Karmona`s Pragmatic Blog

1^st Warning: Chaotic post below

Software project are chaotic system and are highly sensitive to their initial conditions (a.k.a. the butterfly effect) and dynamics (e.g. wrong design, vague requirements, team professionalism etc.).

To master (/control) a software project you must be able to breathe (/smoke ;-) the project - inhale the chaotic butterfly movements around you and exhale with the needed adjustments or you will be crushed on the nearest project failure shore with zillions of butterfly excuses.

2^nd Warning: Smoking software project is bad for you health

After a decade of software projects smoking I find myself easily doing a background-surfing on the chaotic edges of my projects like I drive my car in the same daily well known route back from work but since I am part of the same chaotic system I am trying to control, I know that my background-surfing is like forgetting my own butterfly wings.

Software project smoking isn’t a social event and can’t be easily shared but it is also one of the key factors in projects surfing – If you will not be able to share your surf experience with your team, your own butterfly wings will bring the next tsunami.

3^rd Warning: Don’t practice management if you don’t like the butterflies

* The 1st manned landing on Earth’s Moon was the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969 and the last one was Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972
* Current U.S. Vision for Space Exploration calls for a human landing on the Moon no later than 2019

2019-1972=47 (!!!)

Someone wise once gave this as a metaphorical example for a common engineers disorder, he called experience-anxiety-disorder, claiming that NASA stopped sending manned missions to the moon since they now know much more about the complexity and risk with doing this.

During the early seventies, it was a nice, naive working implementation but when NASA engineers started thinking about the next release they have built a five-decades-project-plan simply because they considered all the technological experience they have gained into large complexity buffers.

The Moral Lesson
Keep-it-simple can-do-approach and don’t over-complicate things with the long-tail-little-details when not needed or the project will take 5 decades to finish.

How do you know you are have an experience-anxiety-disorder?
If someone ask you to add a button to change the database schema and this make you feel a mixture of fear, apprehension, heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath and headache.

What to do?
Sit down and relax, drink a cup of water and then add the damn button!

Last Long-Tail-Detail
Well… I don’t want to ruin this lovely moral lesson with the long-tail-little-detail but the real facts behind this 47 years gap were politics and money (as always) and not that NASA engineers got a severe experience-anxiety-disorder.

Google Trends (a.k.a. my experiment - part IV - Almost forgot…)

• Betty Casey
  
• Most Haunted Life
  
• Piercing & Tattoos
  
• Madonna
  
• World War III (…)
  

After watching many Agile project failures and during most of my adult-software-life you could easily bumped into me saying (with agile critiques link referencing embedded :-)
“Agile can only fit hello- world project scale… It is a bad excuse for weak management, development chaos, poor planning capabilities, lousy communication skills and lazy “we don’t need documentation” programmers - There is no silver bullet for handling software but those agile manifesto guys really found the silver bullet buzzword for making money with the scrum-master for dummies certifications…”

…Then came Scrum by “Natural Selection”:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” - Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)

…So I have evolved by Natural Selection to Agile and I can’t really go back to over-planned fantasy Gantt charts that try to capture every feature in advance and predict we will finish the project exactly in 666 days …

Why “Agile”?
For using all the right buzzwords e.g. Flexibility; Transparency; Short-term predictability; Long term vision ;-)

Why “Scrum“?
Scrum provides the mechanism for making the people and process problems apparent so they can be solved - It encompasses almost any good engineering technique; very simple, not overly prescriptive and relatively small set of interrelated practices and rules which can be learned quickly and is able to produce productivity gains almost immediately.

Why not???
The main reason as I see it now, is that it is extremely simple but very hard to implement successfully* - Mainly because short iteration cycles, rapid changes and transparency brings project management headache and programmer life to extreme optimization while traditional development processes (e.g. waterfall) give you the misleading euphoria** for very long time-frames (e.g. ~666 days in the above example ;-) inside the traditional project lifecycle

e.g. Transparency forces accountability, responsibility, prioritization discussions, trade-offs, and often scope reduction. Scrum requires that managers behave differently than in the past. Instead of reviewing status reports, managers should attend Sprint reviews and retrospectives. Instead of waiting for team members to prepare and present updates, management should go to the project room and see the project’s task board and burn down chart.

Scrum isn’t a silver bullet* but a simple yet powerful encapsulation of Peopleware mindset, project management patterns and development best practices which can put you on a good starting point when you face the software challenge…

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* Friendly reminder: no silver bullet in successful software management
** Although I did see few cases where a mixture of skilled project management & legendary engineers have managed to bypass that inherent misleading euphoria while allegedly practicing traditional development process but my claim is that if you look very closely they were actually practicing 90% scrum without even knowing it…

“The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.” (Peopleware, 1987)

I think that human capital is the silver bullet* for successful software projects – productivity, personalities, teamwork and group dynamics will make or break a project.

Picking the right people is maybe the most important managerial task so on your next interviews please remember** that knowledge can be easily acquired but personality is there to stay.

Don’t spend 90% of your interview time on knowledge when personality (and potential) is the real key for successful recruitment.

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* Although “Peopleware” have a full chapter on how there is no silver bullet… but I partially agree since I never said it will be easy to get to the human capital silver bullet…
** Also remember: Somewhere today a project is failing… and I can personally guarantee that people were somehow involved in its failure!