Tag Archives: Gabrielle Benefield

Coffee and Ethics in Paradise

Posted on by

DSCN0680.JPG sunset at buddha point
It’s my final day on the Big Island after HICCS-42.

Unfortunately, I was a ghost at the conference. I spent most of the week tightly tethered to my East Coast work day. Much sleep deprivation, anxiety and coffee consumption.

I did see the Agile/Lean presentations chaired by Jeff Sutherland and Gabrielle Benefield and participated in the Ethics sessions in which I presented my paper. These were the main reasons I took this very expensive non-vacation and so I’m grateful for how things worked out.

Sounds like there may be an Ethics minitrack again next year. Apparently, this is a relatively unique thing in IT conferences academic or professional and an indication of why HICSS is such an unusual event.

The conversation around my paper may have sparked research interest. My “ask” of the largely academic audience was:

  • Learn more about agile
  • Research dilemmas in an agile context
  • Educate us about the larger concerns
  • Create safe venues for discussing our dilemmas
  • Write about things beyond business value and efficacy

We need all hands on deck. We need to learn from other, more established disciplines. We need better data gathered with greater rigor and without the coda of a sales pitch.

How can we build software with consideration for benefit and harm as well as business value in the interests of society and our users as well as our employers and stakeholders?

How do we evolve from head count to the engineers/craftspeople we need to become?

HICSS-41

Posted on by

I just presented Ilio Krumins-Beens’ [and my paper] on unbounded collaboration between the product owner and development team at the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. (I’ll link off to the paper when the transaction is published on the IEEE site.)

20070110 177HICSS is an interesting mix of academics and practitioners. On the list of presenters in the agile mini-track were Jeff Sutherland, Stephen Cohen from Microsoft, and Gabrielle Benefield from Yahoo as well as researchers Ann Fruhling from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Kevin Kwiat from the Air Force Research Laboratory, and David F. Rico.

HICSS is an instance where the academy has invited us developers into their living room to discuss what we do, the way we actually do it.

There’s a huge disconnect between what I practice as a software developer and what many institutions of higher learning teach.

Theoretical exercises in waterfall practices are not helpful precursors to TDD, pairing, continuous integration, refactoring, interdisciplinary collaboration, self-organizing teams, etc. etc.

Arguably, they are not even helpful precursors to waterfall as it’s actually practiced. If you think XP requires experienced developers what the heck do you get when you make someone with little experience architect a market trading system in UML!

We need the academy to understand us. They not only train our workforce, their research informs policies, standards and business management practices that shape government and industry expectations.

We need business schools that train prospective CXO’s to build lean businesses that will in turn build out agile/lean IT and product development organizations.

Another big barrier to agile adoption is lack of empirical support for the benefits of specific Lean, Scrum and XP practices. We need original research that correlates to the obvious things: quality, risk mitigation, market performance, productivity and cost reduction.

I’d also really love to see original research on how agile, highly collaborative practices correlate to ethical behavior on the part of individuals and organizations, gender and ethnic diversity, and sustained innovation.