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by Keith Ray.
Original Post: Not Victims
Feed Title: MemoRanda
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Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics.
The "agile panel" on the first day of SDExpoWest was talking about useless CASE tools -- how managers buy them, engineers try them out and find they're not helpful, and the tools become shelfware -- and how the money spent on those tools COULD have been spent on something more useful. Jerry Weinberg, in the audience, replied to the panel that we don't have to be victims. Professionals choose their tools as appropriate to the situation at hand and make sure others understand that. He said that no surgeon in the operating room would whine about being given a rusty scalpel because "that was all the hospital would pay for."
Robert C. Martin said in his class about "Stemming the Offshore Tide" that a study of 15 projects found that doing the programming and other project work in a "war-room" enabled teams to be twice as productive as those that don't. He said that programmers didn't have to give up offices or cubicles for private spaces, or alone-time for thinking things through, but when working on the project, they should be in same room as the testers, business analysts, and other programmers so that any question about the project could be answered without leaving one's chair -- either by looking at charts and diagrams on the walls of the war-room, or by asking someone close by.
Of course, it's not just software developers that corporations try to put into cubicles. Hallmark, the greeting card company, did that with its artistic talent -- until Gordon MacKenzie, the author of Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving With Grace put them into a more productive environment -- old-fashioned roll-top desks next to drawing boards, good chairs, partitions made from antique doors with stained glass -- which was also CHEAPER than cubicles and standardized office equipment.
MacKenzie could do that because he had been at Hallmark long enough to have a good reputation, and he had a corporate sponsor who encourage him to hold the job-title "Creative Paradox". He didn't have several studies showing that a particular environment would help artist be more productive.
Most of the focus in this investigation is on the communication patterns of the individuals on the team. Past studies have indicated that less than 30% of a programmer's time is spent on traditional programming tasks and less than 20% of the time is spent on coding [4]. The rest of the time is spent on meetings, problem resolution with the team, resolving issues with customers, and product testing, etc. And, we know that the further away people are who have to communicate, the less they talk with each other. A distance of 30 meters is equivalent to being truly remote [2].
When collocated, team communication is a subtle dynamic. Team members coordinate their actions around various artifacts and arrangements of people in space [Hutchins, Suchman and Heath & Luff, in 9]. Hutchins calls this phenomenon distributed cognition, whereby teammates exploit features of the social and physical world as resources for accomplishing a task [15].
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