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I've been thinking about agile / lightweight methods ever since I first was exposed to eXtreme Programming (XP) back in 2002. Before that I tended to use no real development methodology. XP was interesting but it seemd to solve a problem in management by taking away the manager. It works, but it doesn't solve the problems that occur at that higher level. In some ways, XP is a fairly naive way of looking at organizations.
What strikes me is that what Cockburn seems to be doing in his work is to say that different levels of work have different timespans and you can't know much about the WorkX when it is more than 2×TimespanX out. So, you aren't going to know a whole lot about a task at Stratum I (1 wk - 3 months) when the task is out more than six months. You can know something about this timespan for the task, and then the next task of the same timespan, but not that much out farther.
Of course, some work is predictable. For a variety of social reasons that I won't go into here, most software development in commercial organizations is not.
I can, however, know a great deal about a StrII task (timespan of 3 months - 1 year) that is 16 months out because it falls within the 2×TimespanX rule. (E.g., a development task with a timespan of 9 months can be reasonable predicted and managed out 18 months but not the third iteration. The second iteration isn't really tightly controlled, either.)
What XP and other Agile methods tried to do was to make the development work be understandable at a low level. Most actual coding is a Str1 job, with a timespan of discretion somewhere between one week and three months. But project managers stuck in PMI's unrealistic Body of Knowledge think that they can plan and control the work at Str1 even a year out. You can't.
What Agile Methods are really doing is forcing Str1 work to be done at Str1 timespans, with accompanying risk levels further out.
What its practioners often miss is that there are additional levels of knowing, different levels of abstraction, that can be known farther out because tasks at that level have longer timespans. Some work shouldn't be done in two-week timeboxes. Most development should be done in something like two week timeboxes so that we can check the work.
Other elements of Agile Methods seem to simply be taking software development out of the domain of project management (that evil field) and back into general operations work. It's killing the PMI model by going towards a model of constant management. For the most part, there is little reason to work software in projects since 80% of all development is actually done during the maintenance phase and not in construction. Project management has actually hurt the industry by convincing managers that they are constructing software, like you would be putting together a car.
It's more like farming or husbandry most of the time. You don't architect solutions: you herd them and something is always going wrong. The work is to handle the day-to-day issues while still looking into the farther future to develop the herd into a stronger, more resistant group to cope with unexpected environmental shifts.
Most software development should indeed be done in tight timeboxes of less than 3 months. This allows the work to be done at Str1. It also means that what most people call the development manager or project manager for that level of work would become simply a Foreman. They would be constantly working on these tightly defined timeboxes with limited functionality added. This forces us to manage the work at the right level.
That means that the next level has to truly be at Str2 to manage the work and more importantly provide context.
There's a problem here as we go up. Ernst & Young's folks, in an article in Communications or Computer, aruged that the business of many firms nowadays is actually software. Many firms get all of their competitive value by the creation and management of their software to perform certain things. Some firms spend the vast bulk of their operations money on software creation and maintenance.
This means that internal development should not be outsourced for these companies and that it should be managed as if it were the main thing that they do. C-level executives would then be setting context for the operations. Which they usually aren't.
Agile Methods force development groups to manage work at the right level. The problem with them is that they often ignore the longer timespan tasks because they can't see them.
Anyway, a brief start at my thinking on this.
J, in a comment on a recent post, raised a point I discussed recently about the problems of hospitality, this time in dealing with the church serving the mentally ill:
2. "Even so, we should be able to take in one crazy person per congregation."
Another interesting thought. I agree, but with some caveats. Most notably, we need to take steps to ensure we don't put anyone in harms way by taking in the psychotics. To have one's wife or children harmed or endangered is not required to display God's Love.
I'll just come out and say this: I'm not so sure. I'm beginning to wonder if living out the Gospel of Jesus Christ doesn't by it's very nature put our children at risk.
Last fall, my young friend (The Kid) told me that I should think about calling it a day and going and living with the poor. I wasn't so sure about that idea, but as I reflected on it I realised that he didn't understand: we were poor. I mean, from a strict income level issue, we're dirt poor. Even without kids we live below the poverty line here.
And it struck me that I do live with the poor, if by "live with the poor" you mean share my life with people who have no money. I think that by "the poor" he means "traditionally disadvantaged persons who have no social capital and are unlikely to ever have jobs that pay well", which I would disagree with (most people can learn to hold down jobs, as Opportunity Enterprises shows) but we all have our own definitions. I treat "poor" to mean "no money" and not "no class". As my mother grew up hearing from her mother, just because we're poor doesn't mean that we have to be White Trash.
But let me tell you: living with the downtrodden has its drawbacks.
Lisa Deam has written a wonderful article on finding the grace of Christ in her experience of living with a port-wine birthmark on her face, published in the Trinity 2006 edition of The Cresset. Highly recommended.
In my memory, I am in seventh grade, sitting in my science class next to a boy I like. The boy sits to my right. This is good, because my right side is definitely my best. At one point during the hour I go to the front of the room to collect an assignment. As I walk back to my desk, I am facing the boy from the other direction. That's not so good, because it means that he's seen the left side of my face. Now he's looking into my eyes. He's asking me a question, but he doesn't use words. Instead, he takes his index finger and traces a pattern down the side of his own face.
"It's a birthmark," I say, in answer to what he obviously wants to know. Ikeep my voice level and my eyes down, like a virtuous young woman from the Middle Ages.
"Oh," he said. "I thought it was a rash or that maybe you got burned."
I sit down, and I don't say anything else. What else is there to say? But I remember. Mostly, I remember the way my classmate's finger moved down the side of his face, as if tracing the pathway for a coursing tear. And I remember feeling accused. In my mind, the boy's slender finger grows long and bony, and he points it at me in a gesture of horrified discovery of what I really am: a marked woman.
The complete article is at the Cresset site:
Lisa Deam's "stigm(at)a: facing the mirror of the wounds of Christ"
Stories engage listeners because a person — a hero — is at their center. We identify with the heroes of stories because each of us is the hero of our own story, trying to overcome the external and internal obstacles that stand between us and our goals. They also engage because they leave room for interpretation and reimagining. The point or moral of a story is not equal to the story itself. In fact, explaining a story can kill it, reducing story to statement. This is not to say that a story means whatever a listener chooses. If that were true, stories would have no power to pass on the values, thoughts, and feelings of cultures and organizaitons; they would not communicate. Academics who favor deconstructionism argue that thi is exactly the case, but the experienc of cultures and individuals over many thousands of years proves them wrong. Good stories are flexible and suggestive, they provide opportunities for interpretation and response, but only within a range of meaning the story establishes. The fact that they do not have one simple point does not imply that they can mean anything at all. An employee who interprets a story about the boss firing someone who questions his judgment to mean that the boss welcomes criticism will soon discover that deconstruction works better in theory than practice.
[Cohen & Prusak, 2001. In Good Company. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Pp. 117-118.
I've always believed, like Sokol, that the ideas of the postmoderns made sense if taken more subtlely than postmoderns want. Audiences do indeed co-create an experience, the meaning, a story with the storyteller. Lit Crit folks are known as those who can't tell stories. Or at least don't. Maybe that's why they need to deconstruct them.
I finally took the advice of J, who in a comment earlier suggested that I take the "Are You Emergent?" quiz.
It turns out I'm supposedly "Neo-Orthodox" with heavy "Reformed Evangelical" influences. My Emergent score was fourth, after Holiness/Wesleyan. Liberalism, whether classical or new, bottomed by list.
You are neo-orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God's most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology. The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth.
I would say that this is at least accurate in that I believe that Christianity is all about Christ and that He is The Word of God, the Bible being simply "words about the word" (with a nod to Ole Anthony [I may think he's heretical at times but he still has some interesting things to say]). And, in the end, I am suspicious of my inner experience and require external disconfirmation of the null hypothesis, which probably says as much as anything about me being growing out of the Enlightenment Project. Besides, I know that I can create a profound spiritual experience with the God Helmet.
(Al, a frequent poster here, is from the town that the God Helmet lives in. Interesting....)
J also suggested the "You Might Be Emerging If...." post at the New Pantagruel. (Which is run by the brother of a friend.) Most of the Emergent worship style has always seemed like it's trying too hard and with very little history. Since most of them come out of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist world, a world with very little sacred ritual and almost no real depth of history, it's probably natural that they would be attracted to this type of thing. And I'm all for a sacred-y space: art has a place, as does artfulness. And the absence of decoration can be artful. Or not. Everything is a balance and you have to be able to live in the space.
Besides, I did what would now be called Emergent 15 years ago and I'm over it. Right now I'd say that I'm post-Fundamentalist, post-Evangelical, post-Reformed, post-Emergent, post-Postmodern and looking for the Real Deal. So Neo-Orthodox, as someone who lives in a particular tradition, fits me well.
I think that the picture is of Karl Barth. But I really don't know.
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Last year, the staff at the Church of PowerPoint asked me to put together our combination Maundy Thursday and Good Friday service. I sat down with the pastor for an hour and talked over something. I knew that I wanted to unflinchingly look at a dead Jesus. Not a "going to rise again" Jesus. A dead Jesus. Cold, dead, buried. I wanted to stare into Friday, stare into what the world is like for those who do not know the resurrection of their dead souls.
So I wrote a radio play of sorts. It's below.
I had some limitations. It had to be thrown together quickly. I wanted to use men and women, which meant picking up Mary Magdelene. I had only certain people who could and would do the readings. I needed to make the very un-sacred space of the church offices (think really bad 1970s insurance firm with no money) fit a service. I wanted to connect with our traditions so I used the tennebrae format of extinguishing candles.
So, I put together a play that would be read mostly, acted out only to extinguish candles. I used some music from John Hunt, a marvelous song-writer here in NW Indiana. He wrote "The Road to Golgotha", and we used it. It fit my service perfectly. His wife had complained about it because it wasn't hopeful enough. It's a definitely about Jesus dying. Beautiful, haunting. I still hear it. Too bad the music part isn't available.
This is what we did.
I can't say whether or not we were successful. We wanted to start Easter Sunday with Mary running in, with James and John on the platform chatting. Her yelling about Jesus, about an empty tomb. And them all tearing out the side door.
I'd say the aftermath but it seems pretentious. It did its job. We felt Friday.
The Bible readings are taken from The Message because it was unexpected. "Don't play games with me, Judas!"
This piece is not covered by the Creative Commons License. Reuse or performance requires permission from Daybreak Community Church.
"Deserting Jesus At His Death: A Service for Maundy Thursday / Good Friday" (PDF)
My wife and I both have fairly old equipment. My old Dell Inspiron 5000 died after five years and more than its share of wear and tear in the course and extremely heavy use. I moved to a friend's old HP N5425, a consumer boat anchor from about 2002.
But I'm running Windows XP on that machine while L's box ran Windows ME. With Microsoft's announcement that they were going to stop supporting that OS, along with Windows 98, I had to finally make a decision about upgrading her to XP or just biting the bullet and moving to a Debian-based distribution.
Being only minimally employed in this decade, I went with the cheap but labor-intensive way. This is my record of some of my struggles.
I just found out that Hugh C. Thompson, Jr., the Warrant Officer who saved the last surviving villagers of the hamlet of My Lai in the village of Son My from being murdered by other officers and soldiers of the US Army, died earlier this year. Upon seeing Capt. Ernest Medina shooting the Vietnamese whom he and his team had marked for medical aid, Thompson and his crew put their helicopter between the other soldiers and the remaining villagers. He threatened open fire on them if they did not stand down from the massacre.
Would you have done the same? He ended up continuing the dangerous duty, being shot down five times, the last breaking his back. Lt. Calley, the only person involved in the massacre or its command chain to be convicted, was freed after three years of house arrest and now lives in Georgia where he is a jeweler. Capt. Medina was not convicted, although tried.
The articles about My Lai, like those about abuses in any time, often leave you thinking, "How bad can it really have been?" To get the full story, look at the photographs or read what the soldiers told the Army investigators.
Thompson's passing was worth noting.
"I wish I was a big enough man to say I forgive them, but I swear to God, I can't."
So, you have asked me what I did when I was drowning, when I fell and saw no light. Like you have, you say.
It is a good question. For this is a good time for you to learn new things. And to learn a new thing is to be alive, to live as an image of the Increate, as a glove is the image of a hand.
Here we find something hard. You hold onto these things, things that we will not keep for all is but grass. Love deeply and do not hold them. A paradox, I suppose. We give up needing to live in the depths of desire, a desire finding its true joy in Him.
So, what then?
Of course, I'm not an elder so it wasn't a sermon. It was just a "reflection" or "devotion" where one would normally find a sermon.
Over at the PowerPoint Church we had our annual church picnic over at Kirchoff Park. We pretty much just get together for a short service in the heat and then have burgers and hot dogs along with whatever anyone brings. It beats what we used to do, which was a gigantic affair over at the Fairgrounds Park where we blew burned wads of cash for no good effect. The picnic is a much better idea.