Definitely. Especially the 'girls can't hack this anyway' attitude is horribly widespread.
Re:Cathedral vs. Bazaar
on
QA != Testing
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· Score: 1
Yes and no. I'd have wholeheartedly agreed to all you say until a couple years ago, as this was very much what I did back then: do some job for the money's sake, and get the real stuff done in my spare time.
Apart from objections out of principle (I'd rather have more coherence in my life than that now), I can't really do that so much any more: I've got kids now and want to spend time with them as well, so I'd rather have a job that is interesting in and of itself.
Or to stick with the ESR metaphor: I want at least small spaces of bazaar-like life inside the cathedral -- and yes, I do believe that's doable. We had some semblance of it in a previous team, where we managed to behave more like a startup even though we were part of a large consumer electronics company. We had no hierarchy, little internal documentation, no time tracking, and a pinball machine. That worked in some ways, and failed in others, but we shipped product and had a fairly good time developing it.
So no, I don't agree that 'cathedral' work (in the sense of making money) needs to be controlled by iron fisted processes. That just turns it into grunt work, and I'll stick by my original claim that CMM is especially good at that. What would be really interesting is a model that helps with some necessary amount of docs and planning but works bottom-up (or even better, just horizontally).
Ah yeah, and concerning people who got into computers because that's where the money is: I honestly have no patience at all with them. Thankfully they seem to be a result of the IT boom a couple years back, and since that has gone away (and with it the idea that there's easy money to be made in coding), there won't be so many new ones. Let's hope the others go away too if we ignore them.
So the first point of the Agile Manifesto seems to scream out CMM level 1.
I don't know, valuing people over bureaucracy sounds like an inherently good idea. It screams out many other things too, including "company you can work for without going insane" and "will attract the good coders".
Come on, one of the cornerstones of our culture is "Mistrust authority, promote decentralisation". It really hurts to see authoritarian systems being promoted like that.
Re:Capability Maturity Model
on
QA != Testing
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· Score: 1
Ok, fair enough. It's good to hear that CMM can actually work.
I totally agree that the experience I describe above is in large parts down to bad implementation.
In the special case of CMM I'll still blame the model: its aim is to build stable and predictable processes (that are supposed to help everyone). It defines an auditing process and all that.
If a company can get certified as CMM 3 and is found to comply in every point, when in reality it's a mess, then there's something wrong with the model.
Re:Capability Maturity Model
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That sounds very good. In theory.
Having worked in a CMM 3 company for a couple years, my opinions of the thing are quite different: CMM, and processes in general, are a tool that managers use to offload their work on the engineers.
We used to spend vast amounts of time peer reviewing all sorts of useless documents, making estimates for project planning, and so on, additionally to the architecture and coding work.
This didn't do anything at all for quality. Deadlines slipped like always (often more, because of the time lost to irrelevant stuff). Spec documents were just as Ground-Control-To-Major-Tom-like as usual.
It did, however, give the managers the warm fuzzy feeling that overcomes control freaks everywhere when they're sure they can track, number, file and index everything that goes on around them. Without having to do any actual work. Without even knowing the first thing about the product we were making (without CMM, a prerequisite for anyone attempting to write any sort of project plan).
One of our line managers admitted all of this quite openly, one of his favourite sayings was "Since we have processes, I can go home at four every day". We didn't. We got to stay till 8.
In my experience, CMM should be avoided like the plague. It's complete and utter waste of time, and encourages empty hierarchies.
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely. Especially the 'girls can't hack this anyway' attitude is horribly widespread.
Yes and no. I'd have wholeheartedly agreed to all you say until a couple years ago, as this was very much what I did back then: do some job for the money's sake, and get the real stuff done in my spare time.
Apart from objections out of principle (I'd rather have more coherence in my life than that now), I can't really do that so much any more: I've got kids now and want to spend time with them as well, so I'd rather have a job that is interesting in and of itself.
Or to stick with the ESR metaphor: I want at least small spaces of bazaar-like life inside the cathedral -- and yes, I do believe that's doable. We had some semblance of it in a previous team, where we managed to behave more like a startup even though we were part of a large consumer electronics company. We had no hierarchy, little internal documentation, no time tracking, and a pinball machine. That worked in some ways, and failed in others, but we shipped product and had a fairly good time developing it.
So no, I don't agree that 'cathedral' work (in the sense of making money) needs to be controlled by iron fisted processes. That just turns it into grunt work, and I'll stick by my original claim that CMM is especially good at that. What would be really interesting is a model that helps with some necessary amount of docs and planning but works bottom-up (or even better, just horizontally).
Ah yeah, and concerning people who got into computers because that's where the money is: I honestly have no patience at all with them.
Thankfully they seem to be a result of the IT boom a couple years back, and since that has gone away (and with it the idea that there's easy money to be made in coding), there won't be so many new ones. Let's hope the others go away too if we ignore them.
I don't know, valuing people over bureaucracy sounds like an inherently good idea. It screams out many other things too, including "company you can work for without going insane" and "will attract the good coders".
Come on, one of the cornerstones of our culture is "Mistrust authority, promote decentralisation". It really hurts to see authoritarian systems being promoted like that.
Ok, fair enough. It's good to hear that CMM can actually work.
I totally agree that the experience I describe above is in large parts down to bad implementation.
In the special case of CMM I'll still blame the model: its aim is to build stable and predictable processes (that are supposed to help everyone).
It defines an auditing process and all that.
If a company can get certified as CMM 3 and is found to comply in every point, when in reality it's a mess, then there's something wrong with the model.
That sounds very good. In theory.
Having worked in a CMM 3 company for a couple years, my opinions of the thing are quite different: CMM, and processes in general, are a tool that managers use to offload their work on the engineers.
We used to spend vast amounts of time peer reviewing all sorts of useless documents, making estimates for project planning, and so on, additionally to the architecture and coding work.
This didn't do anything at all for quality. Deadlines slipped like always (often more, because of the time lost to irrelevant stuff). Spec documents were just as Ground-Control-To-Major-Tom-like as usual.
It did, however, give the managers the warm fuzzy feeling that overcomes control freaks everywhere when they're sure they can track, number, file and index everything that goes on around them. Without having to do any actual work. Without even knowing the first thing about the product we were making (without CMM, a prerequisite for anyone attempting to write any sort of project plan).
One of our line managers admitted all of this quite openly, one of his favourite sayings was "Since we have processes, I can go home at four every day". We didn't. We got to stay till 8.
In my experience, CMM should be avoided like the plague. It's complete and utter waste of time, and encourages empty hierarchies.