Lean Software Engineering

I picked up that title because I was disappointed with the state of practice that I could see around me at Microsoft at the time. That was 1996. There were some good ideas and practices around to be sure, but the heroic cowboy coder mentality was still the dominant culture. Objects and iterations and daily builds and triage were all good, but it didn’t seem to be enough. Looking for answers, I also read the SEI’s The Capability Maturity Model around the same time. That probably threw McConnell into even sharper relief for me. What I liked most about McConnell’s approach that seemed so different from everything else I had read on the subject was the attitude:

Here is a collection of principles and practices that people have found to work for them (or not). Maybe some of them will work for you.

…which could hardly be any different from the SEI’s authoritarian presentation.

Well, I was completely delighted with that approach, and this was massively reinforced by another delightful book that I read in 1996 called Design Patterns. The deep message I got from both books was: study what other people in the wide world have done and think critically and creatively about your situation every day. The ensuing avalanche of Design Patterns clones might indicate that some people got a different message.

But my interpretation sent me off on a great adventure looking for more big ideas out there in the world beyond the vast echo chamber of 1990′s software engineering. Of course, that set me up to be both highly aware of the emerging ideas of Agile development, and seriously offended by the evangelical hype that often accompanied those ideas. In recent years, I’ve seen a lot of worthy ideas get steamrolled by True Believers because they don’t fit into some cult ideology. It is disappointing to me that we find ourselves in such a dogmatic and tribal era in the profession.

I think what I’ve really learned after all these years is that ideas are tools, and the more you know, the better you will be able to solve interesting problems. I can draw another lesson from the flip side of that:

The more anybody tells you that they know the One True Path, the more you should feel inclined to tell them to fuck off.

Rapid Development. As relevant today as it was then, and still the best antidote to mindless bandwagons that I’ve seen yet.