Tag Archives: Ken Schwaber

Love of Craft (Continued)

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SD Times has a brief item on the Standish Group CHAOS Study update. In 2006, 65% of sampled software projects were canceled, significantly late and/or over-budget. Over ten years of thought and practice have improved our success rate by a meaningful but disappointing 19%.

Business execution shares more than equal credit for our state of play. Four of the first five Standish Group project success factors are engaged, empowered and pragmatic product management.

There will always be a background failure rate no matter how excellent technical execution becomes. Things change and opportunities involve risks. Some well-executed projects will always fail to pan out. Still, 65th percentile is a mean aspiration.

I haven’t met a talented developer or development manager who wasn’t obsessed with self-improvement. Yet a focus on self isn’t enough. Standing out in the crowd may benefit individuals but it diminishes our craft. The failure around us lowers the hopes of society for what we can achieve.

Principle 7 of The IEEE Computer Society Code of Ethics says we should:

7.07. Not unfairly intervene in the career of any colleague; however, concern for the employer, the client or public interest may compel software engineers, in good faith, to question the competence of a colleague.

Inferior work embarrasses me. Behavior that perpetuates inferior work infuriates me. But when should we step beyond criticism of code to criticize those who author it? First, in good faith we should search our motives for self-interest and vanity. Opportunism is bullshit. Bullshit devalues truth. Bullshit destroys trust.

Ultimately we have a responsibility to protect the interests of those who pay us and the larger community who benefit from our efforts. We have a responsibility to society and the reputation of our industry upon which our potential to contribute to society depends. It’s our duty to find a way of expressing criticism that stands some reasonable chance of benefiting those interests.

Easier said than done where a power imbalance exists. As Ken Schwaber says in Agile Project Management with Scrum, “A dead sheepdog is a useless sheepdog.”

With all that to balance, how do we sleep at night?

About

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I’ve been working in IT for fourteen years and developing software for eleven.

My first development job was in a startup working alone and crashing for a deadline. Classic code and fix. I was pretty successful at it. I generally delivered on time. Often through sheer force of will. My big weakness was not reaching out to learn from other developers. A sure sign of a new or just bad self-taught coder is that they bang away at a problem like no one has ever solved it before. I’m embarrassed by some of the old code that has my name on it. Luckily, I wasn’t a cobol developer so all that work is long since trashed.

As I moved on to larger companies, I suffered under well-intentioned but corrosive attempts at waterfall. Craig Larman’s Agile & Iterative Development has a great description of how these attempts at perfectable planning and design are based on a misinterpretation of W.W. Royce’s writings.

Some of these projects were successful but the process prized simple agreement over trust. At it’s worst it created false hierarchies which hid incompetence and fetishized heroics. I was burning out. My friends were quitting. As if that wasn’t bad enough, even our success often fit Mike Cohn’s description of delivering the wrong software on time and on budget.

Meaningful products can emerge from horrible process. But a way of working that tears down talented people’s desire to work is tragic. To repeatedly participate in this is to sap the world of it’s limited supply inspiration, creativity and joy. This is evil. Now that I have authority, my main goal is to avoid this evil.

About seven years ago, I took my first training from Stephen McConnell’s Construx. Stephen McConnell inspires me. He is open to different practices, sets high standards for performance, and champions a code of ethics for our profession.

Over time I learned some techniques for effective iterative planning, risk management, and estimation. I learned how to work with others to deliver quality software. Through Earned Value Planning, regular inspection points and risk lists we built transparency into our practices. With realistic schedules we were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.

Still, the weakness I saw in my team and in my leadership style was relying way to heavily on the abilities and day to day motivation of individuals. I had to manage the project. My best developer had to work on it. If one of us had a bad day the project might grind to a halt. Our whole wasn’t adding up to the talents of the individuals.

It took me a while to really grok that excellence isn’t about adopting a shared set of practices. It’s about rallying around a shared set of values. I shifted from mentoring my team on how I did things to a conversation about why we do what we do.

We all want to make a contribution, we want to deliver business value for our employer, we want to be proud of our work, we want to learn, we want to be honest, we want time for our family’s, friends and outside interests.

Over the last four years, we have adopted coding practices and a management style that supported our values. Specifically, Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. My recent focus has been on the management side. My short list of thought leaders is Alistair Cockburn, Mike Cohn, Ken Schwaber, and Jeff Sutherland.