Category: Working Life

Conway’s Law & Distributed Working. Some Comments & Experience

The eye-opener in my personal experience of Conway's law was this:

A company with an IT department on the 1st floor, and a marketing department on the 2nd floor, where the web servers were managed by the marketing department (really), and the back end by the IT department.

I was a developer in the marketing department. I could discuss and change web tier code in minutes. To get a change made to the back end would take me days of negotiation, explanation and release co-ordination.

Guess where I put most of my code?

Inevitably the architecture of the system became Webtier vs Backend. And inevitably, I put code on the webserver which, had we been organised differently, I would have put in a different place.

This is Conway's law: That the communication structure – the low cost of working within my department vs the much higher cost of working across a department boundary – constrained my arrangement of code, and hence the structure of the system. The team "just downstairs" was just too far.  What was that gap made of? Even that small physical gap raised the cost of communication; but also the gaps & differences in priorities, release schedules, code ownership, and—perhaps most of all—personal acquaintance; I just didn't know the people, or know who to ask.

Conway's Law vs Distributed Working

Mark Seemann has recently argued that successful, globally distributed, OSS projects demonstrate that co-location isn't all it's claimed to be. Which set me thinking about communication in OSS projects.

In my example above, I had no ownership (for instance, no commit rights) to back end code and I didn't know, and hence didn't communicate with, the people who did. The tools of OSS—a shared visible repository, the ability to 'see' who is working on what, public visibility of discussion threads, being able to get in touch, to to raise pull requests—all serve to reduce the cost of communication.

In other words, the technology helps to re-create, at a distance, the benefits enjoyed by co-located workers.

When thinking of communication & co-location, I naturally think of talking. But @ploeh's comments have prodded me into thinking that code ownership is just as big a deal as talking. It's just something that we take for granted in a co-located team. I mean, if your co-located team didn't have access to each other's code, what would be the point of co-locating?

Another big deal with co-location is "tacit" knowledge, facilitated by, as Alistair Cockburn put it, osmotic communication. When two of my colleagues discuss something, I can overhear it and be aware of what's going on without having to be explicitly invited. What's more, I can quickly filter out what isn't relevant to me, or I can spontaneously join conversations & decisions that do concern me. Without even trying, everyone is involved when they need to be in a way that someone working in a separate room–even one that's right next door–can't achieve.

But a distributed project can achieve this too. By forcing most communication through shared public channels—mailing lists, chatrooms, pull request conversations—a distributed team can achieve better osmotic communication than a team which has two adjacent rooms in a building.

The cost, I guess, is that typing & reading is more expensive (in time) than talking & listening. Then again, the time-cost of talking can be quite high too (though not nearly as a high as the cost of failing to communicate).

I still suspect that twenty people in a room can work faster than twenty people across the globe. But the communication pathways of a distributed team can be less constrained than those same people in one building but separated even by a flimsy partition wall.

References

A Manifesto for Post-Agile Software Development

In nearly 15 years since the Agile manifesto was penned, an entire generation of the software industry has grown up having known only allegedly 'Agile' methodologies. Their experience has not always been positive.

The 'new' criticisms made against agile – by those who have grown up with it, not those who opposed it in the first place – are rarely criticisms of the agile manifesto. They are, often, reactions against the (abusive) experience of being pushed into processes, behaviours & relationships which are unsatisfactory; whilst at the same being stripped of any power to improve them.

We should always react against people being pushed about, and made powerless.

A manifesto is a small thing. It can fall on deaf ears. It can be interpreted to mean the opposite of what was intended, it can be misused to manipulate people. But if we make the effort to keep in touch with each other, and to keep trying to re-state what was meant, it can continue to be a valuable guide. And so I propose a 15th anniversary postscript.

Manifesto for Post-Agile Software Development: A Postscript

  • The agile manifesto was not and is not a prescription for people to impose conformity, nor a tool for controlling people.
  • There is a deeper theme to agile. At the core it is based on trust and respect, promoting workplace relationships which value people. We oppose methods, structures and behaviours which reduce respect and trust, and which reduce people to assets with no power.
  • Agile will always demand shared learning and shared improvement. Without critical reflection and learning – both from their own experiences and from the wider community – teams cannot remain agile. Without improvement based on that learning, 'agile' becomes fossilization.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development: A Reminder of the Original

The Agile Manifesto:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Comment

  • The phrase and much of the bullet point ‘There is a deeper theme...’ comes from About the Manifesto.
  • The emphasis on continuous learning is for some so obvious as to need no explanation. But some are stuck in a so-called “agile” process which they are powerless to change or improve. The irony of naming such an structure “Agile” would be funny if it weren't so painful.
  • Ron Jeffries' response to some criticisms of Scrum was: “The essence of what makes Scrum work isn’t the three roles, the five meetings, the one artifact. It’s Inspect and Adapt. When things are not going as you like, you’re supposed to fix it.”
  • To cry out that without continuous learning and change there is no agile, can be a powerful tool for the disempowered.
  • Calling for change in a broken process can become a step towards changing broken relationships.
  • Beyond “Deliver working software. In a team.”, I see two essentials to agile:
    • Treat people well
    • Never stop learning
    Each of these two is only truly possible when the other is also practised.

Go Further, Do Better

  • Alastair Cockburn was ahead of the game and has been teaching  Heart of Agile for a while. He has four essentials: Collaborate, Improve, Deliver, Reflect.
  • Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson's post on turning the dials up to 12  starts from, ‘Al Smith once said “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy”. We say The cure for the ills of “Agile” is more Agile.”’ and sketches what turning the dials to 12 might mean.

  • Gabrielle Benefield's “Mobius Loop” uses a different language and stipulates a process. At first glance it is much more achievement focussed. The four “corners” of their figure 8 loop are Why & Who; Outcomes; Deliver; Measure & Learn; and the centre crossover of the loop is Options.

An older bibliography

Draft – Comment & Contribution Welcome. Updated September 2019.

One User, Many Computers

I've tried a few solutions for using multiple computers (mostly one MacBook plus one or two Windows machines) simultaneously and I've currently landed on http://synergy-project.org/ as the One for Me.

It's very good. It's pretty seamless (last year less so, this years seems perfect) : put 3 machines next to each other, move your mouse across the 3 screens, and control and type into whichever computer has mouse focus. It's particularly a good solution when some of your machine are laptops and you want to use the laptop screens.

Alternatives I've tried:

  • VNC and remote desktop style solutions have worked best for me when I have multiple monitors on a single machine. The irritation is when your local monitor isn't as big as you want for the remote machine and you end up with a scrolling window. The itch that remote desktop solutions don't scratch though is when some of your machines are laptops, and then you want to use the laptop screen. Of the various options, TeamViewer and MS Remote Desktop seem the fastest; I haven't yet seen a fast solution for Mac.
  • When I don't need a gui, I find ssh or similar is really good. Even a modest monitor easily has room for multiple console windows. A reminder perhaps that guis are not always the bee's knees.

The Known Unknowns Matrix

I.T. is not the only industry to have happily latched onto the the former Secretary of State's famous phrase, "the unknown unknowns". It's a good phrase if you must plan or estimate anything because planning & estimating always involve risk.

But we should really consider the full matrix. There are pitfalls in at least two of the quadrants:

  Known Not Known
Knowns Things we know, and we know we know them Things we know but don't realise we know them. Tacit knowledge that we take for granted. Becomes a problem if we are responsible, and fail, to communicate them to people who don't know. Also a problem when we start work in a new context and do not realise that what we ‘know’ is no longer valid here, so they become unknown unknowns.
Unknowns Things we know that we don't know. We can record the risk, and estimate a cost for investigation & discovery Things we don't know that we don't know. This is the quadrant most likely to shipwreck plans.

Concerning the unknown unknowns, my experience with doing novel software is that when budgeting for development you should estimate for development, plus learning time, plus developing the things you learned about, plus solving problems you didn't know you'd have. A rule of thumb for novel systems might be, multiply your estimate by ten to cope with the unknowns. And/Or, have clear “abandon the project” criteria, even months into the project. Don't be a dupe for the sunk-cost fallacy.

Less dramatically, my takeaway from this is to use this quadrant when listing risks and assumptions. Just having a space for the possibility of unknown knowns & unknowns can be an impetus to discuss, “risk-storm” & consult, to help your team discover the as-yet-unknowns.

P.S.

I've just read the brief and brilliant mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology which points out that you can't afford too much novelty. He suggests that for any new project you should grant yourself a limit of 3 novelty chips. When you've spent them, you get no more.

Well, not unless you really can overshoot your budget and timescales by over 1,000%.

Kudos

A slideshare by Danni Mannes on Agile Architecture pointed out to me all quadrants are worth some of our time.