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Why not follow the boy scout rule when moving on?

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Boy scout rule is well known in extreme programming, people are advised to leave the code in a better state than they found it. I observe this mostly works well for programming but not elsewhere. I have always admired teachers especially the ones that teach the basics. I made it a point that if I understand something after a good deal of effort then I would make it easy for another person by simplifying it. I kept doing this at school and college, I helped people learn tough parts of algebra, chemistry and physics through easy analogies.

When I graduated and got my job, I still carried on with this work of simplifying the tough things I learnt. There was a sudden change in team composition and I had to take up the work of a sysadmin, which was difficult for someone who was in technical support and testing for a year. I spent a lot of time learning to fit in the new role and in the process making sure that the next person getting on to this will require less transition, this is the time I was in for a rude shock; I was told by one of the senior members of the team ‘if you proceed this way of simplifying things and sharing your knowledge, you will soon be out of your job’.

The intentional complexity was hard to accept, especially when the company was trying hard to reduce dependencies on people. The high complexity created many silos in the team which made replacements harder eventually causing the team’s growth to slow down. It gave a false sense of security as people were called experts in their tasks, but not learning anything new as the learning curve was too steep.

Not working together with peers or communities will lead to phase called ‘Expert beginner’ which prevents someone from becoming competent. There is a good writeup about ‘Expert Beginner’. People take pride in the complexity of the their work and put through the new comers through the same phase so that the learning curve is steep and there is still value for expert beginners.

I read an article from ‘British Bird Lovers’ which is about how red robins which are territorial in nature lost out on the learnings it had got to open sealed bottles. The birds which learnt and kept the knowledge to itself gained a lot, but its successors did not learn any. The article finishes well saying ‘Birds that flock together appear to learn faster and increase their chances to evolve and survive’.

The general tendency for people is to pass on what was handed down to them as it is, especially if they spent a lot of effort to make it work for them. If someone has a tough time getting on board at workplace, s/he will tend to keep the on-boarding process the same, largely due to the fear of someone else overtaking or replacing them. In the process creating a culture of territory and stagnation instead of co-operation and shared growth.
Eric Schmidt mentions in his presentation ‘How google works’, that the only way to consistently succeed is to attract skilled people, work as a group, care for the workplace. We should only hand down the best, leave the place better than we find, if we do it that way then together we move ahead.

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sashimi-472778_640At a fine dining restaurant if I complained that I did not like the food; immediately the chef, waiter and the food taster run to the dining table to assure that I don’t feel disappointed and provide me an alternative as soon as possible. If you take a look behind the kitchen door then we will come to know that they take lots of precautions to make sure that this never happens at the dining table. Chefs have a tough time to keep taste and quality up to the mark irrespective of the availability of ingredients and limited time.

A typical restaurant is staffed with a chef, chef’s cooking assistants, butcher, waiters, managcook-196932_640er, janitors, food tasters and a lot of machines which speed up the process of cooking. Cook’s best use of time is spent cooking the food, but does it mean the cook should not get a feel whether the food is cooked and is it as per the customization the waiter described?

Let us a take a scenario where the manager is able to hire more food tasters and shifts the burden of the quality to the food taster. Cooks will be able to create lots of dishes as per the recipe given by the chef without giving a second thought about the balance of ingredients, texture and the level of cooking required. The dish will ready to present in a finished state when it reaches the food taster, if any fault is found then the dish had to done from the beginning which will increase the workload of the cook further and reduce the output considerably as the reworks are expensive, eventually will make the customer wait more or increase dining table incidents.

What looked like a clever idea on paper backfires as cooking for fine dining is not something that could be made into a template and responsibilities could be in silos; it is a complex system with a strong feedback loop at every stage. The scene at programming is similar at many cases, developers are encouraged to write only the code and leave the testing to the QA as the perception is that the best use of a developer’s time is to make her code. Seasoned programmers know better that unit tests are also code, if you are not testing then you do not know what you program.

Cynefin_as_of_1st_June_2014Programming is an emergent practice, which matches the complex domain in the Cynefin framework by Dave Snowden. Each project will be unique and a pattern will emerge over time which will be efficient for the team if there is a strong feedback loop. Trying to separate out of responsibilities like testing to just one small group will push the team into a cycle of code, test and fix with long feedback loops, eventually causing delays. Quality has to be assured at every stage of application development, responsiveness determines who is competitive in a complex environment.

Image courtesy: http://pixabay.com & http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Dave_Snowden

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Building software is always a task of trying to hit a moving target. The complexity keeps growing on every parameter if not managed well. Projects which build softwares that have to talk to each other are often built by different teams under different managements, leaving less scope to find schedule and contract to match for smooth integration. Many times I have observed that there is so much of dependency on each other that the projects look like they are progressing so well until they hit a dead lock on integration.

rocking-horseIn my view such projects are like rocking horses, for a child it gives an illusion that s/he is in control of the horse and its movements but there is no real progress, it is just moving not progressing. The illusion of movement in a project is formed when developers implement the requirements which is neither validated nor integrated but just added to growing source code, followed by an all out big bang effort to integrate and push it to production. The result of rework and last mile dash leaves the teams burnt out and demotivated that there is hardly enough energy to move on to the next work.

Research say that we have two kinds of thinking which I encountered in the book ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, it says that people who work with the brain (knowledge workers) need to make use of both focussed and diffused modes of thinking which is mentioned as L-mode and R-mode in the book. Procrastination is the key to R-mode as it props up the answers we are looking for, at a moment when we are not thinking about it. It has worked for me very well as I have observed that I get great ideas in shower, while driving, while having coffee staring outside the office window.

Sadly management is trained to look at people furiously typing at their computers for long hours as work and any thinking time saharais deemed as a luxury. This problem gets compounded when management in the guise of agile leaving out all the people aspects behind; which help in looking back, taking stock of situation and plan well but use it solely for micromanagement. People if lost will usually walk in circles, it is a proven fact that people lost in a desert in the night time or an overcast condition without the direction markers will walk in circles, more about it in this link from Nat Geo.

Directionless movement is just a movement for the sake of movement like a rocking horse, there is no real progress.