There’s a movement among the students of the MBA program of Harvard Business School for an MBA Oath of ethical conduct. Read the oath here.

From a June 4th article in the Economist:

The student oath is part of a larger effort to turn management from a trade into a profession…

This is the exact debate going on in Software Development — emerging profession or craft?

One of the two main criticisms of the oath and of the whole idea of turning management into a profession, particularly in business-school faculties, is that it is either unnecessary or actively harmful… (by) promising to “safeguard the interests” of colleagues, customers, and society, are the future captains of industry simply short-changing their shareholders?

Defenders of the oath reply that the goal of maximising shareholder value has become a justification for short-termism and, in particular, rapid personal enrichment. They are concerned about managers doing things that drive up the share price quickly at the expense of a firm’s lasting health.

The second complaint is that the oath’s fine words are toothless.

Even these cheerleaders admit there are differences between practising management and, say, medicine. They concede that no self-regulating professional body for managers could possibly monopolise entry to the profession

We can debate that a practice has ethical consequences, i.e. that it has a larger array of stakeholders who can be harmed or benefited by the daily decisions of practitioners – without calling for accreditation, lincensing, certification, standards bodies, and regulation.

Developers should consider end users, society and our common reputation even as managers consider long-term investors, employees, their industry and the larger economy.

Name a widespread activity that isn’t abetted/enabled by software systems. Even the debate over an MBA Oath:

As for punishing unprofessional behaviour, Mr Khurana (Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School) is inspired by the internet rather than by a closed council of grandees. From open-source software to eBay and Wikipedia, new systems of self-regulation are emerging based on openness, constant feedback and the wisdom of crowds. These could be adapted, he thinks, to provide effective scrutiny of managers.

If anything about this strikes you as not true, I’d love to hear why.

Tag(s): Add new tag, employment, ethics, good work
Comments: none

ContactPoint is a web accessible database containing identity information for all English children.

From the Department for Children, Schools and Families:

ContactPoint holds the following basic information for each child in England up until their 18th birthday:

• name, address, gender, date of birth and a unique identifying number
• name and contact details for each child’s parent or carer
• contact details for services working with a child: as a minimum, educational settings such as schools and GP practices
• contact details for other service providers where appropriate, for example health visitors or social workers; and whether practitioners are lead professionals and have undertaken assessments under the Common Assessment Framework (CAF). Please note these are not currently held on the system but will be added over time.

The new flow of information is intended to detect abuse and save children’s lives. According to the Financial Times:

It (ContactPoint) was first proposed after the 2003 Laming report into the death of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old girl who died after failures by social services.

Still the risks are alarming.

From the Times Online:

In March the Government admitted that it had uncovered problems in the system for shielding details of an estimated 55,000 vulnerable children. These include children who are victims of domestic violence, those in difficult adoptions or witness protection programmes and the children of the rich and famous, whose whereabouts may need to be kept secret.

However, there remain concerns about the security of the database, which was recently criticised by the Rowntree Trust as illegal under human rights and data protection laws.

Balancing the potential for benefit and harm can be incredibly difficult. Is the right answer obvious to you?

Tag(s): ethics, technology
Comments: none

1916 Fourth Avenue. I spent ten years here as a company member at Annex Theater.

The old Fred Astaire Dance Studio with the sprung floor and light booth permanently improvised on top of the bar is gone.

In its place is a new high-rise.

The tower’s street level facade evokes the building it replaced.

The ghosts of “Captains”, “Annex” and “7-11″ keep the old tree company — the same tree that shaded our front windows and hid our rotating anarchy A sign.

Tag(s): photo
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From Huffington Post, Washington Times Runs Obama Girls’ Photo With Story About Murdered Chicago Kids

Editor John Solomon told Greg Sargent technology, not a person, was to blame.

“The theme engine, through automation, grabbed a photo it thought was relevant, and attached it to the story,” Solomon said, acknowledging that the photo had gone up without a person seeing it. “There was no editorial decision to run it. As soon as it was brought to our attention, we pulled it down.”

“There was no editorial decision to run it”??

Who decided to acquire/build a search algorithm to publish file photos without human oversight?

The example is outrageous but using loose tags to associate photos of people to stories of crime and human tragedy? Under what circumstances does this technical solution make journalistic sense?

Technology to blame? Not even the technologists. Doesn’t this newspaper have an editorial board?

How about applying the same standard of care to your online property that you’d use for print?

Mistakes happen but blaming your tools just betrays how unequipped you are to use them.

Tag(s): ethics, failure, technology
Comments: none

Safari user, sometime StumbleUpon user. Don’t like having to remember to use Firefox to favorite a site in StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has a WebToolbar but for some reason does not provide instructions for setting up a Bookmarks Bar button to it ala Delicious.

In Safari make a new bookmark in your Bookmarks Bar called “StumbleUpon” with the following address:

javascript:(function(){location.href='http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/#url=' + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);})()

It opens the page you are currently on within the StumbleUpon web toolbar so you can thumbs up or thumbs down it.

Tag(s): javascript, safari, stumbleupon, webtoolbar
Comments: none

I am ambivalent about the Scrum community’s focus on process and tools.

Yes, it is this effort that has driven adoption and created an economy for us practitioners. But adoption is yesterday’s challenge. We’re kind of winning that one.

We need to place less emphasis on getting new organizations to try Scrum to more on getting existing teams practice Scrum better.

How many of us many, many Scrum adopters strive towards the potential of the practice?

• Where reliable software delivers monetary return to sponsors because it is truly valuable to end users.
• Where individual contributors are allowed to bring their most creative effort to the workplace to the benefit of both employers and end users.
• Where workers are allowed to live rewarding lives outside the workplace to the betterment of their families and communities.

Not just exceptional productivity – ambitious enough as that is — but exceptional productivity to a genuinely productive end.

Life is full of compromise but if that is not the aspiration — to fill our careers with as much of these achievements as possible — then why bother?

Why spend money on training and tools to deliver more waste on short, iterative cycles?

Why extract more lines of code that no one will test or use but only spend money to maintain?

Why use the Scrum process to perpetuate the alienation of the knowledge worker from their work?

Mastery means taking responsibility for ourselves and our peers. Grasping our practice is the sum of our intentions and actions in the service of something.

So here’s my plea to shift the conversation back to it’s roots.

“Agile” is about the material and human good we create when we respect our co-workers tell truth to our employers, strive to improve, and care for the people affected by the software we help build.

We use a tool or process to the degree it furthers that end and no farther.

Tag(s): agile, principle, scrum
Comments: 1

FNC Tea Parties an insult to British imperialism.

“Do you even remember what we did to you people!?”

Tag(s): politics, video
Comments: none

Tag(s): photo
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The funniest two minutes of television I’ve seen this year.

Tag(s): television, video
Comments: none

The American Presidency Project lists the results of presidential popularity Gallup polls since 1941. Data compiled by Gerhard Peters.

Looking over the data, I was surprised in retrospect how consistent Clinton’s ratings were, how un-remarkable the changeover from Clinton to Bush was, the affect 9-11 had on Bush’s popularity compared to Pearl Harbor, and Bush and Obama’s near exact swap of approval and disapproval.

Tag(s): politics
Comments: none