Presumption of intellect

I’d like to talk about yet another obvious public trend, opposite to the main vogue in choosing SLCM for a software development project.

Have you noticed that different institutions, be they business or governmental units, while communicating with people presume people’s foolishness from the very start? Just try to place your inquiry or claim to, for instance, a bank, or to a phone company, or to a local or federal government, and you instantly would feel yourself complete idiot. Having no real choice, you will be routed through unnecessary silly options, you will be forced to answer silly questions having nothing to do to your exact inquiry, etc.

As is customary, all this is covered up by striving for universality mixed with concerns about enough level of political correctness. Those guys who make decisions just say “We need to communicate with everybody regardless of race, age, sex, health, etc!” So far so good. However, the next decision “Whoever we talk to, let us do it in absolutely the same way!” is quite disputable. You cannot talk to all people in absolutely the same way. It’s obvious, because people differ greatly in their educational level, in their abilities to quickly absorb new information, in their current emotional state, etc., etc., etc. So, to make communication effective and comfortable to the both parties, reasonable gradation of possible audience should be presumed. Unfortunately, those who should do it, never trouble themselves. They rather prefer to consider all the people being at the lowest possible level of intelligence, and thus all the standard options and questions in surveys and in standard dialogues are intended for people on the brink of mental illness.

The result is disastrous, since in fact the brink of mental illness is suggested as the norm for the human society. Just have a look at the vast majority of sitcoms, of commercials, of movies, of fiction books, etc. All this cultural junk food is intended for “normal” members of human society, i.e. (see above) - for the people on the brink of mental illness.

Little by little the society accepts these understated norms, and little by little society becomes sillier and sillier in average. On the contrary: If norms were just a bit overstated, the society would have moved forward to be cleverer and cleverer in average. It’s easy: Try to talk to a person as if he is fool, and you will talk to a fool; try to talk to a person in a clever manner, and you will talk to a clever enough and reasonable individual.

So, what am I talking about? Strange though it may seem, I am getting at software. Absolutely the same excellent result of choosing presumption of intellect rather than presumption of stupidity can be seen in managing software development projects. Try to behave with your customer as with an idiot and you get a non-reasonable, stupid and very difficult customer. Behave with a customer as you would prefer others behave with you (i.e. in a clever way), and you get reasonable, interesting and efficient partner in working on the project. I think, it is one of the main reasons why the software community slowly shifts to use the Agile model, whatever is meant by “Agile” in each particular case and whichever related practices are used.

Software life cycle: More freedom than in human life

Software development as one of the human activities is part of our life. Hence, it cannot be completely independent from society, from politics, from prevailing lifestyle. That said, it looks strange to me how common software development techniques show obvious tendencies absolutely opposite to the main trends of the society.

The turning point for the society is 9/11. In the morning of 9/11/2001 I was on my business trip in Boston, MA, and thus I have lived through all that nightmare of the first week after The Turning Point with American friends and colleagues. America was under attack, and America began to defend. Nobody could show the enemy, so the defense activities focused on “security”. Why in quotes - because for a few first months it was “kinda” security. For example, one could not visit any normal eatery in the airport beyond the checkpoint. The reason was that after the checkpoint you should not have any ability to possess a knife or a fork that could become a weapon in the airplane. Good! But after that, in the airplane your dinner was served with absolutely normal metal knife and fork. Yes, now they are plastic, but for the first 1-2 months they still were metal. Was it security? No, rather stupidity.

Anyway, at this point the USA has turned to a new way, and the entire world obediently followed it. The new way - the new rules; the new rules - the new regulations; the new rules and regulations – serious shift in the spirit of the society. Rules, regulations and the shift, all of them were about restrictions and about much more control on how people behave. Strictness grew terrifically: recall, for instance, how in August 2001 people in the US airports used to check in for flights near an airport curb, without showing any ID at all; and compare it to how airport check-in is organized now. The same for lot and lot of other places all over the world. Let’s take just a few examples. Look around yourself at any place in London, and you will see couple of video cameras watching for you. Not the single huge and monstrous London Eye, but thousands of tiny electronic London eyes are watching for you wherever in this beautiful city you are at any given moment. Replace the word “London” in the sentence above for “Moscow”, and everything remains true except that the huge London Eye does not have an equivalent in Moscow. Need more examples? Okay, let’s move to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and walk around it. In couple of minutes you will notice well equipped and armed to the teeth officers looking so impressive, that I would never put in doubt they represent some French special forces. These guys with their rifles are not just loafing around, they watch for those who are. Very close to the tower there is a bus – a local staff wherefrom these guys are managed. So, we easily detect presence of the Big Brother in every country now. The Big Brother does not hide himself now, on the contrary - his presence is demonstrative in each country. To a scale of the whole world it really is the Big Brotherhood, or more precisely - the Brotherhood of Big Brothers. Who would believe in this a decade ago? Just a few years of fear, and here is the result.

I was just talking about main trends that work now for the society. Maybe I became a little bit too agitated: All these obvious and hidden cause-and-effect relations are very interesting, and we really depend on all this. Well, now let’s have a look at the main trend in software development PM. If the trend would have been the same as for the society, we should have seen enhancing strictness and control. Do we see it? No, quite the opposite: In managing their projects, software developers more and more move in the opposite direction, to anarchy. The term seems to be too strong? Let us imagine we are, say, in 1985 and while talking to a follower of a waterfall SLC model we describe him/her an agile methods of 2009. No doubts he/she would have indignantly called it anarchy. Yes, until now we do use waterfall and spiral SLC models. It is not that old good approaches have vanished; I would rather say they are out of style. If 10 years ago following something like RUP standards was somewhat innovative, now it is commonplace, and it looks unprofessional if you abandon RUP-like or MSF-like approaches when they are required. But in these days we are talking quite often about agile methods, about mixed Agile Unified Process, and so on. And we really use these comparatively new PM techniques. What’s strange is that these new “irregular” and “anarchist” techniques have not appeared just out of mind, they are not a result of some theoretical research. They only mirror real needs of customers. But our customers are just people and together they build our society. So what we have is that people in their common life vote for enhancing regulations and control, and at the same time they stand for more and more freedom in managing software projects. What is it? Escape to virtual reality similar to the same in computer games? As if we are burying our heads in the sand, like “Okay, I have to waive freedom in real life, but at least when I work on software, I partly compensate it!”