I posted how Anpanman by Takashi (嵩) Yanase (柳瀬) is my role model. Turns out John Maeda has similar sentiments.

What a noble aspiration to act under the belief, “That if you had more you could always get by with less.” One I find very hard to live up to.

In the workplace, I hate to assume responsibility for decisions I did not make. I’m not talking about anything illegal. I’m talking about the daily harms people inflict on others — particularly those over whom they hold power.

There is an industry around how to confront such situations but let’s admit there are people and events we cannot change.

Having no participation or influence over the decision, I want to stay out of it.

But as a human being of good will I have to acknowledge harm and live with my action or inaction in the face of it.

So what can you do when you have no means within your role or recourse to outside authority?

Consider the person and respond as an individual. Give of your personal time and resources.

I aspire to this and very often fall short. But I am challenged and inspired by an absurd and beautiful Japanese children’s character.

I am also inspired by the actions of others including my wife, Kathie, my former employer, Peter, and my friend and co-worker, Luke. Small, extraordinary acts of good will by good people.

Posted: November 23rd, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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I’ll be presenting two talks at the November Scrum Gathering.

One of them is dear to my heart. I’ll be using this blog over the next few months to work up my ideas and document conversations I have around this topic.

The Ethics of Scrum and Agile Software Development.

Here’s what I proposed:

Presentation Description

Are Scrum and XP inherently ethical?

In the face of contradictory beliefs over what we do and how we do it, we software developers, agile or not, experience pressure to compromise our work and our due care for others. Meanwhile, as our products become more beneficial, more pervasive and inter-connected our potential to harm grows.

Attempts by the ACM and IEEE to engage us in a dialog on norms of conduct has resulted in a controversial code of ethics that borrows heavily from established engineering disciplines – mandating specifications to ensure effective software.

We, agile software developers are making an under-appreciated contribution to ethical practice in our field.

Whether our work is a profession or craft, we need to engage the larger community in a conversation about how our day to day actions affect our employers, our peers, and our society. This presentation will attempt to frame professional ethics in the context of agile values and practices.

Why is this topic of interest to Scrum Gathering attendees?

The discussion over norms of ethical conduct happens outside the earshot of most working developers. The day to day experience of Scrum practitioners is at a distance from those who concern themselves with software ethics.

As a Scrum community, we have a responsibility to help shape the expectations placed upon us by others. We cannot delegate our integrity. Nor can we defer concerns over negligence, recklessness, or intent to harm the human beings who use the systems we create. We openly discuss our projects, our working conditions, and our advancement but to protect those very interests we often deal with issues of conscience privately.

Yet the passion behind Scrum is, in part, an idealistic one – a hope that by dealing openly and responsively with our stakeholders we will build something of real value. We need to harness this idealism to encourage each other make better decisions in the interests of stakeholders who do not pay us and do not always have a seat at the project table.

Given the downstream effect ethical lapses large and small have on society, we need to engage in this discussion or have the wrong solutions imposed upon us by employers, institutions, and regulatory agencies.

Presentation Objectives

1. Is it important for us to establish a shared commitment to ethical conduct?
2. What obligations a software developer should feel beyond fulfilling the requirements of their employer?
3. How the Agile Manifesto and Scrum/XP practices suggest a partial set of norms of ethical conduct.
4. How agile organizations have started to provide their own statements of principles to extend agile values and encompass conduct towards our peers and society.

Posted: August 30th, 2007 under scrum.
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Ken Schwaber made an audacious comment today. To paraphrase:

“One of my canaries in the coal mine is the number of women in the software industry. Women are smarter than men. They tend to gravitate to careers where they are compensated well and find the work rewarding. They are fleeing the our industry in droves.”

He was speaking at Agile 2007 on The Enterprise and Scrum.

The Stanford Daily reported that “13 percent of CS undergraduates are female this year, down from 24 percent in the 1999-2000 school year.” This despite National Science Foundation statistics that show more women are receiving bachelors degrees than men.

I agree with Mr. Schwaber, a software industry more inviting to women entering the workforce would provide a better, more humane environment for all employees.

Also, what potential innovation is being lost? History is rife with examples of gender inequality in service and outcomes across a wide variety of industries — most troubling being medicine. A male dominated field should not be confident it is best serving its women consumers.

My company’s own research indicates that women are men’s peers when it comes to the use, ownership and purchasing decisions around technology. So this is an opportunity as much as it is a concern.

A 2006 paper by McDowell, Werner, Bullock and Fernald found that pair programming practice “may help increase female representation in the field.”

Agile values and practices support a collaborative, empowering and sustainable work place. As practitioners, we should encourage research on whether this can contribute to a more diverse workforce.

Fundamentally, we have to make software development more conducive to the contributions of half our population.

Posted: August 17th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

Informed Consent — “the right of each individual potentially affected by a project to participate to an appropriate degree in decision making concerning that project” (Gail D. Baura, Engineering Ethics: An Industrial perspective)

“(T)he astronauts should have been informed of the possibility of O-ring failure before the Challenger launch…” — G. Baura

Often the people asked to pay down a risk are not the ones who suffer if the risk plays out. For Challenger, this distance contributed to the sacrifice of innocents.

As developers, we must never hide risk for which others suffer the consequences. This is core to Scrum. The team tells the Product Owner anything that may affect the business outcome of a project.

Scrum’s focus on self-directed teams instills the courage informed consent asks of us. Frequent opportunities to inspect and adapt gives it voice.

However, an ethical view obligates us to more than delivering business value and we cannot entirely cede our conscience to our product owners. We have an obligation to each other, our collective reputation, the people who use or indirectly benefit from our systems, and the public good. For the most part, these interests have no informed consent on our projects.

As Agile practitioners and Scrum advocates, how can we expand our conversation and help each other exercise due care?

Posted: August 8th, 2007 under scrum.
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I just found out that the ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, is an alumnus of my school, Whitman College.

It’s an interesting coincidence because I’ve been thinking alot about Renee Montagne’s February 7th NPR story:

Like his military counterpart, Lt. Gen. David Petreaus, the new top general in Iraq, Crocker raised questions about the conduct of the war. Now, Crocker and Petreaus are being asked — perhaps too late — to correct it.
…
Crocker and Petreaus will be sent to fix the troubled post-war situation that they warned of four years ago. [Barbara] Bodine [, former ambassador to Yemen,] wonders where the United States might be today, had Crocker and Petreaus been appointed earlier in the war.

“It will be one of the inevitable speculations of history,” she says.

As Demarco and Lister say in Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects, it can be futile to be the only one in the room acknowledging risk.

It really is so late.

Is it too late for professionals with relevant experience, appropriate authority and a willingness to entertain complexity?

Posted: April 10th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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A fundamental value of computer ethics, agile and Scrum is truth telling.

As developers we have an obligation to provide honest feedback around decisions that affect either the quality or value of software our employer asks us to create.

I am now the senior person dedicated to software in my company. If that means anything it is that my responsibility has expanded to protect the best interests of my employer on any project we undertake that has software development dependencies.

The profound challenge in this is that while the company has expanded my scope of Responsibility it has not necessarily expanded my scope of Authority. As a mid-size, growing company we give department heads great discretion. My company is also one of many with a structural distinction between online and IT related software development. Therefore my team has no direct role in some of the most visible outputs of our company.

As a result, I cannot have true accountability for some outcomes since I cannot change them. That does not absolve me of my ethical responsibility nor allow me to narrowly define success in my current role. That is why to take my job seriously is to take on a certain amount of anguish.

The obvious answer is that I never should have taken on the role unless I was given commensurate authority. Perhaps this is correct.

I accepted the promotion because I believe it raises the profile of my team and makes more visible the quality and value return they are producing. I also believe that while responsibility without authority is flawed, it is a common state of play for those of us who introduce agile practices into a company. Let’s be honest, introducing agile is an attempt to lead change. Since I am not an entrepreneur it is a given that I will have to earn trust at each step of the way in making that change.

So given these circumstances, what is my responsibility to my employer around truth telling? Who am I obligated to tell truth to? Let’s focus on questions of value and quality and leave aside safety or legal concerns because as dramatic as whistle blowing is, that is not my reality.

Basic risk management tells me that the person who’s interests are most damaged should a problem arise owns the risk. In a functioning Scrum organization this is the product owner — or as Yahoo calls them, the single wringable neck. This one person is held accountable to the performance of a product in the market place. It is to them that any concerns over the value or quality of a software product need to be raised.

As I’ve said, I have a Scrum team but I do not work in a Scrum organization. There are times when projects originating outside my team do not have a clear “single wringable neck”. This presents a huge challenge. Who will be most affected by a problem if no single person is assigned real accountability for the outcome of a software project?

I have decided after hard experience that in circumstances where there is no responsible and empowered product owner the person most affected by problems is the person most identified with our brand and our products, my CEO. Therefore my responsibility for truth telling is to her.

This is, to me, a freeing realization for in it lies great opportunity for my company. My CEO who has proven herself to be an exceptional product owner. If anyone on the business side understands agile principles and my ethical responsibility as a software developer it is her. If anyone is capable of creating positive change in my company it is her.

Therefore, in the spirit of my CEO’s own vision, I will expect the best of people while maintaining my integrity and independent judgment to serve the best interests of my company, our customers, my peers, and our society.

Posted: March 31st, 2007 under scrum.
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Two justifications I’ve seen for dismissing the relevance of computer ethics in decision making:

• this decision is harmless,
• this is a business decision not a technology one

I’m reading a great collection called Computer Ethics and Professional Responsibility. In the essay Unique Ethical Problems in Information Technology Walter Maner writes:

In the discreet world of computing, there is no meaningful metric in which small change and small effects go hand in hand.” - (Dijkstra 1989. p. 1400) … the normally predictable linkage between acts and their effects is severely skewed by the infusion of computing technology.

This disconnect around human perception, size and complexity reminded me of John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity:

Thus while [integrated circuits] are a primary driver of complexity in modern day objects, they also enable the ability to shrink a frighteningly complex machine to the size of a cute little gum-drop… There is no turning back to the age when large objects were complex and small objects were simple.

So in hard and soft technology, size is no longer a predictable measure of consequence. Small contains great expressive power.

From Bill Joy’s 2000 wired article on the threat of miniaturization, ubiquity and self-learning systems, Why the future doesn’t need us:

The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved.

Not only small tools but mundane and seemingly insignificant decisions about their use can have tremendous consequences.

Should we limit our concern for consequence to harm: injury, economic loss and the like?

To think so would be to absolve most technologists of ethical considerations most of the time. But an ethical view point doesn’t limit itself to harm but considers net benefit. So this isn’t just a discussion of quality control, it’s one of maximizing value and not just to our employers, clients and ourselves but with consideration for all those who are affected by the use of our products.

But is good ethics good business?

If “good business” is maximizing return over a fixed period then that clearly is not the same as maximizing benefit to the larger society. Most would argue that there are meaningful considerations besides acquiring wealth for both an individual and an organization but I’ll leave that for now. Let me concede that in business there are winners and losers and that winners often gain at the expense of those around them.

Nonetheless, what Walter Maner, John Maeda and Bill Joy are telling us is that in a way unique to this time in history we cannot deem a thing or a thought innocuous because it is small.

To borrow from an ex-Secretary of Defense, our work is fraught with far more “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” and far less “known knowns” than our ape-evolved brains would have us believe.

Even out of narrow self interest we must approach decision making around technology with humility and not skip the hard work of thinking through the consequences of our actions.

• this decision is harmless
• this is a business decision not a technology one

Embrace such thoughts at your peril for you deny complexity that both envelops you and fits on the tip of your finger.

Posted: March 28th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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