the mechanics of kneading dough in a bread maker.

(22) Team diversity and delivering value

Women are significant customers and influencers in the buying decision for software and software dependent technology. Statistically, women have different perceptions and preferences for software. Therefore, according to knowledge creation theory, it is a competitive advantage to have women individual contributors bring their tacit knowledge to software product development.

Next: Do Agile principles demand we confront the shortage of women developers…

Previous: Are women are under-served by software?

All slides published to date.

There is abundant research on the problems women face in our field. I would love researchers to jump in on whether Agile principles and Agile practioners can really make a difference.

I’d also love any suggestions of organizations, institutions and individuals I might reach out to for more information, collaboration, or to take up the cause.

Please comment on my proposal to Agile 2012.

The full citation list for my paper.

Are women are under-served by software?

Posted on by

These are notes from my presentation at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) #45.

I’ll link to my full paper when it is available and to subsequent posts as I publish them.

Agile values, product innovation and the shortage of women software developers Part 2 of 7

(11) Lost opportunity in the software industry (Product)

The lack of women on software teams is also a potential loss to product innovation…

(12) Women are our customer

Women directly or indirectly influence 61% of U.S. consumer electronics purchases[18].

(13) Women in gaming

Women are 42% of active game players and 48% of frequent game purchasers. And if you think they’re just buying them for their kids, industry research shows women 18 and over are 37% of game players whereas boys 17 and under are only 13%[19].

(14) Women on the internet

Half (50.4%) of the internet population is women 18 and over. They spend an average of 38 hours per month online. They spend 5% more time than men in online social networking and 20% more time on online shopping. Women account for 58% of internet buyers, 61% of internet transactions and 58% of internet dollars.

(15) Women are underserved

Software products are generally designed with no consideration for women as distinct user groups. In “Gender differences in Web Usability”, Frank Spillars states, “Gender differentiation is barely present in North American technology product design… let alone Web experiences[22].”

(16) how women perceive and use software

In “Towards Female Preferences in Design.” the authors found differences in the ways men and women perceive and describe software products. “The results of this research have revealed female-oriented themes that should… enlarge views of pleasurable product design attributes and language for the genders[23].”

(17) three ways companies fail.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) highlights three ways companies fail to address women consumers: Poor product design: failing to tailor products to women’s unique needs and challenges.

(18) three ways companies fail.

Clumsy sales and marketing: based on outdated images and stereotypes.

(19) three ways companies fail.

Inability to provide meaningful hooks or differentiation: considering women indistinguishable from the general customer population or thinking of them as one monolithic segment[24].

Next: Can women devs help software better address the needs of women end users…

Previous: Are we driving women away from software development?

All slides published to date.

There is abundant research on the problems women face in our field. I would love researchers to jump in on whether Agile principles and Agile practioners can really make a difference.

I’d also love any suggestions of organizations, institutions and individuals I might reach out to for more information, collaboration, or to take up the cause.

Please comment on my proposal to Agile 2012.

The full citation list for my paper.