I spoke with Ahmed Sidky today and his feelings about my open letter advocating for an Agile Fringe. Ahmed feels some folks in the community are misinterpreting my remarks [in the paragraph below] to his detriment. So I feel some clarification is in order.

I find Ahmed's attitude to be academic and unrealistic. It relies on the process and removes focus from the people. His argument that all the submissions for Breaking Acts in 2008 could have been accommodated on other stages might be valid in theory but in practice they would never have been accepted. In the agile community we should know better than this. We value individuals and their interactions more than we value processes and tools. Ahmed is asking me to put my faith in the review process and the online review tool. I prefer to put my faith in human nature. [...]

First let me state that Ahmed has been a keen innovator in our field and a true supporter of innovation and protector of those ideas. He was involved in our agile model evolution discussions at Agile 2008. He truly understood and supported the idea that we needed a more expansive and scientific definition of our agile values that would allow us to recognize new innovative practices as aligned to our underlying agile values. I have every faith that Ahmed wants to see innovation in our community and that it should be present at the Agile 2009 conference.

So moving on to my remarks about people versuses process and tools. These remarks were prompted by this paragraph from a private email from Ahmed to me, Olav Maassen (and others.) I am reprinting this with Ahmed's permission.

I really have a lot faith in our peers that they can spot innovation when they see it. If you look at committees that are in place for each stage - you will see that these are competent professionals who I don't believe have hidden [...] agendas. I believe that if a group of 10 of our peers look at a submission and say it is not suitable for the conference - then that means quite a bit to me. Why would I think that only those handling the Breaking acts stage could "spot" innovation.

There are really two established interpretations of the Agile Manifesto statement that we value "Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools."

There is a simplistic interpretation. It is the interpretation that we simply must have good craftsmen and that tacit knowledge transfer will always work best. I feel this is an elitist interpretation. It's exclusive in nature and suggests that only truly great craftsmen (developers) are welcome in the community. It also completely fails to scale beyond teams of 6 to 12. This view outlived its usefulness years ago. Applying the benefits of agile development to enterprise scale problems has been an active topic in the community for 6 years and it simply isn't possible for every IT worker in every enterprise to be a truly great performer.

A second more useful interpretation is that individuals implies psychology and that interactions implies sociology. In other words, we believe that effects of psychology and sociology are much stronger than the effects of processes or tools in determining an outcome, and hence, processes and tools must be designed to accommodate human nature and work with, rather than against, recognized psychological and sociological effects. This is largerly the work we have been doing for the past decade. We've been throwing out old development processes and tools that denied the fundamental human nature of our work and did not adequately reflect the psychology and sociology involved and replacing them with more human friendly processes and tools. Feature Driven Development embraced the idea that we need a solution for large teams and adapt to the psychology of the people on the team. Jeff De Luca's 1st law, "It's 80% Psychology, and 20% Technology."

While I have no doubt that Ahmed has a deep belief in people and their ability to do the right thing, I find his confidence in the correct outcome unrealistic. Ahmed believes that the people will overcome the process and tools (in this case the announced program and the submission and review system) that are by their nature designed to solicit submissions for the topics named in the announced stages, and uses a popular democracy mechanism (albeit an open flavor) to select the winners. He asked the stage producers and reviewers on a conference call recently, to watch out for innovative ideas and to protect and support them.

I have two problems with this. The first is that the system is designed not to encourage submissions about topics not listed in the announced program. Psychologically and sociologically there is nothing in the announced program to encourage submissions on other topics or dissenting viewpoints. The second is that while the reviewers may have heard Ahmed, understood him, and value his message, they will not as a group be able to advocate for and protect the innovative, or dissenting ideas that compete against other submissions that fit nicely with the envisaged stage. Again it is simply the natural effect of the psychology and sociology designed into the system. The popular democracy will tend the outcome to the safe middle ground.

Ahmed and I have agreed to disagree over our opinion on this.

Meanwhile, Ahmed is worried that folks in the community have formed the opinion that he doesn't understand the Agile Manifesto and the principles that our community is formed around. If this is true, then I apologize for seeding that opinion. I am quite convinced that Ahmed does "get it" and that he has a valuable part to play in our community. I look forward to working with him on it in future. If I have a criticism it is simply that I feel he is putting too much faith in people. Too much faith that they will do the right thing and follow the direction that was provided as a bandaid because the Breaking Acts stage was dropped from the program.

[I hope that clears this up. It's very difficult to articulate. Meanwhile, Ahmed has a proposal he is circulating that may lead to a satisfactory resolution of the matter. I want to give him the space and time to work this and I am confident of a satisfactory outcome.] Technorati tag: Agile+2009, Agile+Chicago, Agile+Alliance, David+Anderson, Ahmed+Sidky