Programmers and Managers

In this presentation Alexander goes on at length on the observable structure of beauty but closes with a call to action after observing, "that those of us who wield the power to transform the world have accepted the role of technicians, hired guns, serving other interests."

Beauty appears as a central motivation again here from Dijkstra who was mentioned above in "Programmers and Managers". Dijkstra argued that only the most skilled logician could appreciate beauty in a program as a proof. His notion of "weakest precondition" transferred easily to TDD.

Here Richard Cook explains the tension between those who know (engineers) and those who want (management). Systems seem to run at the very edge of failure much of the time. The combination of high workload, limited resources, pressure for additional features and capability, and inherent software, hardware, and network fragility is a noxious kettle of stuff always about to boil over in the form of outages, degraded response, or functional breakdowns.

A the dawn of desktop computing the "customer" that agile speaks of was often the "user" selected by management to get the new, yet to be programmed, workstation. An often lost aspect of extreme programming was the expectation that the customer/user could demonstrate on a weekly base the accomplishments of recent collaborations. In this way the decision maker was demonstrating requisite variety to make good decisions as to the future they desired.

I thought it interesting when the proponents of various "live" programming tools gathered recently that another shift in culture, not just technique, was on the horizion. Deadlines were identified as an obstacle to live-culture, a programmer-management conflict? The suggested solution was to redefine the goal such that development could return to live activity. In my own Episodes pattern language I called this Work Split, and this served the same purpose of aligning expectations of creative work.

Several authors have returned to my 1994 pattern language dubbed Episodes. This has been recognized as a founding work in the history of Agile. So an inquiry into roots of the now accepted and consequently diluted practices might want to know more about how Episodes came to be.

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