The Process is Personal is Political

This year I've read three books that follow projects from the perspective of individual contributors, managers, and the business. They are The Goal, The Phoenix Project, and The Soul of a New Machine.

The Goal is perhaps the most well-known. It's a pedagogical novel in which a manufacturing plant manager is given three months to turn his failing plant around. He stumbles across a mentor who, with well-chosen questions and challenges, exposes the fallacies of the traditional production models being followed and suggests new ways to analyse the business. The philosophy at the heart of this is the Theory of Constraints, where constraints can be anything that gets in the way of the business goal, and the aim, as described by a couple of its key players is "not so much to reduce costs but to increase throughput". (p. 298, Kindle)

The Phoenix Project is also fictional but this time set in the world of IT, Ops, Dev, and Test. Again, the main protagonist is under pressure to change outcomes in a complex system, again finds a mentor and, again, The Theory of Constraints is central. In fact, the authors freely admit that the book is "an homage to The Goal, hoping to show that the same principles ... could be used to improve technology work." (p. 341)

The Soul of a New Machine sees journalist Tracy Kidder given access to a product team at the Data General Corporation during the development of the MV/8000 computer (codenamed Eagle) in the late 1970s. It predates the other two books, and has no obvious aim beyond the telling of a good story through the varied lenses of a selection of its protagonists.

For those who've been around implementation, deployment, and maintenance projects of any size or complexity over any length of time there will be many moments of empathy, sympathy, and antipathy in these three works. As a tester, I particularly enjoyed reading about debugging the prototype Eagle: "Veres ... tells Holberger [that they] ran 921 passes [of the test suite] last night, with only 30 failures. And Holberger makes a face. In this context, 921 is a vast number. It means that any given instruction in the diagnostic program may have been executed millions of times. Against 921 passes, 30 failures is a very small number. It tells them the machine is failing only once in a great while — and that's bad news ..." (p. 194)

There's a bigger picture here, though. Crudely, the first two books are about processes and their underpinnings while the third is about people and their interactions. They are symbiotic, they interact intimately: process is made by people, people follow imposed process and are the instigators of emergent process. Understanding both people and process is crucial in the workplace.

People and process are both also subject to politics, and understanding that is important too. In the Phoenix Project, as improvements are attempted in one group, turf wars and ass-covering activity break out around the place. In The Soul of a New Machine, the Eagle project can only exist because of the experienced under-the-radar manoeuvrings of the group manager, Tom West. "We're building what I thought we could get away with" he says early on. (p. 31)

I'd recommend all three of these books. Why? Well, the recognisable episodes and personalities are great fun in a Big Chief I-Spy kind of way, but the higher value for me came from the opportunity to use someone else's eyes to view them. And then, naturally, to reflect on that and try to apply it to my own contexts.

The editions I read:

The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder (Avon) 1981
The Goal, Eli Goldblatt 30th Anniversary Edition (North River Press) 2014, on Kindle
The Phoenix Project 5th Anniversary Edition, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford (IT Revolution) 2018

Thanks to the Dev manager for the loan of The Soul of a New Machine.

Images: Amazon and AbeBooks.

Comments

Robert Day said…

I read 'The Soul of a New Machine' many years ago, long before I was working with computers in any detail or joined the industry. It taught me a lot about the work that goes into developing even the smallest of features which we now take for granted - a clickable button in a GUI, for instance. It has led to my general philosophy on our modern lives and the tools we interact with daily. Almost anything you or I use has been designed and then made; anything we use has at some time been the focus of one or more people's entire working life. So to me, that means that we should not take these things for granted; we should respect the artefacts we use every day, because that implies respecting the unknown thousands of people who conceived, designed and made the things we are surrounded with.

May 20, 2019 at 9:32 AM

Meet Me Halfway?

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answ...

The Best Programmer Dan Knows

I was pairing with my friend Vernon at work last week, on a tool I've been developing. He was smiling broadly as I talked him through what I'd done because we've been here before. The tool facilitates a task that's time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, tiresome, and important to get right. Vern knows that those kinds of factors trigger me to change or build something, and that's why he was struggling not to laugh out loud. He held himself together and asked a bunch of sensible questions about the need, the desired outcome, and the approach I'd taken. Then he mentioned a talk by Daniel Terhorst-North, called The Best Programmer I Know, and said that much of it paralleled what he sees me doing. It was my turn to laugh then, because I am not a good programmer, and I thought he knew that already. What I do accept, though, is that I am focussed on the value that programs can give, and getting some of that value as early as possible. He sent me a link to the ta...

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested ...

Beginning Sketchnoting

In September 2017 I attended Ian Johnson 's visual note-taking workshop at DDD East Anglia . For the rest of the day I made sketchnotes, including during Karo Stoltzenburg 's talk on exploratory testing for developers (sketch below), and since then I've been doing it on a regular basis. Karo recently asked whether I'd do a Team Eating (the Linguamatics brown bag lunch thing) on sketchnoting. I did, and this post captures some of what I said. Beginning sketchnoting, then. There's two sides to that: I still regard myself as a beginner at it, and today I'll give you some encouragement and some tips based on my experience, to begin sketchnoting for yourselves. I spend an enormous amount of time in situations where I find it helpful to take notes: testing, talking to colleagues about a problem, reading, 1-1 meetings, project meetings, workshops, conferences, and, and, and, and I could go on. I've long been interested in the approaches I've evol...

How do I Test AI?

Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps something like this: what kinds of things do I consider when testing systems with artificial intelligence components . I freestyled liberally the first time I answered but when the question came up again I thought I'd write a few bullets to help me remember key things. This post is the latest iteration of that list. Caveats: I'm not an expert; what you see below is a reminder of things to pick up on during conversations so it's quite minimal; it's also messy; it's absolutely not a guide or a set of best practices; each point should be applied in context; the categories are very rough; it's certainly not complete. Also note that I work with teams who really know what they're doing on the domain, tech, and medical safety fronts and some of the things listed here are things they'd typically do some or all of. Testing ...

Don't Know? Find Out!

In What We Know We Don't Know , Hillel Wayne crisply summarises a handful of research findings about software development, describes how the research is carried out and reviewed and how he explores it, and contrasts those evidence-based results with the pronouncements of charismatic thought leaders. He also notes how and why this kind of research is hard in the software world. I won't pull much from the talk because I want to encourage you to watch it. Go on, it's reasonably short, it's comprehensible for me at 1.25x, and you can skip the section on Domain-Driven Design (the talk was at DDD Europe) if that's not your bag. Let me just give the same example that he opens with: research shows that most code reviews focus more on the first file presented to reviewers rather than the most important file in the eye of the developer. What we should learn: flag the starting and other critical files to receive more productive reviews. You never even thought about that possi...

Express, Listen, and Field

Last weekend I participated in the LLandegfan Exploratory Workshop on Testing (LLEWT) 2024, a peer conference in a small parish hall on Anglesey, north Wales. The topic was communication and I shared my sketchnotes and a mind map from the day a few days ago. This post summarises my experience report. Express, Listen, and Field Just about the most hands-on, practical, and valuable training I have ever done was on assertiveness with a local Cambridge coach, Laura Dain . In it she introduced Express, Listen, and Field (ELF), distilled from her experience across many years in the women’s movement, business, and academia. ELF: say your key message clearly and calmly, actively listen to the response, and then focus only on what is relevant to your needs. I blogged a little about it back in 2017 and I've been using it ever since. Assertiveness In a previous role, I was the manager of a test team and organised training for the whole ...

My Adidas

If you've met me anywhere outside of a wedding or funeral, a snowy day, or a muddy field in the last 20 years you'll have seen me in Adidas Superstar trainers. But why? This post is for April Cools' Club . --00-- I'm the butt of many jokes in our house, but not having a good memory features prominently amongst them. See also being bald ("do you need a hat, Dad?"), wearing jeans that have elastane in them (they're very comfy but "oh look, he's got the jeggings on again!"), and finding joy in contorted puns ("no-one's laughing except you, you know that, right?") Which is why it's interesting that I have a very strong, if admittedly not complete, memory of the first time I heard Run DMC. Raising Hell , their third album, was released in the UK in May 1986 and I bought it pretty much immediately after hearing it on the evening show on Radio 1, probably presented by Janice Long, ...

Not a Happy Place

A few months ago I stopped having therapy because I felt I had stabilised myself enough to navigate life without it. For the time being, anyway. I'm sure the counselling helped me but I couldn't tell you how and I've chosen not to look deeply into it. For someone who is usually pretty analytical this is perhaps an interesting decision but I knew that I didn't want to be second-guessing my counsellor, Sue, or mentally cross-referencing stuff that I'd researched while we were talking. And talk was what we mostly did, with Sue suggesting hardly any specific tools for me to try. One that she did recommend was finding a happy place to visualise, somewhere that I could be out of the moment for a moment to calm disruptive thoughts. (Something like this .) Surprisingly, I found that I couldn't conjure anywhere up inside my head. That's when I realised that I've always had difficulty seeing with my mind's eye but never called it out. If I try to imagine ev...

Software Sisyphus

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "How can I possibly test 'all the stuff' every iteration?" Whoa! There's a lot to unpack there, so let me break it down a little: who is suggesting that "al...

Hiccupps

Search This Blog