Agile Software Development
Автор: Alistair Cockburn /
CHAPTER 3. Communicating, Cooperating Teams Teams as Communities
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Часть 4
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As a result of differences around frankness in speach, people coming from different cultures can have difficulty working together. The overly frank person strikes the other as rash and abrasive, while the overly polite person strikes the other as not forthcoming, not contributing.
Professional Subcultures
Each profession also builds its own culture, with its own cultural values and norms. Project managers have theirs, as do experienced object-oriented developers, relational database designers, COBOL programmers, sales people, users, and so on. Even novices in each group have their own values and norms, distinct from the experts. Here are a few: · Project managers need an orderly attitude to sort out predict delivery dates and costs, and the complex dependencies within the project.
· OO programmers need quiet time, abstract thinking ability and the ability to deal with the uncertainty of simultaneously evolving programming interfaces.
· Requirements analysts rely on thorough thinking, going through the requirements and the interfaces one line at a time, looking for mistakes.
· Marketing people benefit from strong imaginations and people skills, and dealing with the constant surprises the market (and the programmers) throw at them.
Let's consider programmers' "non-communicative and anti-social" behavior for a moment. Actually, as a number of them wrote me, they do like to talk. .. about technical things. They just don't like talking about things they consider uninteresting (baseball games and birthday parties, perhaps). What they really detest is being interrupted during their work. It turns out there is a good for that.
Software consists of tying together complex threads of thought. The programmer spends a great deal of time lifting and holding together a set of ideas. She starts typing, holding in her head this tangled construct, tracing the mental links as she types.
If she gets called to a meeting at this point, her thought structure falls to the ground, and she must rebuild it after the meeting. It can take 20 minutes to build this structure, and an hour to make progress. Therefore, any phone call, discussion, or meeting, distracting her for longer than a few minutes, causes her to lose up to an hour of work and an immense amount of energy. It is little wonder that programmers hate meetings. Anti-social behavior, meeting-avoidance in particular, is a protective part of their profession.
Thus, the values of each group contribute to their proper functioning, and the differences are necessary for the proper functioning of the total organization, even though they clash.
It would be nice to say that all of the values and norms are constructive. Not all are, though.
An example we saw earlier is the Invent-Here-Now imperative. It is developed as a cultural value and norm all the way through college. In most organizations, however, inventing new solutions where old ones already exist is counterproductive to the aims of the organization. The ideal norm would be to scavenge existing solutions wherever possible, to invent only where it leads the organization past its competitors.
Adapting to Subcultures
Most people's initial reaction is to force one group's values on the other groups.
· Researchers in formal development techniques want more math taught in school.
· Managers uncomfortable with iterative development want their programmers to get the design right the first time.
· The programmers, frustrated with not being able to communicate with their managers, want the managers to learn object-oriented programming prior to managing a project.
There are two problems with the make-them-change approach:
· The less serious problem is that it is really, really hard to get people to change their habits and approaches.
· The more serious problem is that we don't yet understand the subcultures. To force them to change their values is a bit like prescribing
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