Alistair Cockburn - Agile Software Development

Here is a story of a key developer who changed his attitude toward the project when it was made clear to him what his contribution to the project and the community meant. Realigning Commitment

The programmer was a senior-level contract programmer who was working on the most complicated and critical portion of the system. He was already being paid well. The executive involved was a socially astute person.

At some point, the executive had a conversation with the programmer. The executive made it clear how important this particular programmer was to the success of the entire corporation, and he did it in a way that illustrated to the programmer that building a really clever, beautiful, and perfect solution that was hard for the other people to use would be to the detriment of the entire community and that the programmer could make a very positive contribution to everyone involved by making a simple and workable solution, even if it was less aesthetic or less mathematically sound. Almost immediately, the programmer shifted his behavior. Rather than sneer at the company and the technology, he became interested in delivering value, contributing to the group. He was already a core contributor but now delivered a workable solution and stayed on long enough to see the solution deployed.

The interesting thing to me is that the executive did not draw on the programmer's feeling of pride-in-work with respect to the perfection of the design. Instead, he drew on pride-in-contribution to the community

Combining Rewards

Laubacher and Malone at MIT's Sloan School of Management highlight the combination of rewards needed for high-tech workers (Laubacher 2000). They start with this caution: "We’ll get and keep the best" is not a viable strategy for most companies. Such an approach may be possible for leaders like Sun Microsystems and Cisco, that can offer a compelling package of salary, stock options and challenging work. But not every firm has these resources.”

They amend that by pointing out the following: “Because so many of its engineers have become millionaires through company stock options, Cisco Systems likens its workforce to volunteers and manages them accordingly. This is an extreme example, but in many highly skilled fields, talent is seeking something more than the biggest package of stock options. Interesting, rewarding work or a chance to join in a compelling mission now become valuable tools for attracting and keeping talented people.”

Open-source projects seem to offer all three of the intrinsic reward mechanisms. The people involved comment on their pleasure in contributing, on the pride they feel about their work, and on their own and others’ accomplishments. Those who contribute to open-source software are a notably committed group of people who generate very high-quality code. In their case, software creation clearly is a cooperative "game," done more for fun than for profit.

Even with all the above discussion in place, it is still not true that a single reward mechanism will work for all people. The space shuttle projects, for example, benefit from people who take pride in finding every mistake and who therefore take their time and review every work artifact carefully. It may be difficult to find appropriate rewards on a project like this if the people involved are looking for high-risk projects that will let them go fast and get rich quickly.

This difference among people is good, because so many different kinds of systems need to be built.

FeedbackPeople benefit from clear and frequent feedback. In general, the quicker the feedback, the better the effect.

Seymour Cray Fiddles

Seymour Cray, inventor of the world's fastest computers for several decades, gave some talks about his early design techniques. Fresh out of university, he was the proud owner of an extra-large radial slide rule. He immediately used it on his first assignment, diligently calculating the parameters for several days.

Walking the halls one day, he met an experienced designer who showed him that it was simpler just to apply a few rules of thumb and build a prototype. He could then test it to see where it was off, make a few adjustments to the design, and bring it to spec.

Seymour Cray illustrated that a little bit of feedback can replace a lot of analytical work.

Of all the published methodologies, Extreme Programming (XP) perhaps puts the most emphasis on feedback, both during design and in the overall project.

XP calls for programmers to work in pairs during design and programming. The second person catches many programming errors as the programs are being entered.

The programmers keep unit tests in an automated test suite. Whenever they change a section of code, they run the test suite to discover right away whether they have broken something that had been working.

The surprising thing about human success modes is how nebulous and improbable they seem, based as they are on these kinds of characteristics:

·

· Being able to learn

· Being malleable

· Being good at looking around

· Taking pride in work

· Liking to be a good citizen

· Taking initiative

Are these the mechanisms that consistently pull projects through to safety?

They produce running, tested code every few weeks. The on-site customers evaluate the new parts of the system and give feedback on the usefulness of the system while the work is still fresh in everyone's minds.

They review their own working habits every few weeks, reflecting on how well they worked in the previous iteration.

Actually, every development team should review its working habits every few weeks, whether or not it uses pair programming or XP. The project "post-mortem" that some teams hold at the end of a project happens too late to help the project. Holding regular reflection sessions during the project is much more effective. The team has a chance to incorporate feedback along the way and to work in the time needed to benefit the project.

Periodic mid-project reflection sessions are the single practice common across all of the Crystal methodologies described in Chapter 7 [insert automatic cross-ref]. Every two –to six weeks, depending on the project's cycle duration, the team gathers to discuss what went well, what didn't, and what to try out during the next period.

With regular feedback reflection periods in place, the team can construct methods to gain feedback about other aspects of the project, such as Highsmith's product review sessions (Highsmith 2000).

Success Modes

In my interview notes, I find that one answer showed up repeatedly when I asked what caused a project to succeed in the end:

"A few good people stepped in at key moments and did whatever was needed to get the job done."

For the first eight years of my interviews, I assumed that the speakers meant that they had messed up, and only personal heroics had saved the project. Slowly, though, as I kept hearing it, I realized that I could not explain why people did that or the overall role of this sort of action on the project. It was by investigating this sentence that I started to see the powerful effects of the human success factors just mentioned, effects that are relevant no matter whether a tight or loose process is being used.

Let's look at these success factors.

People Learn

Novices don't stay novices forever. People who are novices on one project become experienced by the end of the same project and often are senior designers a few projects later.

This ability to learn along the way helps many projects. Within a single project's time frame, the people learn new technology, new problem domain, new process, and how to work with new colleagues.

Often, a team struggles through the first two increments, becoming stronger and stronger until successful results at the end are almost a given. In long-running projects and in situations where there is a steady flow of small initiatives, senior people leave and junior people—who have become senior— take their places.