During lunchtime yesterday I expressed my disgust at some people’s behaviour – it seemed like they were more interested in not getting blamed, rather than ensuring that the end result was a success. I’m the first to admit that I’m (regrettably) not always productive and that I often let personal interests guide myself, but I try to prioritize: the most important thing is to Get the Stuff Done(TM) regardless of who receives the most credit. Or rather: regardless of who receives the less amount of critique. I thought about specifying negative critique, but I think I’ll leave it like that. Of course I hate making errors, but everyone makes them. Seriously. You do too. So it’s not a big thing in the long run.

At this point I have three separate things that I’d like to rant about, and in an attempt to break off from the normal discourse in blogs I’ll sum them up here:

1. The original topic: what happened after I had expressed said disgust? Where was I going with that?
2. Making mistakes is human, but it’s not really like me to make an understanding and helpful comment like that without attempting to apply a twist. Of course I have something else to add.
3. This style of writing: I could easily have written a normal monologue where I slowly shifted between these topics, but instead I chose to make the reader aware of my plans. Why?

For fun (no, that’s not the answer to why; this sentence continues) I’ll number the paragraphs below so that you can skip to your desired topic at a quick glance. Just like these go-to-page-or-chapter-depending-on-what-kind adventure books we all read as toddlers!

1. The response I received to my disgust was a thought-provoking question: “Don’t you think that your point of view is pretty Swedish?” Possibly; and I hadn’t considered that. Many different nationalities were involved with the issue I was discussing – Swedes, French, Dutch, Arabs (sorry – I don’t know the term for people from UAE) and so on – and it just might be the case that I was too critical since my values and expectations are wildly different.

2. To be human is to err. I guess I want to be non-human then. Unhuman. De-humanized. You get the point. I hate making mistakes; I’m getting better at ignoring them, but I still feel slightly panicky when I think of mistakes I made earlier in life. As an extreme example: I nagged my mom into buying me a plastic toy when I was six years old, and when I got home I realized how infantile my nagging had been – the toy wasn’t important enough and didn’t give me pleasure enough to warrant my annoying my mom. The shame of that realization still burns. It’s one thing to say that everyone should own up to their mistakes, but making them - and admitting to it - can be very painful.

3. For fun.

4. Where the hell did 4 come from? Let’s just say that it’s vaguely relevant to point 1 above. I read an article called The Essential Unified Process: New Life for the Unified Process today, and I felt…uninspired by it. Maybe cynical, even. Elaborate processes – even ones that try to simplify and be agile – feel so pointless: it’s just an attempt to rationalize something too large - too complex. Consider point 1 above: processes are often conceived by people of one nationality…and then they’re adopted (and adapted, thankfully) by people of other nationalities. But people have different sets of values. Using a single management process for everyone is like trying to [insert vulgar verb phrase] with [insert suitably humorous noun phrase].

5. I really didn’t want to make yet another numbered point, but symmetry requires it since I felt like making a new paragraph here. After my rant in 4 I guess I ought to conclude that the article was pretty interesting after all. Agility and the Unified Process is a big step forward from stagnant older processes, and if the EUP indeed moves toward being as flexible and extensible as the article describes, it sounds like yet another step in the right direction. Processes can never be perfect due to individual variations, but I guess that they can be better or worse tools for making educated approximations. I’m still not a happy cynic, though. I work differently from my co-workers. Swedes work differently from Finns. Making things agile or test-driven or xtreme or [insert new buzzword] is definitely no solution to the variations.

6. I think I need to cook some dinner before I get even grumpier.

245. It’s pitch black. You were eaten by grue. Go to section 1.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.