Agile Software Development
Автор: Alistair Cockburn /
CHAPTER 2. Individuals Working Better in Some Ways than Others
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Часть 6
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Pride in Contribution
The third possible intrinsic reward is pride in contribution. People's desire to contribute is so strong that I regularly see programmers damage their health and private lives in their effort to contribute to the team.
Here is a story of a key developer who changed his attitude toward the project when it was made clear to him what his contribution to the project and the community meant. Realigning Commitment
The programmer was a senior-level contract programmer who was working on the most complicated and critical portion of the system. He was already being paid well. The executive involved was a socially astute person.
At some point, the executive had a conversation with the programmer. The executive made it clear how important this particular programmer was to the success of the entire corporation, and he did it in a way that illustrated to the programmer that building a really clever, beautiful, and perfect solution that was hard for the other people to use would be to the detriment of the entire community and that the programmer could make a very positive contribution to everyone involved by making a simple and workable solution, even if it was less aesthetic or less mathematically sound. Almost immediately, the programmer shifted his behavior. Rather than sneer at the company and the technology, he became interested in delivering value, contributing to the group. He was already a core contributor but now delivered a workable solution and stayed on long enough to see the solution deployed.
The interesting thing to me is that the executive did not draw on the programmer's feeling of pride-in-work with respect to the perfection of the design. Instead, he drew on pride-in-contribution to the community
Combining Rewards
Laubacher and Malone at MIT's Sloan School of Management highlight the combination of rewards needed for high-tech workers (Laubacher 2000). They start with this caution: "We’ll get and keep the best" is not a viable strategy for most companies. Such an approach may be possible for leaders like Sun Microsystems and Cisco, that can offer a compelling package of salary, stock options and challenging work. But not every firm has these resources. ”
They amend that by pointing out the following: “Because so many of its engineers have become millionaires through company stock options, Cisco Systems likens its workforce to volunteers and manages them accordingly. This is an extreme example, but in many highly skilled fields, talent is seeking something more than the biggest package of stock options. Interesting, rewarding work or a chance to join in a compelling mission now become valuable tools for attracting and keeping talented people. ”
Open-source projects seem to offer all three of the intrinsic reward mechanisms. The people involved comment on their pleasure in contributing, on the pride they feel about their work, and on their own and others’ accomplishments. Those who contribute to open-source software are a notably committed group of people who generate very high-quality code. In their case, software creation clearly is a cooperative "game, " done more for fun than for profit.
Even with all the above discussion in place, it is still not true that a single reward mechanism will work for all people. The space shuttle projects, for example, benefit from people who take pride in finding every mistake and who therefore take their time and review every work artifact carefully. It may be difficult to find appropriate rewards on a project like this if the people involved are looking for high-risk projects that will let them go fast and get rich quickly.
This difference among people is good, because so many different kinds of systems need to be built.
FeedbackPeople benefit from clear and frequent feedback. In general, the quicker the feedback, the better the effect.
Seymour Cray Fiddles
Seymour Cray, inventor of the world's fastest computers for several decades, gave some talks about his early design techniques. Fresh out of university, he was the proud owner of an extra-large radial slide rule. He immediately used it on his first assignment, diligently calculating the parameters for several days.
Walking the halls one day, he met an experienced designer who showed him that it was simpler just to apply a few rules of thumb and build a prototype. He could then test it to see where it was off, make a few adjustments to the design, and bring it to spec.
Seymour Cray illustrated that a little bit of feedback can replace a lot of analytical work.
Of all the published methodologies, Extreme Programming (XP) perhaps puts the most emphasis on feedback, both during design and in the overall project.
XP calls for programmers to work in pairs during design and programming. The second person catches many programming errors as the programs are being entered.
The programmers keep unit tests in an automated test suite. Whenever they change a section of code, they run the test suite to discover right away whether they have broken something that had been working.
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