Agile Development and the Division of Labor

The Puzzle

• Essay by Leonard Read: "I, Pencil."
• Pencil "ingredients": cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, glue, etc.
• Adam Smith's pin factory: 10 workers make 48,000 pins per day. A single worker could "scarce" produce 10 or 20. So we have a productivity increase of 50x.
• In any case, we seem to be reversing this process with Agile / Lean / DevOps.
  Why? What does it mean?
• A clue: There was always someone who organized the factory, who, in the first place, decided to make pins: the entrepreneur.
• Entrepreneur: one who is alert to opportunities for improving the way things are currently done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The extreme division of labor during much of the 20^th century was a temporary thing.

• Workers were discouraged from thinking about the overall production process.
• "Keep your head down and do your own job."
• Humans were, in essence, turned into machines on the assembly line.
• Marx: the worker is alienated from his product.
• Smith:
  "In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible to become for a human creature to become."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The lure of central planning.

• A form of "central planning" prevailed: a few expert engineers/managers were the only ones who were supposed to think about the entire process and product.
• Taylorism: "Taylorism was based on trying to replace the implicit knowledge of the workmen with mass production methods developed, planned, monitored, and controlled by managers. 'Under scientific management,' [Taylor] wrote, 'the managers assume... the burden of gathering together all the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae... Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the laws of science.' -- Jerry Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics, pp.32-33.
• General Motors: "The managerial 'superstructure which organizes and directs production... draws all possible brainpower away from the shop; everything is centered in the planning and schedule and design departments.'" -- Daniel Bell, quoted in Muller, p. 33
• The waterfall model was an attempt to duplicate this condition for software development: everything was centered on the analysts: the coders just had to turn it into COBOL!
• A problem with central planning: F. A. Hayek's "Use of Knowledge in Society": each person is an "expert" on their own particular circumstances of time and place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DevOps practices are a different way of working, based on the different demands of the 21^st century.

• DevOps represents a reincarnation of "craft work."
• A reincarnation, because it is craft work with a new layer of automation available.
• The expert craftsperson understands the roles of the other experts with whom they interact.
• "Get all workers deeply involved in analyzing feedback from the market and rapidly figuring out how to act on that feedback." -- Mary Poppendieck
• Software-controlled machines can take the place of "human machines."
• People re-take their rightful place: rational animals.
• Every employee acts as an entrepreneur.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is the role of the "DevOps toolchain" in this new way of working?

• The mechanical, repetitive tasks the assembly-line worker performed in the 20th century must be automated! (And automation is documentation!)
• Testers cannot test successfully unless they are part of the production process from day one: thus, continuous testing.
• Operations cannot successfully deploy constantly evolving products unless deployment itself becomes a software product capable of swiftly evolving: thus, software as infrastructure.
• The "business" stakeholders in the product can't ensure it is meeting business needs unless they are continually engaged: thus continual interaction between the engineers and the "business people."
• Why is "business" in scare quotes above?
  "We are not developing software. We are doing something larger and software is just part of the solution." -- Tom Poppendieck
• How new versions of a piece of software impact the end users cannot be determined without continual feedback from those users, thus:
• Incremental development, which means developers work on small batches and can easily change course based on feedback;
• Continuous deployment, allowing users to comment on the work done in those small batches; and
• Continuous monitoring, so that problems using the product become known right away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How can we balance the need for specialists with the DevOps demand to "break down silos"?

• An agile enterprise needs to hire people with broad understanding of various technologies and how they forward the goals of the enterprise.
• To a great extent, the need for specialization, and thus the division of labor, has been pushed into the software.
• Nevertheless, we still are coping with extremely complex technologies, and we will need people who understand them in great depth!
• So we need people with:
  a) a specialty; but who are also
  b) entrepreneurs.
• A story of the need for "generalizing specialists": adding exchanges to a price feed.