In part six of my series on software craftsmanship I have a look at how software craftsmanship is sometimes portrayed as an apprentice’s journey up a guild heirarchy to the elevated rank of “master”.
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Category Archives: Musing
Software Craftsmanship is a community of practice with overlapping values
In part five of my series on software craftsmanship I look at the definition of software craftsmanship presented in the book by Hoover and Oshineye (2009). Their definition is wrapped around the concepts of community and values. Nice embracing terms but what does that mean for software craftsmen?
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Software Craftsmanship is skilled software development in small scale production
In this, the fourth post in my series on software craftsmanship, I interpret Wikipedia: Craft in the context of software development. I’m doing this because Ade Oshineye: Software Craftsmanship – More than just a manifesto
recommended the wikipedia definition of craft although Ade generally avoids dictionary style definitions for software craftsmanship (Hoover and Oshineye, 2009).
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Software Craftsmanship is not writing crap
In the third post in my series on software craftsmanship I’m having at look at Bob Martin’s call to arms to software craftsmen to not write crap.
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Software Craftsmanship is not Software Engineering
In part two of my series on software craftsmanship I take a look at how Peter McBreen, in his book entitled Software Craftsmanship (McBreen, 2001), sets up software craftsmanship in opposition to software engineering. Actually he does say that "Software craftsmanship is not the opposite of software engineering or computer science. Rather, craftsmanship is a different tradition that happily coexists" (p. xvi). But the rest of the book undermines any claimed coexistence.
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Management on the Ground
You have to keep your feet on the ground when others want to put you on a pedestal. After a while on a pedestal, you stop hearing the truth. It’s filtered by the henchmen, and they read you so well, they know what you want to hear. You end up as the queen bee in the hive, with no relationship with the worker bees.
Bill Burns, CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals
quoted in Goffee & Jones (2006), p. 43
One of my project managers recently mentioned that, despite being a programme manager, my own management style is quite "hands-on". In the sense of being on the ground with my team rather than in the technical sense although the two often come together. This approach has held me in good stead over the years.
Others, like Bill Burns quoted above, have realised dangers of being distant from the people doing the work and the corresponding benefits of being on the ground. I thought I’d take a quick look at some of these previous advocates of being on the ground:
- Military Commanders on the ground
- Management by Walking Around (MBWA)
- Toyota, Lean and Genchi Genbutsu
I’ll wrap up by having a quick look at the Agile practices that help me be on the ground.
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Is Software Craftsmanship some code-obsessed mishmash of martial arts and carpentry?
Software Craftsmanship is some code-obsessed mishmash of martial arts and carpentry or plumbing
Ade Oshineye: Software Craftsmanship – More than just a manifesto
"Software Craftsmanship" is one of the big catch phrases in the software development community at the moment. There is an Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship, a few books (Hoover & Oshineye, 2009; Hunt & Thomas, 1999; Martin, 2008; McBreen, 2001), conferences and seminars, and lots of blog posts.
But what does software craftsmanship actually mean?
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Agile: I Prefer Hype to Ignorance
The good news is that Agile has crossed the chasm (Moore, 1991). On the down side there has been, and is, a lot of hype and hyperbole around Agile, Lean, Scrum, XP and Kanban, etc, etc. In particular, and despite the Agile Manifesto, the meaning of the term "Agile" has become very diffuse. So much so that there are many people, like a colleague of mine and one time Agile fan, who now says "I don’t talk about ‘Agile’ any more; it doesn’t mean anything".
I find the hype annoying, and Agile’s loss of meaning exasperating, but I also think it an inevitable part of progress.
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Side Bets and Sweeties in Organisational Change
People don’t resist organizational change! – People resist being changed!
My current programme is using new, bespoke software to drive organisational change. So I need people to change what they’re doing. A lot of people. As a first step I need them to adopt our new software. So I am always looking for ways to push the software roll out. In an earlier post I described one approach we use for encouraging adoption: Foot in the Door Technique. In this post I look at two other methods – which we call "Side bets" and "Sweeties".
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Two Types of Post Implementation Review
Recently people at work have been asking my advice on how to run post implementation reviews of major programmes so I thought I’d write up my thoughts. I believe there are two types of post implementation review and I recommend doing both. The first type happens in Project Closure and the second happens after the project has finished, i.e. Post Project.
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