Monday, May 03, 2004

Agile Apprenticeship

Martin Fowler asks, should their be agile certification? and speculates that perhaps people wouldn’t pay for it. This is a theme which Steve McConnell touched on in his book Professional Software Development where in Chapter 19 “Stinking Badges”, he takes the idea further than certification and talks openly about licensing - ah hem just like real engineers.

The real issue with this is economics - the market currently does not demand it. It really requires some firms to be visibly beating out competitors through their use of more agile teams before the market will start to demand certification or licensing. I feel that the enabler to this is greater transparency and that has to be requested by the stockholders in the form of the market analysts who work for the firms which do the trading on their behalf. The Throughput Accounting measures I propose in Agile Management would be one way of doing this. It would measure the effectiveness of agile teams.

Then you need to compare the effectiveness against the competency and see if their is a relationship. Competency can only be measured by some form of certification. The prolonged certification that Martin Fowler suggests is required sounds more like an apprenticeship to me. Yes, agile development is a craft and perhaps a journeyman scale and a craftsman’s certification model is what is required. Initially, this starts small because the number of experts and masters in the craft is small. Hence, the number of journeymen is small and the number of apprentices not quite so small. However, gradually the numbers would swell.

How does a craftsman report his/her status in the profession/craft? Perhaps like this…

David Anderson trained under Peter Coad and Jeff De Luca. Worked as journeyman at <insert employers> in the following <capacity>. Achieved his master craftsman status after delivering/building <project> or publishing <work>. Finally he achieved his expert status when invited to write and later publish “Agile Management for Software Engineering” in Peter Coad’s series for Prentice Hall PTR - a work which extended the state of the art in software lifecycle management through application of the Theory of Constraints.

Everyone in the industry would have to produce a resume which looked like this and was somehow rooted in the core experts of agile (or some other branch of software engineering) as the original mentors. For example, my staff from Sprint in Kansas City would list that they trained under me and that I in turn had trained under Peter Coad and Jeff De Luca. Everyone would have a pedigree.

Sunday, May 02, 2004

Socratic Method Considered Dangerous When…

Eli Goldratt’s writing on the Theory of Constraints contains a lot of use of the Socratic method - the style of teaching adopted by Socrates which uses questions and asks the pupil to devise the answers for themselves. Goldratt goes into some depth in What is this thing called the Theory of Constraints and how should it be implemented to explain why the Socratic method works - pages 16 through 20. However, I’ve learned the hard way that it is problematic and more recently I’ve learned that Jonahs (qualified practitioners of TOC) all over the World have experienced the same issues and the problem is well known and discussed. Well evidently not well enough known. So here I am writing it down in a place where Google will find it for the benefit of those who come after me.

First, the problem statement. Generally, Goldratt recommends the Socratic method when a systems thinker is trying to persuade a cause-effect thinker that a course of action is correct. The questions are designed to reveal the layers of depth in the system to be analyzed and allow the cause-effect thinker to “see” the system and realize the deeply obscured cause and effect despite time delays and derivative actions between cause and its effect. Peter Senge called this point of linkage between cause and effect “the leverage point” and seeing it can be difficult. However, my experience with the Socratic method is very negative. In systems thinking and the patterns movement, they say you have to see something 3 times before you cease to think of it as coincidence. And I’ve seen this problem enough now to realize it is real. So what is it?

Simply put the subject being questioned feels manipulated by the questioner. As layers of questions unveil layers of the system being analyzed, the subject becomes increasingly irritated and objects. They feel manipulated. They feel like the questioner is leading them down a path and that other paths are somehow being obscured from them. That it is all a trick. And most of all, they resent that the questioner already knows the answer.

When I first saw this, I put it down to West Coast, liberal, conspiracy theorist tendencies. However, I’ve recently heard that the problem is seen all over the World. At last week’s Puget Sound TOC Learning Event, in Bellevue WA, coach Fran Fisher, who was an invited speaker, nailed the problem. Yes, the subject feels manipulated and the reason why is simple. They know that the questioner knows the answer. The conversation is not one between peers. When the questioner is a knowledgeable expert in a field and the subject an apprentice then the relationship will breakdown if the apprentice feels manipulated. She recommended that the relationship which works is a coaching relationship. In this case, the relationship is one of peers. The person being coached is an expert in their field. The person doing the coaching is only able to ask the right questions but does not know the answers. Indeed, this is truly a description of the relationship between Jonah and Alex Rogo in Eli Goldratt’s novels. Jonah is not (or pretends very well not to be) an expert in Alex’s field. He simply asks the right questions and forces Alex to come up with the answers for himself.

The revealing detail was finally offered from the back of the room, and I confess to forgetting who offered it. Apparently, Socrates used his method in two ways. The first was to ask of the subject a series of questions which led them to a conclusion, then to ask some more which led to a conflicting conclusion. Socrates would expose the internal inconsistency and show people that by their own logic, their proposal was invalid. He would also use the questioning method in collaboration with others when neither he nor his colleagues knew the answer. It was a journey of discovery for them all.

Hence, the advice seems to be, make careful use of the Socratic method, as it is considered dangerous when the inquisitor is an expert and the inquisition is designed to educate the subject of the inquisition. Better to use Socrates’ method of questioning when no one knows the answer. Using it to flush out internal inconsistency risks embarrassing someone, so it is best used in that circumstance only in private. Using Socratic method as a teaching tool is to be avoided.