One of my favorite terms about software projects is the notion of “progressive elaboration”: software development, as a knowledge-acquiring activity, requires an approach where we over and over again refine what we do: what we do in development, how the UI looks, which languages and locales to support, how to handle roll-out and documentation and testing and a hundred other things. In order not to end up in an infinite loop, the first thing we need in any software project is a vision that guides everything else we do. Of course, that vision should not just be in one head, it should be shared across the entire project team so that it can guide and coordinate all the activities of the entire team.
Continue reading The Universal Yardstick: Creating a Vision – Software Development by Oral Tradition
Software Development by Oral Tradition
One of my favorite quotes about software development is that “software development is not a product-producing activity, it is a knowledge-acquiring activity” (Phillip G. Armour, “The Five Orders of Ignorance”, CACM 10/2000).
One of the consequences is that there are fundamentally two types of “bugs” or defects: (1) “we” know how it should work, but have messed up reflecting that knowledge in the software, and (2) the software accurately reflects our knowledge, but our knowledge is in some way “defect”. Plus, there is another one: Practically all relevant software is developed in teams, and there is a chance for misunderstandings between the individuals comprising the teams.
A lot has been thought and written and invented around getting rid of these misunderstandings. So far, none of it works reliably: at the very least, the task at hand and the people on the team should determine the choice of method (and, especially in large corporations, doesn’t).
Continue reading Software Development by Oral Tradition
Brainstorming with an Anecdote
Time to kick off a brainstorming session. How to do that? – Reminding everybody about how brainstorming works? Focussing people on the topic at hand?
Fortunately, I ran across this nice article “Twitter Strangers” just in time. I re-told the article (admittedly in a creative interpretation), roughly with the following key content: about the tendency to get stuck in the same associations, about the challenge to be really creative and about a simple experiment that shows the value of unexpected contributions. It was just the material I needed to wake everybody up, establish some cliff-hangers and so on to bring some spice back into the heads.
In the workshop summaries, the resulting brainstorming was repeatedly highlighted for its energy level 🙂
For me, this proves once again: The success of any kind of group activity is determined by the ability to put everybody into the same frame of mind.
Image Credit: kevindooley / Flickr
Functional Fixedness: Real-world examples
You may remember the candle experiment from the recent post “Motivation 2.0: Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation“. The whole point of the candle experiment is to demonstrate that overcoming functional fixedness can not be accelerated with carrots and sticks – on the contrary.
Here, I’d like to give three real-world examples for overcoming functional fixedness. Or actually… one example for, two examples against it.
Continue reading Functional Fixedness: Real-world examples
Aunt Sara
… from the “anecdotes for project managers” series …
This time, the story comes from ShadowCulture’s BugBash. It’s so nicely written that it can well stay there.
Enjoy!
Heisenberg award!
Last Friday, I’ve spent quite a chunk of time on the “E=H2O” simulation that IEEE Spectrum had organized together with the Institute for the Future.
Actually, it earned me a “Heisenberg award”.
Continue reading Heisenberg award!
Twitter beyond the Tornado?
Every once in a while, I get delusions of grandeur and think I can understand the world.
Given the latest major pieces of news about Twitter, I get the impression it’s that time again.
The other day, I was studying “Inside the Tornado” once again. (See Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets
With that fresh in my mind, latest news about Twitter seem to ring a bell…
Motivation 2.0: Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation
The other day, a friend of mine recommended another TED-Video to me: “Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation” (~18 Minutes). I think everybody who’s into management and/or leadership should have seen it.
It’s clearly worth watching, because Daniel is a truly gifted speaker. Still, for the hurried reader, here are the core points as I picked them up. The main theme is
There’s a gap between what science knows and what business does.
What he’s referring to is the “candle problem“: A cognitive performance test dating back to 1945. This test and a range of other examples Daniel quotes clearly shows that “sticks and carrots” (aka incentive plans etc.) actually reduce performance in cognitive tasks.
Incentives do work for mechanical tasks (which were predominant through much of the 20th century). They do not work for cognitive tasks, which dominate the 21st century. That’s the gap Daniel is talking about, and I’d like to add that this especially applies to the business of software
While science knows for more than 60 years that a bonus plan, say, for managers, reduces effectiveness, businesses reach out to higher and higher incentives in the areas where they are known to work least. One could say: They don’t know better. How else to motivate people?
And Daniel has an answer to that question: Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery.
In the video, he goes on to explain purpose – the topic in its entirety is covered in Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Since then, I keep asking myself: Do you create a sense of purpose in the people you are working with?
Lost+Found quote: “What’s going on in the project” (Ward Cunningham)
For questions like, “What’s going on in the project,” we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff that you don’t anticipate.
(Ward Cunningham, founder of the first Wiki)
Found at artima developer: “Exploring with Wiki” – A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, by Bill Venners;
October 20, 2003
Everybody, Somebody, Nobody. Anybody?
I think everybody knows the following story. Still, it has turned out both fun and useful for me. Regularly. 🙂
This is a story about four people: Everybody,
Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was this
important job to be done and everybody was asked
to do it. Everybody was sure that somebody would
do it. Anybody could have done it, but nobody did
it. Somebody got angry about that because it was
everybody’s job. Everybody thought that anybody
could do it, but nobody realized that everybody
wouldn’t do it. It ended up that everybody blamed
somebody when actually nobody asked anybody.
Image: Flickr / нσвσ