Agile Fatale – Human Nature
“In fact, I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but, how little man himself has changed.” – Khan to Captain Kirk in Star Trek Episode “Space Seed”.
I was discussing a recent a survey from Version One with a colleague, and we noticed an interesting statistic — who champions Agile at their companies. To “champion” means to advocate; the advocate would introduce Agile, push for it, bring in tools etc. The number that came up was astounding – 63% of management is the Agile champion at companies according to this survey.
Why would I be surprised that it was management, and not the developers, who are the champions? Honestly, these days, I am not. Agile is now seen as almost exclusively a management technique and not an engineering technique by the industry.
Agile is not developers methodology anymore, its managements — on the social scale.
In the old days, at the start, this wasn’t true. In fact at a shadow level on projects this still isn’t true — there are still scopes of “agile” developers use, naturally, to create software that is still a bit out of purveyance of management because there is no way to track these activities, yet.
Agile encompasses a lot of things — and management is part of it. But management as developers intended it was meant to be self management to get their own work done. We used to use XPlanner, for instance — and the PMs didn’t care. Now middle management controls and even enters what is to be in the modern XPlanners — the scope has been changed. Less useful for developers, more useful for middle management and up. Still we, as developers, need a way to manage our work. So when you walk by you’ll see instances of Sublime Text or Text Mate all running, in their documents the creative process of managing their work.
In the early days of “agile” — mid to late 90’s for me — we all thought there would be a democratization of software building. Less management, more developer’s taking on roles. It happened for a while, but Agile morphed back to almost-waterfall when the value to our tracking became apparent to management. It’s just reality.
Reality – Agile Ignores Human Nature
Evaluations
The reality is, someone is responsible for the work that gets done. The reality is, people are evaluated on an individual basis and not as a group. People get hired of fired based on these judgements not teams. Agile can’t circumvent this reality. Agile proponents made the mistake of ignoring human nature. Management needs indicators to judge people and products on — and that’s what’s there.
Estimates
The impact of PEOPLE is why the estimate feedback loops we used to create in the tools like Rally are all but gone. Someone would make a swag estimate for a story, then the team would get together and make a task estimate, then real time would be tracked against those estimates and next time supposedly the process of estimation and building would get better. But this never happened properly. Fear would rule — because you could get fired for missing a target if HONEST. At a lot of places I would see over estimation used as a weapon by developers to get more pay, or protect themselves. Its all due to lack of trust, and that is due to human nature.
No one, still, believes estimates are at bet a 50% +/- activity. That’s a sad reality. There’s no way around it, because technology is a creative process and you can’t accurately always estimate it.
Natural Ways
If you’ll notice, a lot of Agile is almost waterfall-like now. I’ve even seen charts from internal accounting departments putting cost centers on phases of “agile” and “waterfall” — equivocating the two. There we are again with scope of management. And you know — a release schedule at a management level IS waterfall, because its natural to them.
Still though we sit in meetings with management where they play the old Microsoft Project game of microtasking.
Fear of not meeting a deadline drives this. Again — it is folly. Yet we still play with these rituals.
The Next Agile
So Agile as we talk about it has two scopes in software: development and management. Right now we are on a development downtick and a management uptick.
Management is following up on what is already there because they are concerned with scale and capital — and neither of these matter until there is a product or an idea of a product first. That’s OK. Even though I have not really seen any improvement in management the whole time. Management should really concern itself with culture — dealing with making human nature a strength in their organization. I have not seen any progress in this though, sadly. There are some outstanding individuals but, I know, I know — what do I expect. A process doesn’t make people better, and training doesn’t make them ethical. Etc.
Developers have contributed the most to the process: inventing better tools like continuous integration, automated rollouts, test based designs or test suites at all levels. In my opinion, that’s what has enabled Agile to even move forward — not better management, better tools.
So that’s my focus. I still have to fight the human nature battles — project scope changes, contracts, personalities etc. But the tools, the TOOLS, are the next great step all the time. There is no key to changing human nature, just tools.