Negative perceptions about software development. Do you have a solution?

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Feedback on my proposed session at Agile 2012 on whether principled Agile practice is capable of creating workplaces and an industry more inviting of women software developers…

I could not agree more. There are many negative perceptions about software development these day in the US (off-shoring, hostile env, long hours, …). As a result, my friends at North Carolina State University tell me that overall CS enrollment is down. There was a similar event in Japan with the creation of the “Software Factory” in early 80s. I believe that they almost decimated their software industry. But how do we solve this? It has to start early as the career begins way before their first job. Leadership? If we want to maintain the industry, you bet.

Agile thought leaders came together in the first place to challenge the rest of us to empower individual contributors, elevate the role of craft and quality, cultivate collaborative ways of working, and create better, more valuable software products.

Following their lead, principled Agile practice is a determined process of honest observation and incremental improvement. It is dedicated, courageous advocacy for removing obstacles — an effort supported by analytics and a track record of improved performance.

The ambitions of this change don’t stop at a team or a set of engineering practices (though those are hard enough to accomplish). It is a change program within an organization.

We should see our mission is aligned with creating a software workplace and definition of the software developer inviting to articulate people, with diverse interests and points of views, who reflect our actual end users, and who want careers that have meaning and purpose.

I’ve never participated an agile adoption that didn’t ultimately set its sites on the larger company, the products that organization is building and why it is building them. I’ve never been part of a prolonged and dedicated agile adoption that didn’t bring developers closer to creative people outside the team, that didn’t make work a more rewarding place to show up each day.

Agile practitioners need to battle workplace cultures that discourage women and other talented people from entering and remaining in our field one dysfunction, one bully, one obstacle at a time, in one workplace at a time, because they are obstacles to collaboration and trust, disempower and burn out talented individual contributors, and distance us from our customers and end users.

I’m not saying this happens everywhere or that the changes are permanent. Widespread adoption brings with it mixed and often disappointing results. But enough of us need to drive for this change in enough of our shops, enough of the time that Agile remains a path to excellence for those of us capable of striving after it.

And by doing this we will create enough change to influence the rest of the industry. Agile adoption itself is an example of this kind of change.

Does this effort provide a clear path to success? Clearly not.

But is this approach capable of driving large and dramatic changes in companies and our industry? Yes.

How values create change from small networks to large

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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 7 of 7

(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.

All slides.

Previous: Antidote the diving catch culture of heroics and privileged roles

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 the diving catch culture of heroics and privileged roles

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 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.