Enough of Processes: Let's Do Practices Part I

The Current Age: Processes

Every project team needs to have some way of working together—a way that is effective and delivers quality results on time. While every project team works differently, the way in which they work is usually inspired by what experts—internal or external—advocate. These experts have their own ways of working—their own methods, their own strategies, their own approaches, their own processes. The experts then feel the need to publish their preferred way of working in as unique and individual a way as possible, packaging their knowledge up as product—typically as a branded process, a standalone reference, or even a process framework. There are several reasons why this is a problem.

The Problem of Denied Commonality

With denied commonality, each process has a few interesting gems, but they are embedded in a larger package of commonalities. This is because no individual is good at everything, and an individual is usually only an expert on a few things.

There are many different processes promoted within the software development industry. But are they really that different? If you look closely at their content, you find that there are more similarities than differences. The reasons for this are straightforward:

• There are a number of common practices considered useful for all software development teams. (For example, iterative and incremental development, and continuous process improvement.)
• If you put two passionate experts together, their conversation progresses to a debate on the subtle differences in their approaches. But the subtle differences themselves do not provide enough breadth to become full-fledged branded processes, and so they borrow silently from each other whilst continuing to debate the subtle differences.
• Everyone is looking for a silver bullet. People aren't really interested in things that have proven their worth over time. They are just interested in what's new and fashionable, even if it is the same old thing rebranded with trendy jargon and acronyms.

The bottom line is that the processes have more commonality than differences. However, this can be difficult to detect as the champions of each process dress the common stuff in new words and make it sound as if everything is new.

Because everything in every new process looks new, it can be hard to really compare processes. It is even harder to mix and match—extract the gems and combine them with the gems from other processes.