Derek W. Wade

Facilitators, has this happened to you?

You have a nice four-hour block for your working requirements / product planning / process re-engineering / whatever meeting. You allot a “generous” 30-minute chunk near the beginning for the definition of terms. You put a few domain-specific words up on a flipchart to get ideas flowing, point to the first term, and prompt the team:

“So, everybody, what is the definition of _______ ?”

(Two hours later…)

One phrase is detailed to a precision that would satisfy most German engineers, the total number of terms to define has tripled — but none of them have been defined — and you have had to break up three near fist-fights.

A common vocabulary is important, but does it have to be this hard? I recently had a delightful experience which suggests that it does not.
(Read on …)

At lunch with my wife the other day:

Meg: …sometimes it seems as if everyone on the internet is an idiot.

Me: Well, it used to be that the ‘net was the place for geeks to go and converse with other geeks. Then the web made using the ‘net easy, everyone got on, and now it’s just like the real world.

Meg: Yeah, like all the new settlers moving into the frontier.
Me: I think you can still find some bastions of geekdom though, via media that have higher barriers to entry like a wiki, or IRC.

Meg: So, don’t hang out in the AOL Chatrooms, is what you’re saying.

Me: Not unless it’s the AOL FreeBSD Chatroom… sorry, I couldn’t say that with a straight face.

I just got back from CITCON and am boiling over with the many wonderful stories, ideas, and concepts that were either sparked in my head or crammed in there by other attendees. Some highlights to dig into later:

• the spontaneous co-invention by Brian Marick, Jason Huggins, and myself of “the affinity definition game” as an alternative way to capture team vocabulary
• the lunch-table conversation about dev team members, Maslow’s Hierarchy, and the dangers of labelling non-conformist developers as “cowboys”
• Jeffery Fredrick’s talk about training and education in agile methods, and the dissatisfaction expressed both by recent university graduates and by hiring managers at the poor emphasis on agile techniques in the academic world
• the whole OpenSpaces format, and how asking a question could turn into the opportunity for a talk of my own

The one thing about the conference that really stood out for me, though, was the amount of — well, not exactly surprise at — but interest in the social aspect of software teams. Or, as expressed by one participant at the final wrap-up session: “I never realized how much psychology is involved in making software.”

I was both dismayed and gratified to hear this. Dismayed because as we like to say at 3Back, “software is product and product is produced by people,” so it makes sense to us that hardest remaining problems in software are about people.

But such talk was pretty New-Agey less than five years ago, so I’m gratified to see these topics getting more attention these days.