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Good Agile — Development Without Deadlines
BigTom writes, "In a recent blog entry Steve Yegge, a developer at Google, writes a fascinating account of life at possibly the coolest development organization in the world. Steve lays out
some of the software development practices that make Google work. Go on, say you are not even a little bit jealous. ;-)" From the article:
- Developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.
- There aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week.
- Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.
- Google tends not to pre-announce. They really do understand that you can't rush good cooking, you can't rush babies out, and you can't rush software development.
3!? What do they need 3 meetings for?
Where I work, we have an average of about 1. and sonme of us think that that's too many
Google can do this, and pretty much any company that can set its own time-table can use "Google Agile" methods. But you're limited to just those products where a delay of a few weeks or months isn't a major issue. It's simply not true for every type of software developer out there.
Maybe "Agile" methods aren't the absolute best out there, but there are cases where it's simply not possible to use "Google Agile" methods.
Sure, that sounds wonderful, as long as:
- you're working with intelligent, competent, creative people
- you have an effectively unlimited budget(relative to most other companies)
- you're working for a software-only company which is only successful because of its innovation, not because it has to deliver specific functionality to specific clients
How many of us can say that? Hmm?
It sounds like a dream job, but let's face it: it relies on individual heroics, from everyone, all the time. Now that's fine if everyone working there is far above average, and "individual heroics" means "enough intelligence and maturity to keep a view of the big picture without being whipped with a rolled-up Gantt chart", but it's a recipe for disaster in most other places.
Is this the emerging ivory tower of Google developers? While I'm happy for the guy, most of the blog sounds like "look at me, I'm developing under near-ideal conditions, why isn't everyone else?"
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- Google is a company whose success is almost entirely based on innovation
- Innovation comes from intelligent, well-motivated people
- The best way to motivate intelligent people to innovate is to give them total freedom (rewards are just to give them a direction, NOT to motivate them - they are motivated because they love what they do. Try offering rewards for something they don't want to do, and see what happens...)
- Most companies (even software companies) make the majority of their money through churning out the goods, not innovating - Most companies do not have the funds or the original culture to even contemplate the above working practices
- It would be lovely to work for Google.
Personally I'm really glad this article got posted - it's not telling everyone how everyone should work, but it does offer insight into how Google works, and that's valuable insight indeed as long as it's not taken out of context.
Meta will eat itself
Google is not a software development firm, but an ad sales firm (check their 10-K if you have any doubts). It uses software to attract viewers in the same way television networks use programming and magazines use articles. Under this model, it makes sense to give developers a large amount of freedom to develop whatever they want. The final type/quality/status of the software doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that there are new features appearing on the site from time to time to attract new viewers..er, users... and keep old users. Most of the applications probably won't amount to much, but just like with any media company, you only need one or two big hits a season to keep people coming back.
Google develops a large amount of its content in house in much the same way old movie studios developed all their films in house. For Google, the talent is not actors and directors but developers. Movie studios learned that you treat the talent well to keep them around and Google has taken that lesson to heart. Developers tend to want complete freedom to work on what they want with no deadlines and giving them this is the easiest way to keep them happy. Call it 'good agile development' or whatever else you want, it's really just keeping the talent happy in the hopes that they'll keep developing content to attract users.
Unfortunately, software companies that rely on software or service sales for revenue cannot take this extreme approach to agile development. They need to deliver software on occasion or someone else will replace them in the marketplace. Agile development is still the best way to go, but unbounded development only works if software isn't your primary source of revenue.
-Chris
I know you're just flamming, but what does 'beta' actually mean? It's just a label on a given version of a piece of software. Would it make you feel better if tomorrow google changed their gmail from 'beta' and put 'production' on the page? That is what most other software companies do. Especially if the product has been up and running successfully as long as gmail has.
In reality most software is either continously developed or it dies. I've worked on numerous software projects and few if any have ever reached a point where no more work was required. Even if you found and fixed every bug (haha), feature requests will continue to come in as people use the software. As soon as bugs/feature request quit coming in most software is essientially dead b/c that means people have quit using it.
100% correct you are. // posting anonymously for obvious reasons
I worked for Microsoft myself and I'm at Google now. There's a whole lot of brainwashing going on here at the miracle company. Yes, the benefits package is pretty good, and yes the work per se is pretty cool. But all the marketing hype that makes working here sound like working in heaven is so much inflated. Coincidentally enough, I'm planning on going to Oracle in the coming months -- there are a couple cool positions open in the group where a friend of mine works. Don't get me wrong, Google is cool, but nowhere near as cool as it's portrayed, especially here on Slashdot.
The terms "rush" and "do quickly" are different.
... if it takes 3 minutes, it takes 3 minutes, not 30 seconds.
Yous till can't rush a stirfry
Its not rushed if its done in the right amount of time, even if that amount of time is short relative to other foods.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)