What Would Jesus Do?
I’ve always had a penchant for all things miraculous: God speaking to me through a homeless person, large structures randomly falling out of the sky, estimating a development effort accurately 8-months in advance. I’ve recently been tasked with the last one, given that we are subscribing to a SDLC that is slowly falling down a giant waterfall. We’re currently in Week 13 of requirements gathering.
The field of software engineering has evolved through years of theoretical research. Computer Scientists have come up with great ideas that should work in theory, but are seldom applicable in real world situations. I have learned more about software development out in the field than university could ever have prepared me for. Most of the things I did learn in university, I would need to look up on the Internet anyway, say if the rare occasion ever arose that I would need to know how hash maps are implemented using Red-Black Trees (I only apply at Google once ever 18 months).
Software is an immature discipline and software itself rarely lasts much longer than 4-5 years before it becomes legacy. As such, it becomes increasingly hard to predict, as complexity increases. Only thirty years ago, computers were the size of refrigerators and Irene, the 70 year old grandmother you see today coding in COBOL while staring at a 50lb CRT monitor running at 640×480, was in the prime of her life. And in fact, there’s an army of Irenes who don’t like it when you show up in Lacoste shoes, and tight pants. Sometimes I wear pin-striped dress pants with a checkered shirt and that completely throws her off.
Irene probably went to a very good school where they taught her everything to know about documentation and software specification. In fact, she probably received accolades for her work in the field of requirements engineering. But now, the business’ needs have changed drastically, as have the times, and that mainframe system backed by a flat file-based database, can’t support what the business needs to do.
Large corporations reinvent themselves all the time to accommodate climate changes in the economy, business direction changes and continually respond to the market’s whims. There is no reason software development shouldn’t be any different. Software processes need to be adaptive to these changes just as much as individuals do. Clinging onto traditional methods that are known to be heavyweight and slow will only demean what we do as professionals and continue to lose the trust and confidence of our customers. Arguably, some of the time, developers are happy to engage in lightweight processes, but its the archaic bastions of old-school software engineering who claim authority over this subject matter, that refuse to allow it.
Agile development is so radically different than most of what they’ve been teaching in school that traditionalists are worried that they will need to adjust their thinking. Meanwhile, there are those of us who have been dying, waiting for something like this to come along and revitalize our craft. In time, agile processes will mature and evolve, and things like distributed agile development will come into focus. In time, agile processes will become obsolete and perhaps a successor will emerge as a better way to build software and provide business value. Those are the things we should look forward to and embrace, rather than reject and undermine.
How do television evangelists do it? Day after day, they convince millions of Americans to follow them and give them money, and yet I can’t convince one person in this organisation to adopt a lean software development methodology. Perhaps, I’d have better luck converting them to mormonism. But that’d be too easy. Given the option of marrying multiple 16-year olds, I’m sure they’d choose that over lent any day. I’d be happy with just one.
Christians need to work on their marketing. The best that Christians have come up with in the last 100 years is a fish. Lame! I recently saw a bumper sticker that said, “Try Jesus” as though Jesus was a spicy Mexican dish that you’d never seen or heard of before advertised on a giant poster on the side of a dingy roadside restaurant that read, “Try our new Mole con Pollo!” And frankly, I don’t doubt that Jesus loves mole con pollo.
References:
1Agile Requirements Best Practices Ambler, Scott
2Agile Requirements Definition: A View from Requirements Engineering Eberlein, Armin, et al.
3Mole con Pollo! Mexicans everywhere.
