Stephan Schwab

I’m pretty sure you know that very well … I’ve spent today wandering around thinking about the topic of corporate IT and Agile. One of my thoughts were related to education and the type of person one wants to have on a team. I even started to write a blog post about it but stopped because its a broad topic and certainly needs more thinking to make sense.

But one thing seems to be clear. While the corporation views IT in a supportive function Agile might not work at all. They will always set a fixed deadline, a fixed budget and expect a full feature set. The fun part will always be that “full feature set” will never be clearly defined, because they just want “something that helps the business”. And obviously there is no time to figure out what that is, because they have a business to run. ;-)

So unless “the business” understands that software development is always new product development with all the risks that come with it, those projects will always be in trouble. They would be better off to buy off the shelf software instead of attempting to develop their own.

When you develop a new product you usually don’t make it a fixed-time, fixed-budget and fixed-scope project. You target a point in time (a trade show maybe) to release a first version or you have a budget and go as long as it lasts. Or you define the scope and accept that time and money needed to accomplish the task are unknown.

If you are a business and just want support from IT, then you should stay clear from any form of development. It certainly is far better to choose off the shelf software that can be customized. You then pay people to do specific work and that’s basically what ERP systems like SAP R/3 offer. The good thing about this is that you can get people who are really qualified to do the job, because the way how such a system gets customized doesn’t change so drastically as for example Java web frameworks or technology in general. It may be expensive, but it certainly is far more predictable than custom software development. It’s kind of calling a carpenter or plumber – just a bit more advanced.

Based on a number of recent experiences I’ve come to think that there might be a relationship between work ethics, personal motivation and whether one will succeed with Agile projects. This post will definetely not give the answer. It is merely a thought I wish to publish and maybe some kind readers will provide their own opinion or share their own experience.

To me it seems that there are two types of people in software development. Those who are passionate about creating some work of art and enjoy building software. And those who simply work to make ends meet.

By no means I am condemming those who wish to make ends meet. That’s only natural and in a world where one has to buy food, shelter and other supplies it is simply a matter of survival, if looked at closely. People do so many things to that end and I can only speculate why some of that type chose software development and not something else.

Let me make clear that the last sentences do not only refer to those who actually write code. I am talking about all the others who are involved in any software project as well. That includes persons who represent the business side and write specifications – user stories or in other form -, those who manage teams and individuals, those who work in QA, system administration and everything else.

It is astonishing to see what small teams comprised of passionate and highly motivated indiduals can accomplish when they are not restrained by any form of governance. I believe a team comprised of good “corporate citizens” would probably work for a year and still be disussing which toolset to use.

The question is why is that?

Maybe it is because there are so many choices that only someone who devotes his life to the art of software development is able to keep track and accumulate enough knowledge for making an informed decision. Can that be? The regular corporate office worker spends 8 hours at work. A good chunk of that time is used up by meetings, responding to emails, preparing reports and other administrative duties. When this person arrives at home she is tired and wants to be with her family. And the weekend is certainly not spent researching technology topics. I remember one 40ish gentlemen who was working in the IT department of a mid-sized company on SAP R/3 stuff by the time I met him. He was pretty interested in learning about network security and TCP/IP networking in general. So I referered him to a number of books and his response was something like “I have maybe 10 minutes per day to read when I come home”.

The Agile Manifesto says:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to 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

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

That is very noble and makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately it does not mention anything about the type of individuals.

Can Agile work with people who are only interested in their paycheck, having fun in life and be home one time? Can it work with those who like it easy? Those who prefer to hold up anything with endless discussions about nuisances unconsciously knowing that it will allow to water down anything and get away with it?

Or is Agile merely something for the doers, self-motivated people who are interested in getting it done and then improve it further? Does it refer to entrepreneurs?

How hard is it to transform a worker type person into someone who is passionate about his work? Do we need a psychological evaluation of team members to determine whether they are suitable for Agile?

Update: After posting I did a Google search on psychological evaluation Agile. I would not have expected the result. Interesting…

Reading my feeds I came across this little snippet:

Why We Need Web Apps on the Desktop – ReadWriteWeb:

As Mitch Grasso, founder of Sliderocket (our coverage) wrote in a comment here yesterday, “Adobe AIR isn’t just about taking apps offline. Multi-window support, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, and access to the rich clipboard are all things that you take for granted in a desktop app are difficult or impossible to do in a browser. Browsers are designed for reading webpages – not hosting applications.”

There might be a day when the web truly is our operating system, and when browsers really will be designed to run multiple applications. But that day hasn’t arrived, and until it does, bringing web apps to the desktop is another important step in their evolution and the way forward in pushing the idea of hosting data in the cloud out to the mainstream.

A while back I wrote The webtop – back in time? and I still think there is a reason for offering some service in the form as a webapp and there is a reason for desktop applications. Squeezing everything into the limited runtime environment that is the browser is not a good thing. We have better capabilities on the desktop and there is no need to get back in time and tie ourselves again to some kind of mainframe. It doesn’t matter whether that happens over a wire or with a wireless connection – it’s the same.

Maybe the bad experiences with a certain operating system that is plagued with viruses, worms, and trojan horses made people fall in love with the safety of a sandboxed environment named Firefox. I can understand that. But is that a good compelling reason for going back in time and seek salvation in the arms of mainframes and terminals? I don’t think so.