app

Introduction to the Post-Agile Life

2012-01-15

Binary Opposites

Ferdinand de Saussure argued that something is, by what it is not. We cannot have ‘good’ without ‘evil’. Jacques Derrida believes that in Western culture one of these binary pairs holds dominance whilst the other is marginalised. White/black, man/woman, matter/spirit, Christian/pagan. It is a hierarchical relationship.

Manifesto of the Communist Party v Manifesto for Agile Software Development

Our idea of the manifesto is derived from Marx and the communist manifesto is the model for all successive manifestos. It has an excitable and urgent rhetoric that sees history in progressive but conflictual terms. It argues that the bourgeoisie is necessarily exploitative and that it is the proletariat’s destiny to overthrow capitalist social relations and bring forth a communist society. The manifesto became a polemical intervention that spawned numerous other manifestos. The futurist, surrealist, situationist and other avant-garde manifestos followed, bringing the manifesto into the artistic and as well as the political arena.

A manifesto is a “public declaration of intentions”, yet both the communist and agile manifestos were written when their movements were already established. Marx opens with, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism” and the agile manifesto emerged from a grouping of extreme programming, crystal, feature-driven development and other lightweight methodology practitioners.

The agile manifesto doesn’t take on the literary form of the manifesto standardised by Marx. A manifesto is usually written with complete self-belief and a series of demands. The agile manifesto is both sombre and calculating, which outlines preferences against alternatives. Consisting of only four tenets it is extremely terse. It suggests that writing successful software includes (1) skilled workers closely interacting, (2) writing software, (3) continual customer/developer dialogue and (4) the ability and willingness to adapt.

Ironically, the manifesto for agile software development is the single most important document in agile software development.

Modernism v Post-Modernism

According to Lyotard post-modernism marks the end of the ‘grand-narrative’. The grand-narrative is the big idea made complete: marxism, christianity, economic liberalisism (our post-modern disrespect for these narratives leads us not to capitalise them). The grand-narrative (waterfall) is replaced by a plurality of small and local narratives (scrum, extreme programming (Xp), dynamic systems development method etc). The unified process (UP) was stuck between modernism and post-modernism in late-modernism. The UP can be implemented in either an agile or heavyweight manner (but usually in a heavyweight manner, as consumers were scared to miss anything out).

The waterfall model with its engineering metaphors and ideas of completeness and correctness has been seen as masculine whereas agile with its concern over people and relations has been viewed as feminine. This equates with the inherent division within modernist and post-modernist literature. According to John Carey, the high-modernist Wyndham Lewis, “persistently characterised the female in terms of repellently soft or fluid textures and consistencies.” Many modernists deemed women’s literature to be inferior: passive, emotional and subjective, whilst men’s literature was: objective, theoretical and serious. Women have always been excluded from engineering as they are seen as not being able to be both precise and abstract. Those with traditionalist attitudes towards software development still believe that agile developers have not got the discipline to become ‘proper software engineers’.

Agile v Post-Agile

Post-modernism is not the complete rejection of modernism and neither is post-agile the complete rejection of agile. We can accept some agile practices that have worked for us, reject others and also think of things new. Fred George under the programmer anarchy umbrella dismisses stand-ups, stories, retrospectives, estimates, iterations, unit/acceptance tests, refactoring etc, but keeps the Xp values of simplicity, communication, feedback, respect and courage. Like classic Xp, Forward Technology have only developer and customer roles: no project managers, no business analysts, no testers and no managers of programmers. They replace this with highly collaborative teams, small, short-lived applications and continuous deployment. They have statistics to prove they deploy every few minutes.

Dan North, the originator of behaviour-driven development now states “it’s ok not to do TDD”. He says on his blog: “I find I’m writing fewer TDD-style tests these days in favour of rapidly iterating and manually testing the components of my apps. I still write tests for places I’m likely to screw up …”. Even though TDD is primarily about design and not testing, lets go further. Dan states that risk is a two-dimensional axis of impact and likelihood and that in agile environments we aim to reduce the impact of something happening. Instead of a major bug found in the live environment, we reduce the impact by locating it in our continuous integration. But we could also minimise the impact by automating deployment, so if there is a problem, we can quickly deploy something else. Test automation is a proxy for reducing impact and not an end-in-itself. It becomes the value-judgement of the experienced developer on whether it is worth writing tests or not.

Jason Gorman differentiates between ‘Agile’ (capital ‘A’) and ‘agile’ (lower-case ‘a’) Agile (capital ‘A’) is the marketing term and now involves management consultancy, two-day Scrum Master courses, “Agile tools” etc. Agile (small ‘a’) is about the ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. Agile is not agile, but in fact its opposite.

The term ‘Agile’ was usurped and ruined by those removed from the mode of production. Scrum omitted Xp practices which in most cases led to a ‘hyper-productive mess’. Software craftsmanship was a way to address this unbalance but there is also a fork that has gone beyond ‘Agile’. Post-modernism lower-cases narratives, so there is only – ‘agile’. We are in a post condition and both post-modernism and post-agile is an eclectic mix or pastiche from which we can pick and choose. I believe post-agile to be a developer response to ‘Agile’ and its natural progression. It repels totalitarian dogma, replacing it with a society of choice, freedom, democracy, anarchy, responsibility and courage.

Deconstructing Agile Communication

2011-01-15

“What threatens is indeed writing” Derrida

In “Agile Software Development” (2000), Cockburn writes against writing. The heat of the communication channel, he argues, increases as we move away from text towards face-to-face communication. Marks on paper are a poor form of communication, he argues, which are open to misinterpretation and feedback delays. Improving upon this are: email exchange, audio-tape and continuing in order of “richness”; video-tape, phone calls and close physical proximity facilitated by a modelling apparatus.

The primacy of speech is expanded upon with the idea of osmostic communication; meaning that background information (i.e. conversation) is consciously accepted or positively filtered into the unconscious. In open areas, when someone speaks, “traces” are picked up by others which becomes a backdoor transference of knowledge.

A decade ago these ideas were seen as radical, but have now been widely accepted across Agile methodologies and are prevalent in current practice. These ideas are not radical, but have for centuries been an integral and common thread in Western thought.

Derrida in “Of Grammatology” (1976) demonstrates that since Plato, speech has been of central importance whilst writing has been secondary. He calls this bias logocentrism.

“Logos” is the Greek word for speech or reason. To be logocentric is to believe that truth is the word. The Gospel of St. John declares “In the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “The Word” becomes a transcendental signified, which is a meaning that lies beyond everything in the whole universe and is thus centred.

The metaphysics of presence is based on the God-Word transcendental signified. Talking is seen as a direct presentation of thought and Cockburn adds that in someone’s physical presence, communication also involves body language and vocal intonation. Writing however is seen as an absence of presence which involves some kind of loss. A document that I write and you read when I am not present might be “mis-read”. So I would only write if you we not present. Speech is favoured over writing.

But isn’t true meaning conveyed when I am speaking in your presence? When I write, is that meaning not distant and untrue? Is writing something that is derived from speech?

Saussure in the “The Course in General Linguistics”, creates a binary opposition between speech and writing and comes down firmly on the side of speech.

Saussure believes language is system of signs. A sign is composed of a signifier and a signified. The signifier can be a word, or sound-image of a sign, whereas the signified is the concept or meaning. A linguistic sign of “cat”, is made up of the sound “c-a-t” and the concept of a “cat”.

Derrida believes that Saussure regards the signified or meaning as being more important than the signifier sound (“c-a-t”). Saussure believes that the sound (“c-a-t”) gives us access to the meaning. That the sound is outer and the meaning is inner. Using Christian referents God-the-Father is the essence while Christ is the mouthpiece.

Saussure argues that speech is a way of representing inner meaning whereas writing is a way of representing speech. If speech is a sign of inner meaning then writing is only a sign of speech and thus only a sign of a sign.

Saussure thus concludes the sounds of speech should be the object of linguistics and not writing.

Derrida then operates a deconstruction reversal on how writing can be seen as central in Saussare’s own text. Saussure on the one hand argues there is a natural bond between the signifier and the signified, but on the other believes that sound and meaning is arbitrary. “Cat” gets its identity from its sound difference with other signifiers. “C-a-t” is slightly different from “m-a-t”, which in turn is slightly different from “m-a-t-e”. A sound then, is what it is, because it differs from other sounds in the same language. Likewise conceptually, the signified has no meaning in-and-of-itself, and only receives meaning through difference. Meaning is thus, necessarily unstable, if it depends on difference.

How can Saussare still privilege speech, argue there’s a natural bond between sound and meaning whilst also arguing that both sound and meaning exist through difference?

Derrida says he can’t.

Instead of speech being more important than writing or vice-versa, Derrida puts both terms under erasure. Erasure is signified by writing the word and marking a black ‘X’ over it. The technique was borrowed from Martin Heidegger, meaning here that both speech and writing are inadequate to describe the more general play of differences common to both. But in this discourse we cannot do without them, so they are put under erasure.

Derrida then goes on to say that the play of difference that constitutes both speaking and writing is derived from what he calls “arche-writing”. Arche-writing is an original form of language that comprises all modes of communication. It is that which allows this free-play.

Cockburn has in fact reproduced that which was already in the cultural osmosis, and justified logocentrism within software development. Stakeholders now have a theoretical reason not to write. And the writing that is done, is of a very poor quality. If writing is so evil, why do we write software?

Logocentrism has become so pervasive that it has affected books spawned by software development. Like Maoist’s in the cultural revolution, Jason Fried and DHH (2010) in “REWORK” shout;

“When you get out of school, you have to unlearn so much of the way they teach you to write there. Some of the misguided lessons you learn in academia:

The longer a document is, the more it matters
Stiff formal tone is better than conversational
Using big words is impressive
You need to write a certain number of words or pages to make a point
The format matters as much (or more) than the content of what you write"

In poorly written and throwaway prose they put forward, that writing should be conversational and non-precise, and that any kind of formal structure is “drippy”. Would DHH write code in such a flippant manner? Is it really a wonder that specifications are the worst written artefacts in software development?

We need to return to the communication medium of writing as a skilled, and sometimes arduous craft. We should favour neither speech nor writing above each other, or as binary opposites. Both mechanisms should exist equally in our world and each be used correctly in their appropriate contexts.