Process over the individuals

April 9, 2006 by Artem

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools © agilemanifesto.org

Lately on a Russian programmer forum I've read a story about the usual victory of a process over the individuals.

One software development company had Windows and Unix stations. As a result from time to time the wrong endline characters leaked into the repository and caused the build breaks. There were two ways to overcome the problem:
1. To oblige everybody to check the files before the commit
2. To devote some time to writing an automated checker and/or converter.

As you might have suspected the first solution has been chosen. The irony of the situation is in that it was the status quo already. Nobody was doing things wrong on purpose, people were just making mistakes.

Fixing the failures

Now recall what sometimes happens in "old good" software companies when huge projects ship many months later, than was expected and with much lower quality, than was needed? The big bosses request "raising the bar higher", plan more thoroughly and estimate more carefully. The irony is again in that it is already the current practice: there is no project manager, who isn't trying to get as good estimations as possible.

Unfortunately the creation of a new software product is a complex process. The behavior of a complex system cannot be predicted by studying all the details in advance. Rigorous following the process might help when you develop the tenth information system for yet another book shop, but won't help when you create the brand new functionality.

Be very careful, if the only result of the failure investigation is the decision to "really" follow the already existing process. It might be a good idea, but it might also be just a bad process. Even if it is good it might be more useful to study why the process hasn't been followed.

Did it happen to you? Was it so, that when the reasons of a failure haven't been understood, the boss simply requested the bigger soldier-like discipline? And did it work?

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