Musing about Agile

I’ve been catching up with my reading, and came across an intriguing post by Kathy Sierra. Headlined What Comes After Usability, it poses some very interesting questions. I quote from her post:

Unlike waterfalls (which run in one direction and don’t back up), spirals can produce software much more likely to match what users want. Spirals support usability, and usability drives the need for spiral development. But what comes after usability? And will new development approaches emerge to support it?

So, I guess I’m really asking two somewhat-related questions.

What are spirals? Kathy’s term for the family of techniques we know as Agile and XP and fast iteration, a term I happen to like. Here’s the context she uses it in:

Development models

Kathy puts forward the suggestion that what comes after usability is Flow, and, as you would expect, makes reference to the Godfather of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and to his seminal book on the subject. By the way, she invites comment and opinion on her suggestion, so please join the fray at her site so that we can all learn from it.

While I was thinking about this, I was doing my usual thing and reading a number of other books and magazines in parallel. And one of the books I’ve been reading is quite unusual; it’s called Dreaming In Code, and it’s written by Scott Rosenborg, one of the co-founders of salon.com. When I saw it was touted as “the first true successor to Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine“, the Data General person in me couldn’t resist picking it up. And seeing recommendations from Steven Johnson and Dan Gillmor made sure I read it. [An aside. As a result of buying the book I’ve discovered Scott’s blog, Wordyard. Fascinating.]

In the book, Scott quotes from an interview he did with Joel Spolsky some time ago. While on the subject of methodologies, Joel is quoted as saying:

“The key problem with the methodologies is that, implemented by smart people, the kind of people who invent methodologies, they work. Implemented by shlubs who will not do anything more than following instructions they are given, they won’t work. Anyway, the majority of developers don’t read books about software development, they don’t read web sites about software development, they don’t even read Slashdot. So they’re never going to get this, no matter how much we keep writing about it.”

Incidentally, Scott makes reference to The Joel Test as part of this discussion, and it made me smile, just as it did when I first read it nearly seven years ago. If you haven’t seen it before, here are Joel’s Twelve Questions:

  1. Do you use source control?
  2. Can you make a build in one step?
  3. Do you make daily builds?
  4. Do you have a bug database?
  5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
  6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
  7. Do you have a spec?
  8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
  9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
  10. Do you have testers?
  11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
  12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Anyone feel up to updating those 12 questions, to make them relevant to today’s context? [Yes, I do realise that the anti-Agile crew will probably insist that no such update is necessary… the same crew who claim that opensource is anti-innovation and anti-capitalist and anti-I-don’t-know-what-else….]

Apologies for the ramble. What point am I trying to make?

Well, let’s start with Scott. One of the points he makes with real vehemence is the importance of constraints. I quote from his book:

Despite the odds — despite complexity and delay and unpredictable change — a lot of software does get written and delivered and, finally, used. Occasionally, it’s even good. Rarely, it actually does something new and valuable. And in a handful of cases, it achieves all of that on schedule.

Very often, in those rare cases, success is a by-product of iron-willed restraint — a choice firmly made and vociferously reasserted at every challenge to limit a project’s scope. Where you find software success stories, you invariably find people who are good at saying no. Like an artist who deliberately limits his pallet to one colour, a poet who chooses to write a sonnet instead of free verse, or a manufacturer who chooses to serve one small product niche, the successful programmer thrives because of, not in spite of, constraints.

if you’re interested in software development, you should read the book. Scott goes on to explain and develop the experience at 37 signals, an experience that really underlines the importance of user stories, in documenting what the user expects to see, touch, feel and do.

Then we move on to Kathy, who speaks about the need to move from usability and into flow, a state where the user is too busy enjoying what she is doing, too busy to critique or snipe at the software. Flow is when the user experience is no longer submerged in the software, but instead elevated to the outcomes that the software make possible.

Which brings me back full circle to a recent post of mine, where I was talking about Patricia Seybold’s new book, Outside Innovation. The excitement and the challenge of customer-created anything.
The excitement and challenge of helping make that happen.

Remember what Peter Drucker said all those years ago, something I’ve quoted before:

Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

Customers don’t want software, they want the things they can make and do because of the software.

When we speak of customer experience, it is not about the software, it is about the things they can make and do. That’s where the flow is, that’s where the joy and the magic are. I still remember the joy I had when I played my first Star Trek style game on a Commodore Pet, when I played my first text-driven adventure game on a Burroughs 6800, when I played my first game of Rats on a B20. Ah yes, nostalgia.

Whose joy? The customer’s. Who is in the Zone, who’s experiencing the flow? The customer. Who can define what that experience is? The customer.

Which is why everything we build should be built around user stories.

And that’s why I’m Confused. How come everyone doesn’t use Agile?

Four Pillars: The Power of Context

checkershadow illusionHave you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.

I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe ten years ago. Like you, I’ve seen many such illusions in my time, but none of them has had the same impact as this one had. Some of you may not have seen it, so I thought I’d share it with you while musing about context.

I think context is the key differentiator for Web 2.0; whether you look at it from the viewpoint of Four Pillars: Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation, whether you’re one of those people really into the Semantic Web, whether you’re more of a Mashups person using GPS or other location-sensitive tools, whether you’re into deep dialogues and arguments about microformats or identity… it’s all about context.

Hold that thought for a minute and come for a tangential wander.

In the past, I’ve had my rants about e-mail, about spreadsheets and about presentation tools. Like with most other things, these have good uses and bad uses. For some reason, the bad uses seemed to proliferate. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation and not tell you I’m doing it. I like spreadsheets and presentations so much I insist on reading them on my BlackBerry. I trust everyone so much that I’m going to keep online and offline copies of every version of every spreadsheet and presentation I’ve ever come near. I like you so much I’m going to show you a draft of something and then use something completely different at the meeting a day later. Recognise any of these?

Enterprise collaboration tools are by themselves fairly useless unless people actually want to collaborate, unless people want to share, unless people want to work together. E-mail and spreadsheets and presentation tools are by themselves not evil, but can be subverted into bad uses.

For many years I wondered why people did this, why people misused the tools. And I’ve only been able to come up with one logical explanation, one that fits with my belief that people are intrinsically good. You see, many of these tools came out during the 1970s and 1980s; during that time, many of the basic tenets of enterprise employment were being turned upside down; security of tenure went flying through the window; downsizing and rightsizing and wrongsizing were all the vogue; outsourcing and offshoring were being discovered; the war for talent had not yet begun.

Now the primary and secondary sectors had already been through all this, but not the tertiary sector. And within the tertiary sector, the term “knowledge worker” was just beginning to emerge. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a question of timing. Insecure people were learning that knowledge had power, while being presented with tools to protect, fortify, even submerge, that knowledge. Are they to be blamed for using the tools selfishly?

Okay, back to the context argument. Tools like e-mail and spreadsheets and presentations, because they were so individual and stand-alone, could be manipulated. And could be misinterpreted.

They did not come with context.

What we are seeing with Four Pillars tools, with Web 2.0 tools in general, is the very opposite:

  • The way that conversations persist allows context to be captured and shared, whether in IM or wikis or blogs
  • Modern tools for archival and retrieval, via the use of tags and non-hierarchical processes, allows context to be enriched
  • The availability of location specific information, of tags and microformats, of semantic web concepts, all coupled with better identity and authentication and permissioning, allows the enriched context to be made more relevant and timely

Context. Captured and shareable. Enriched and made available. At the right time, in the right place, to the right person.

I wish it were all that simple. Whenever I see the sheer power of the tools today, I also see the stupidities. Stupidities in the context of DRM and IPR and The Series Of Tubes and and and, which have the capacity to kill this goose before any golden eggs are laid.

7 seconds of fame: a parable for our times

There’s a lovely little story going around, about a band called 7 seconds of love.

Ninja KittenThey’re very today, they even have a myspace site;
They’re very yesterday, they play ska;
They’re very tomorrow, they’re unsigned.

Somehow a 2005 hit of theirs got copied lock stock and barrel. Seriously plagiarised. Not just the tune, but the characters and costumes in the video as well.

They were not happy. They complained to the head office of the company that did the plagiarising. And the company gracefully apologised and settled out of court. The band gave some of the proceeds to charity, and said they would spend the rest on themselves.

So far so good. What makes this a parable for our times?

The plagiarism apparently took place in Argentina, where the theme and the tune were used for a TV ad.

So how did the band find out? Fans of theirs, fans they didn’t know they had, left comments on the YouTube clip.

Wow.

Linus’s Law in operation. Given enough eyeballs……

[An aside: Their music might not be to everyone’s taste, but do take a look at their web site. Why? Here’s an extract from their “bio”

At the dawn of the new millennium a revolution was underway which would change the world for ever.

Joel and Alex Veitch from rathergood.com were men on a mission. Men wild-eyed with the crazed pursuit of their obsession. Men who loved the moon, U-Boats and Zeppelins. But above all else, men who loved kittens. Kittens.. OF ROCK!

Their mission to subjugate the world to the utopian kitteny vision of the future was well underway, but there was one ingredient missing. And that missing ingredient was…… the unstoppable, unbelievable power of rocksteady skanking ska punk pop beats.

Unbeknownst to them, at the same time four battle-hardened, bloodied and weary gaijin Warriors Of Rock staggered from Japan to the shores of Great Britain. Exactly like the Seven Samurai, but with less Samurais.

And less swords

And more musical instruments. (And also they weren’t actually Japanese like the 7 Samurai were)……

Nuff said.

Four Pillars: Thinking about sand and broccoli

I’ve always been intrigued by what people actually do in services firms; I’ve worked in them all my life, and I have yet to figure it out completely. Why? Because every time I look, the daily “outputs” of individuals mystify me, yet everyone appears really busy. Weird.

I used to understand how things worked, but lost my way after we discovered “productivity tools” and “end-user computing”. Ever since people started using spreadsheets and presentation tools, all the service industry rules changed for me. And I understood less and less.

Maybe I’m a dinosaur.

You see, I understood how individuals could use the spreadsheets and presentation tools, and I thought it was great. Then, when I saw some semblance of group work in these contexts, I thought I understood, and I hoped it would be great.

But the reality was different.

People spent incredible amounts of time producing the spreadsheets and presentations. People spent even more incredible amounts of time changing these things, arguing about what was in them, comparing the “content” with other sources of the same “content”. People spent time trying to acquire preview copies of spreadsheets and presentations; trying to influence what they contained; trying to differentiate what their particular thing said in comparison to what someone else’s thing said.

These productivity tools became the playthings of politicians. Particularly in large organisations. You know what I mean. It’s a bit like finding out that a GANTT chart was suddenly more important than the code deliverables it represented. [I know, I know, I’ve met those project managers as well….charlatans.]

The playgrounds that were called Meeting Minutes started looking deserted, as the serious players went on to bigger and better things. The power of presentation and graphics. And, particularly in Europe, the power of the spreadsheet. [Many years ago, I remember reading an unusual paper called Britain’s Right and Left Handed Companies, written by a professor from Warwick. His first name was probably Peter, his surname was short, perhaps only four letters, I can’t remember any more. But he looked deeply into this “figures” mentality and its European roots, and how it affected companies, particularly those in the UK]

Yes, I know I’m painting the lily. [Painting, not gilding. Gilding is what one does to refined gold]. But I digress.

Why am I so worked up about this, so much so that, explicitly, I didn’t allow for spreadsheets and slideware in Four Pillars?

Simple. Because these things are often lies. Without substance. They don’t need to be based on anything. Which makes the process of comparison and challenge and validation and verification truly painful. Yet everyone swears by them. Emperors and New Clothes. Everyone swears by them and everyone wastes incredible time using them. Unproductivity tools.

I think of spreadsheets and slideware in the same way I think of DRM. They pollute the path. Why do you think auditors the world over pore over and challenge ‘end user computing”, “desktop computing”, “spreadsheet computing” and their likes?

Which sane person would actually implement business processes that crystallised swivel-chairs all over the place? Let’s face it, that’s what we did. We didn’t learn from all the attempts at “Business Intelligence” and “Data Mining”. We didn’t learn from the prior pain of having implemented stand-alone non-referential systems. We went and enshrined all this in the way we work. No wonder ERP systems never delivered on their savings promises.

This is why I see no space for spreadsheets and presentation tools in Four Pillars.

There’s no point just ranting on about something, no point unless I suggest alternatives, new ways of working.

Plants 7 Bg 082104

So I want to talk about broccoli.

Not really, except for the fractal bit. I think there’s something Small-Pieces-Loosely-Joined about the way we work today, something High-Cohesion-And-Loose-Coupling, that means that everyone deals with fairly well-formed items of work. Not piecemeal Assembly-Line, the way the productivity experts tried to make service industries work for the last fifty years. Somehow, we’ve gone and used concepts of workflow to break up tasks that cannot and should not be broken up, so that we felt happy in our assembly line cocoons and security blankets. Somehow we haven’t cared about the impact on our productivity, because we’ve had spreadsheets and presentations to hide behind. Standalone spreadsheets and presentations.

Now, with Web 2.0 tools and Web 2.0 ways of working, these things are changing. Tasks are becoming more fractal, and the information inputs and outputs are similarly fractal. Who knows, maybe we’re actually discovering what Object should have meant. I think that’s why I found what Sigurd Rinde was doing at Thingamy so fascinating. There was something about the way he looked at enterprise financial information that really jelled with me. He definitely saw through the clothes that weren’t there.

Which brings me to sand. Granularity. Granularity in the context of Four Pillars.

When I looked at the way Search, Publishing, Fulfilment and Conversation work, I realised more and more that there’s something different about the way we interact with information now. There are small pieces, for sure, but the pieces are beautifully formed and whole. Not sliced and diced to nothingness. Not summarised up the wazoo.

Now, when we see a summary of something, we can dig into what it represents. Dig and dig and dig until we go to the source. [In fact many years ago, not long after I started using spreadsheets, I met someone who had a startup in this space. I think it was called Forest and Trees. It may have become part of Symantec, I lost track. But they were on to something.]

Now, there’s no real loss of information as a result of synthesis and summary. No risk of error in multiple transformations. No need to reconcile stuff because you’re looking at the source anyway. No need to employ armies of reconcilers either. No need to spend years arguing about the figures on spreadsheets, or making the authorship of presentations something politically desirable.

Spreadsheets and presentations are like nuclear energy or e-mail. There are good uses and bad uses. The trouble is that for the last few decades, we’ve been in the Bad Use phase, and we need to break away from there. We need to make sure the small pieces stay loosely joined.

[My thanks to PDphoto.org for the wonderful royalty-free broccoli image. They do accept donations, though, which is good.]

Continuing the ramble in open spaces amidst walled gardens

Cory pointed me towards this article in the New York Times, headlined Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music. [An aside: The retarded hippie in me just cannot comprehend the use of the word “contemplate” in a context where “navel” and “lint” are absent…]

Where was I? Oh yes, the New York Times article. Here are a few snippets from there:

Publicly, music company executives say their systems for limiting copies are a way to fairly compensate artists and other copyright holders who contribute to the creation of music.

But privately, there are signs of a new appreciation in the industry for unrestricted copies, which could be sold as singles or through subscription services or made freely available on Internet sites that support advertising.

The EMI Group said last week that it would offer free streaming music on Baidu.com, the leading Web site and search engine in China, where 90 percent of music is pirated. EMI and Baidu also agreed to explore developing advertising-supported music download services. This summer EMI licensed its recording to Qtrax, an ad-supported music distribution service.

I think there are two things here worth observing:

One, ad-based selling of singles is not as outrageous as it sounds. Ad-based selling of anything doesn’t sound that outrageous. Just look at Google. There is something Because-Of-Rather-Than-With about it that makes the model attractive. I can get something for free or at a reduced price, if I rent my eyeballs out. [In fact that is what I expected the iPhone to do; like any other handset, I can get it free or subsidised from a lock-in provider, or I can pay the unsubsidised price. But what do I know?]
Two, look at what happened when Sabeer Bhatia launched Hotmail, or when Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis let Skype loose. The revenue lock inherent in a particular business model just went and exited stage left, followed by a bear. But the new business model made money. In a strange kind of way, maybe that’s what Because-of-Rather-Than-With is about. Making money differently.

Someone will do this. I’m not sure “content owners”, or for that matter Wall Street, really understand the power behind today’s groundswell of opinion against bad DRM and bad IPR. Those walls will crumble. I love my Macs, I love my iPods, but I will not love them forever. iTunes will have to change. I will keep buying iPods because I want to, but from now on only if I don’t have to.

A related issue. I’m sad to miss the VRM meeting I had hoped to attend: doctor’s orders… I wish the participants every success. I think that what Doc and gang are working on is absolutely crucial, and in the current context it made me wonder about something:

If marketing as we knew it doesn’t exist any more, and if trusted recommendations are the new marketing…… Every one of us has so much “advertising consumption capacity”, and it all gets converted into iBalls or something like that. We start our lives with so much iBalls each. I spend my iBalls as I feel like: buy music, watch movies, read articles,  whatever. Sometimes I run out, I can buy spare iBalls from my next door neighbour. Or sell them.

It’s just capacity trading. But as human beings in markets, having Cluetrain conversations. Today’s been a Cluetrain day for me, for a variety of reasons.

Just a thought.