You realize, of course, that the ongoing vicious internecine battles over agile, XP, SAFe, Scrum, waterfall, and all the rest is bold and clear evidence for all to see that we never have and still don’t know how to build software. 1
And because these battles continue, and morph, and appear to change without ever actually changing is further proof that we never have and still don’t even know what the problem is, or where we might look to find a solution. 2
The narrow, qualified, problematic success of open source is one of the few lights in the darkness, and yet few people seem to gain any useful insight from it. 3
Some claim open source will solve all of our problems, when it clearly doesn’t and clearly won’t. 4
Every other universe of creation has a well-established discipline for creating appropriate products that satisfy externally imposed contexts. But not software. We still build it the way an artist paints a canvas. A bad artist who’s 11-years-old. 5
The structure of most development organizations is dictated by the (flawed) assumptions of upper management, which are rigidly upheld by the (flawed) assumptions of the VC community. 6
And the practitioners, who are holding the shit end of the stick, are forced to perform a dance that they know from experience cannot and will not work, but they do it anyway because paycheck. 7
And each shop does some slight variant, and each variant has some successes and some failures, and each practitioners extrapolates from his or her experience whether or not that variant works or not. 8
But the one overarching truth is that none of these methods work very well, even when they are working at their best. And everybody just seems to think that this is normal for creating tech products. 9
The communities of designers still find it easier to give managers what they ask for rather than what is needed. Ditto communities of developers. The two communities then point fingers at each other because both are floundering. 9
Grrrr.
