The Shorter Timescale

I’m reading a very scary book right now: Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates. It’s a funny and informative look at how philosophers and religious thinkers deal with death. I don’t want to be a spoiler but the basic message of the book is that most people live in denial of their own mortality and most philosophers are trying to wake them up. Them being us.

This is especially true in software development. Any experienced engineer looking at a 6-12 month project plan will tell you there is a lot of denial going on. I don’t want to sound overly melodramatic but the 3rd Principle from the Agile Manifesto…

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

…is all about waking up and getting out of denial.

I covered the idea of working software in a previous blog post but “preference to the shorter timescale” idea deserves some focused attention all on it’s own.

If you live life to a Tim McGraw sound track then you don’t waste a lot of time on planning or doing things that are simply not going to happen. The idea of a preference for shorter timescales come from the principle that risk grows with distance into the future.

This principle doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream big! I’ve met many engineers who tell me “Agile is only for minor tweaks, not big initiatives.” (No I won’t name names but I dare you guys to a blog war!) Your backlog should be as big as forever. It’s just that you plan and sprint for what you can achieve as a human mortal. Zeus and Hera can execute a 12 month plan with a waterfall process–Agile is not for immortals.

I like 2 week sprints (with one week of planning in between) for three reasons:

1. It’s been my experience that (most) human mortals only have vague capacities for planning and managing large chunks of future time. Today, tomorrow, Next week are   cool. We live in a bubble of now that trails 1-2 weeks behind and runs 1-2 weeks ahead.
2. Engineers (and artists) are mostly monochrons. (Almost everyone else tend to be polychrons.) It’s part of the self selection process that leads people down the road of life to end up either alone in front of a computer (or piano or canvas) or in a group running around the planet making noise. Maybe it’s all due to Asperger’s Syndrome but the creative process seems to require that we focus on doing one thing at a time for a fixed period of time in a repeatable cycle.
3. Engineers (and artists) get lost in their work (the music of the spheres as it were) and lose track of time. Short sprints mean they can’t go too far astray before they check in with home base! Once an brilliant engineer told me it took a month to fix an ad server bug because he first had to rewrite Math.c. Good thing I checked in when I did or he might have rewritten all of UNIX!

So if we end up working together I will ask you to think in short increments that give us plenty of time to capitalize on the future 🙂