What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/467353553552416769

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” and it appears to be epidemic. My own personal grand unified theory of everything is that most problems stem from or are aggravated by a lack of communication. Whether the topic is process, governance, planning, estimates, or design, chances are it’s easier to find opinions (and worse, policy and practices) based on one-sided viewpoints than a balanced understanding of the contexts involved. This is dangerous due to the simple fact that organizations are social systems (frequently fractal systems of systems) and as Ruth Malan has noted:

Russell Ackoff urged that to design a system, it must be seen in the context of the larger system of which it is part. Any system functions in a larger system (various larger systems, for that matter), and the boundaries of the system — its interaction surfaces and the capabilities it offers — are design negotiations. That is, they entail making decisions with trade-off spaces, with implications and consequences for the system and its containing system of systems. We must architect across the boundaries, not just up to the boundaries. If we don’t, we naively accept some conception of the system boundary and the consequent constraints both on the system and on its containing systems (of systems) will become clear later. But by then much of the cast will have set. Relationships and expectations, dependencies and interdependencies will create inertia. Costs of change will be higher, perhaps too high.

In other words, systems exist within an ecosystem, not a vacuum. Failure to take context into account harms systems (whether software or social) by baking in harmful structures and behaviors and we cannot take into account contexts that are not communicated and appreciated. This, by the way, is why you find posts about management and process on a site with the tagline “All Things Architectural”.

This is why I believe that successfully managing technical debt can’t happen without successfully communicating to the customer when it’s being taken on, what the costs involved are (or may be) and how it’s affecting the evolution of the product.

This is why I believe the answer to problems related to estimation lies in communication and collaboration, rather than #NoEstimates on the one hand or rigid authoritarianism on the other. This, in my opinion, holds true for all the social system issues (management, process, governance, planning, quality, and architectural design) that affect software development. Without understanding (which does not happen without communication) the goals behind the practices and what results are being achieved, it’s unlikely that the system will work to the satisfaction of anyone.

Local “optimizations” won’t fix systemic problems. We need to bridge the gaps. Can we talk?

Updated 4/8/2016 to fix a broken link.