6 ms·

A Proposal for an Antifragile Software Manifesto

67 points by jhrobert 10y ago

danielvf 10y ago
"We value reliable software", is nice, but everyone values that. But if you said "We value reliable software over meeting deadlines", then you'd actually have said something. The power of the Agile Manifesto was that it clearly identified tradeoffs they were willing to make.
- kazinator 10y ago
  They try to prioritize their principles, but they are vague. Let's see: > Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer by building a non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive system Okay, firstly, what is that? And secondly, does it serve the customer if those are not the customer's requirements? What if I don't want a "self adaptive" system, whatever that is? It could be bad: self-adaptive software keeps some global state somewhere and doesn't quite ever do the same thing twice. If I require something that produces exactly the same output every time I feed it a given input, then I'm ill-served as a customer if I'm handed some self-adaptive contraption.
  - edocecrous 10y ago
    > what is that? A collection of popular buzz-words in contemporary software engineering research. > And secondly, does it serve the customer if those are not the customer's requirements? These are never any customer's requirements. Not a sane customer, at least. Instead, they are (conjectured, probably correctly, to be) generalizations of sufficiently many customers' requirements. But you're correct -- most customers don't want or need any of those things (except non-linearity. But every piece of software everywhere has this spades.)
    - matt4077 10y ago
      Or you could read the book. I haven't (summer reading list, again). But it's got a 20-page bibliography, and appendices with all sorts of greek letters that define, well, a lot. I think. The Black Swan was also by Taleb and probably the most influential finance book of the last 20 years, plus a great read for anybody thinking in 'systems'. It'd give the idea the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes words have no meaning, sometimes it takes some work.
      - edocecrous 10y ago
        The parent didn't ask what antifragile means. The parent asked what non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive means, especially when taken as requirements for a software system. Reading Taleb's book to answer that question is probably a lot like trying to extract evolved dogma out of a religious text because each of those words has taken on a life and meaning of their own in SE literature. You can probably eventually get close, but you're better off just reading a few SE papers on those topics and inferring the authors' intended meaning.
      - kazinator 10y ago
        A URL to a git repo showing the non-linear, self-adaptive piece of software would be more effective.
    - the_af 10y ago
      I agree they seem like buzz-words, but not from software engineering research. They look entreprisey or startup friendly buzz-words to me.
- shoo 10y ago
  > if you said "We value reliable software over meeting deadlines", then you'd actually have said something. This reminds me of a Jamie Zawinski quote from the book "Coders at Work": > [...] Are you trying to write good software or are you > trying to be done by next week? You can't do both. One > of the jokes we made at Netscape a lot was, "We're > absolutely 100 percent committed to quality. We're going > to ship the highest-quality product we can on March 31st."
keithnz 10y ago
I think a manifesto with a lot of buzzwords ends up being quite fragile.
- kazinator 10y ago
  I suspect you might not be applying the right ontology to fully elaborate the reification of the concept.
- zeckalpha 10y ago
  They address that in the article. This is a spitball proposal.
jimjimjim 10y ago
This will be difficult to do in text (imagine a triangle): Quality Time Cost Right, which one is more important? and more importantly who gets to decide which one is more important?
- kazinator 10y ago
  It can't be quality because "[e]rrors are the primary source of an antifragile system", quoting from the paper directly.
- andrewprock 10y ago
  Honestly, I would love it if anyone could make the decision at all. Usually it's "I want all three".
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Yep, managers seem to think the triangle can be overcome with enough money/prowess/brute force.
    - nine_k 10y ago
      Money in many cases can buy you (some) time.
    - myrion 10y ago
      Well, if they're willing to invest money, then they've chosen, no? Cost is not important, but timeliness and quality are.
      - dimino 10y ago
        Cost is always important, everyone has the price at which they're no longer comfortable.
- dstroot 10y ago
  The triangle is "cheap", "fast", and "highly available". Pick any two...
jmspring 10y ago
As with any manifesto, words, interpretation, and practice are where they fail. I've been through the Agile/Scrum classes, yeah, great. Does management buy in, despite professing such? Yeah, not so great. Unfortunately, for me, whenever I see the word "manifesto" in relation to computers, this is the one I immediately remember... http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
- Udik 10y ago
  And this is the one I remember instead: http://programming-motherfucker.com http://programming-motherfucker.com
  - soft_dev_person 10y ago
    After reading that, the world is now cyan. Thanks.
kapitalx 10y ago
Chaos engineering falls in this category: http://principlesofchaos.org/ http://principlesofchaos.org/
SkyMarshal 10y ago
Antifragile refers to a property in which a system does not just resist breaking down under disorder and stressors (robust), but gains/learns/becomes stronger. A good example is how bones heal back stronger where they were broken. While we are currently able to build self-healing systems of a sort, fault-tolerant Erlang systems being a good example, it doesn't seem we can build systems that are truly antifragile on their own, that would require strong AI. Otherwise, humans monitoring and intervention are required to improve systems under duress. This manifesto does include "team" and "organization" to account for that, but a true autonomous antifragile system is a ways off.
- rjeli 10y ago
  Software such as fail2ban that bans harmful IPs and spam filters that learn over time would qualify as antifragile. I can't think of anything at the system security level.
- ctvo 10y ago
  Your bone example isn't accurate (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/health/19really.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/health/19really.html). The example used in the book are muscles (stress -> breakdown -> creating stronger muscles)
  - sitkack 10y ago
    Maybe more accurately, bones subject to survivable progressively more intense stresses are stronger. It would be like an autoscaling algorithm under increasing loads (not delta function loads).
- Chris2048 10y ago
  I think a better example is balancing pendulums. They stay upright under random movement, but fall when things go still...
nikolay 10y ago
When in 2009 I was calling it "Fragile," not "Agile," people were laughing at me as yet again I wasn't politically correct!
- Gonzih 10y ago
  I don't think it's mainly about agile. There is plenty of good examples of fragile OSS out there that has nothing to do with agile. Entire npm ecosystem is very good example.
  - nikolay 10y ago
    It's not only about Agile, but incremental development is always detrimental especially for complex projects. Also, most companies apply some ghetto version of Scrum, most don't even know what SOS (Scum of Scrums) is, pick and treat the Scrum Master incorrectly, don't even do Planning Poker, don't use Epics at all, don't define stories right, don't use burndown charts at all, etc. In most cases, I see Scrum as an eyewash for the business. It's a pseudo-scientific approach to prove to business we've done something this week, and a solid excuse for missing deadlines, etc.
    - matthewmacleod 10y ago
      It's not only about Agile, but incremental development is always detrimental especially for complex projects I really have to dispute that. First, it's not really clear what you mean by "detrimental" - is that to software quality, or development schedule, or suitability? Or all of them, or others? Agile is very clear about the trade-offs - working products being more important than documentation for example, or responding to change over following plans. Second, I don't think it's true. I've directly observed, in multiple organisations, that agile development is perfectly capable of delivering good systems on-budget and on-schedule. If anything, it's especially good for complex systems, which are those most likely to require flexibility and have hidden requirements. I also dispute the idea that "ghetto Scrum" is invalid. Development processes should be tailored to the requirements of the product, organisation and team. Not every team needs epics or planning poker or scrum of scrums, and it's totally valid to take some of the ideas of scrum and apply them to your own development process without having to buy the whole thing. I consistently see agile development hand waved away with this argument that it doesn't work because there are companies which do it badly, and it's baffling to me.
jcbrand 10y ago
Interesting that the concept of Antifragility is gaining traction with regards to software. Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post "Antifragile Software Ecosystems" that discusses how IMO antifragility relates to how software is developed. https://opkode.com/blog/2014/01/14/antifragile-software-ecosystems/ https://opkode.com/blog/2014/01/14/antifragile-software-ecos...
devishard 10y ago
TL;DR: 1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer by building a non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive system. 2. We welcome changing scenarios where unexpected events (Black Swans) are the real paradigm shifting entities. 3. We deliver assuring embedded and adaptive fault tolerance. 4. All stakeholders, and the broader environment, lead the antifragile organization. 5. Build antifragile projects around motivated, skilled and open minded people. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. 6. The most efficient and effective method of building an antifragile organization is building on honest, open and transparent communication. 7. Continuous exposure to faults and automatic fixing is the primary measure. 8. An antifragile organization promotes a context aware environment. The stakeholders should be able to maintain a system indefinitely. 9. Continuous attention to technical excellence, reality, redundancy. 10. Error loving - the art of learning to be antifragile – is essential. 11. Antifragile architectures emerge from self – organizing, context aware teams. 12. At regular intervals, the developing team reflects about the context situation, on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
mk89 10y ago
Why do people still keep writing Manifestos in 2016? I thought it was evident they don't work out - or that they get "abused" as political opinions. We don't need Manifestos, we need people who think about each situation and problem differently, basing their thoughts on experience, knowledge, and communication. You can write all the s* you want, but you won't get that thanks to 10 lines - which will be always ambiguous and misinterpreted, then what? Will you write another manifesto? We need experience, we need to learn, we need to improve. You literally need to fail to get any improvement. And companies need to keep their people, they need to invest in people, instead of relying on a bunch of buzzwords or manifestos to prove themselves "cool" and up-to-date. Stop doing that. Make a step back, give your people time to think, talk to them, and give them the right resources.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  We may need those things, but it's increasingly clear that we cannot afford them so far as we know. I'm using "afford" widely - if we needed those things and understood that need properly, we'd have them. It's the mythic "$20 bill on the ground" - if it was really there, someone would have picked it up by now. it's no great secret how to write robust and unfragile software. We apparently only lack the will to do it. I've been in spots where we priced a defect, and they still didn't want it fixed.
  - mk89 10y ago
    I have also worked for such companies. It's more common than what you and I think :) However, they cannot afford them because they simply don't want to be the best. Look at those companies who invest in people and give them time to grow/think/be. Their products are above average. Why? When you want to be the best, you simply have no other way than "thinking" and "reasoning". Unless you are just lucky and you get one or two Einstein[s]. But even then, if you don't give such a genius the right environment, he is gonna do his best to get away from you. What you call will I call it attitude towards business. Nowadays we don't write software anymore to make a product last at least 10 years, we build companies to be sold in order to get someone (the founder) rich so that he can invest in new crap to sell. Why should he waste 500-1000 $ when that money can go to a new feature or an "important" bug (coming from a bigger customer)?
bernardlunn 10y ago
I think this is more about tools than process. Specifically tools to assess fragility (bad dependency patterns). You cam only manage what you can measure.
norswap 10y ago
I was kind of hoping for a document that outlined principles to make the engineering process truly antifragile, i.e. one that would thrive under contingencies. Honestly, I have trouble fathoming how such a thing would be even possible in the realm of software. Maybe a system that "learns" previous failures and proactively monitor failure conditions / throttles contended ressources? (Seems quite specific already) And the document surely didn't tell me.
- colbyh 10y ago
  I actually think the former would be more within in the spirit of Taleb's book. software is the result of a complex, sometimes problematic process and not every piece of software needs to be antifragile. when bugs or system outages pop up it isn't the responsibility of the software to fix itself, it's the responsibility of the team behind it.

67 points by jhrobert 10y ago

"We value reliable software", is nice, but everyone values that. But if you said "We value reliable software over meeting deadlines", then you'd actually have said something. The power of the Agile Manifesto was that it clearly identified tradeoffs they were willing to make.

kazinator 10y ago
They try to prioritize their principles, but they are vague. Let's see: > Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer by building a non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive system Okay, firstly, what is that? And secondly, does it serve the customer if those are not the customer's requirements? What if I don't want a "self adaptive" system, whatever that is? It could be bad: self-adaptive software keeps some global state somewhere and doesn't quite ever do the same thing twice. If I require something that produces exactly the same output every time I feed it a given input, then I'm ill-served as a customer if I'm handed some self-adaptive contraption.
- edocecrous 10y ago
  > what is that? A collection of popular buzz-words in contemporary software engineering research. > And secondly, does it serve the customer if those are not the customer's requirements? These are never any customer's requirements. Not a sane customer, at least. Instead, they are (conjectured, probably correctly, to be) generalizations of sufficiently many customers' requirements. But you're correct -- most customers don't want or need any of those things (except non-linearity. But every piece of software everywhere has this spades.)
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Or you could read the book. I haven't (summer reading list, again). But it's got a 20-page bibliography, and appendices with all sorts of greek letters that define, well, a lot. I think. The Black Swan was also by Taleb and probably the most influential finance book of the last 20 years, plus a great read for anybody thinking in 'systems'. It'd give the idea the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes words have no meaning, sometimes it takes some work.
    - edocecrous 10y ago
      The parent didn't ask what antifragile means. The parent asked what non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive means, especially when taken as requirements for a software system. Reading Taleb's book to answer that question is probably a lot like trying to extract evolved dogma out of a religious text because each of those words has taken on a life and meaning of their own in SE literature. You can probably eventually get close, but you're better off just reading a few SE papers on those topics and inferring the authors' intended meaning.
    - kazinator 10y ago
      A URL to a git repo showing the non-linear, self-adaptive piece of software would be more effective.
  - the_af 10y ago
    I agree they seem like buzz-words, but not from software engineering research. They look entreprisey or startup friendly buzz-words to me.
shoo 10y ago
> if you said "We value reliable software over meeting deadlines", then you'd actually have said something. This reminds me of a Jamie Zawinski quote from the book "Coders at Work": > [...] Are you trying to write good software or are you > trying to be done by next week? You can't do both. One > of the jokes we made at Netscape a lot was, "We're > absolutely 100 percent committed to quality. We're going > to ship the highest-quality product we can on March 31st."

keithnz 10y ago

I think a manifesto with a lot of buzzwords ends up being quite fragile.

kazinator 10y ago
I suspect you might not be applying the right ontology to fully elaborate the reification of the concept.
zeckalpha 10y ago
They address that in the article. This is a spitball proposal.

jimjimjim 10y ago

This will be difficult to do in text (imagine a triangle): Quality Time Cost Right, which one is more important? and more importantly who gets to decide which one is more important?

kazinator 10y ago
It can't be quality because "[e]rrors are the primary source of an antifragile system", quoting from the paper directly.
andrewprock 10y ago
Honestly, I would love it if anyone could make the decision at all. Usually it's "I want all three".
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Yep, managers seem to think the triangle can be overcome with enough money/prowess/brute force.
  - nine_k 10y ago
    Money in many cases can buy you (some) time.
  - myrion 10y ago
    Well, if they're willing to invest money, then they've chosen, no? Cost is not important, but timeliness and quality are.
    - dimino 10y ago
      Cost is always important, everyone has the price at which they're no longer comfortable.
dstroot 10y ago
The triangle is "cheap", "fast", and "highly available". Pick any two...

jmspring 10y ago

As with any manifesto, words, interpretation, and practice are where they fail. I've been through the Agile/Scrum classes, yeah, great. Does management buy in, despite professing such? Yeah, not so great. Unfortunately, for me, whenever I see the word "manifesto" in relation to computers, this is the one I immediately remember... http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

Udik 10y ago
And this is the one I remember instead: http://programming-motherfucker.com http://programming-motherfucker.com
- soft_dev_person 10y ago
  After reading that, the world is now cyan. Thanks.

kapitalx 10y ago

Chaos engineering falls in this category: http://principlesofchaos.org/ http://principlesofchaos.org/

SkyMarshal 10y ago

Antifragile refers to a property in which a system does not just resist breaking down under disorder and stressors (robust), but gains/learns/becomes stronger. A good example is how bones heal back stronger where they were broken. While we are currently able to build self-healing systems of a sort, fault-tolerant Erlang systems being a good example, it doesn't seem we can build systems that are truly antifragile on their own, that would require strong AI. Otherwise, humans monitoring and intervention are required to improve systems under duress. This manifesto does include "team" and "organization" to account for that, but a true autonomous antifragile system is a ways off.

rjeli 10y ago
Software such as fail2ban that bans harmful IPs and spam filters that learn over time would qualify as antifragile. I can't think of anything at the system security level.
ctvo 10y ago
Your bone example isn't accurate (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/health/19really.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/health/19really.html). The example used in the book are muscles (stress -> breakdown -> creating stronger muscles)
- sitkack 10y ago
  Maybe more accurately, bones subject to survivable progressively more intense stresses are stronger. It would be like an autoscaling algorithm under increasing loads (not delta function loads).
Chris2048 10y ago
I think a better example is balancing pendulums. They stay upright under random movement, but fall when things go still...

nikolay 10y ago

When in 2009 I was calling it "Fragile," not "Agile," people were laughing at me as yet again I wasn't politically correct!

Gonzih 10y ago
I don't think it's mainly about agile. There is plenty of good examples of fragile OSS out there that has nothing to do with agile. Entire npm ecosystem is very good example.
- nikolay 10y ago
  It's not only about Agile, but incremental development is always detrimental especially for complex projects. Also, most companies apply some ghetto version of Scrum, most don't even know what SOS (Scum of Scrums) is, pick and treat the Scrum Master incorrectly, don't even do Planning Poker, don't use Epics at all, don't define stories right, don't use burndown charts at all, etc. In most cases, I see Scrum as an eyewash for the business. It's a pseudo-scientific approach to prove to business we've done something this week, and a solid excuse for missing deadlines, etc.
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    It's not only about Agile, but incremental development is always detrimental especially for complex projects I really have to dispute that. First, it's not really clear what you mean by "detrimental" - is that to software quality, or development schedule, or suitability? Or all of them, or others? Agile is very clear about the trade-offs - working products being more important than documentation for example, or responding to change over following plans. Second, I don't think it's true. I've directly observed, in multiple organisations, that agile development is perfectly capable of delivering good systems on-budget and on-schedule. If anything, it's especially good for complex systems, which are those most likely to require flexibility and have hidden requirements. I also dispute the idea that "ghetto Scrum" is invalid. Development processes should be tailored to the requirements of the product, organisation and team. Not every team needs epics or planning poker or scrum of scrums, and it's totally valid to take some of the ideas of scrum and apply them to your own development process without having to buy the whole thing. I consistently see agile development hand waved away with this argument that it doesn't work because there are companies which do it badly, and it's baffling to me.

jcbrand 10y ago

Interesting that the concept of Antifragility is gaining traction with regards to software. Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post "Antifragile Software Ecosystems" that discusses how IMO antifragility relates to how software is developed. https://opkode.com/blog/2014/01/14/antifragile-software-ecosystems/ https://opkode.com/blog/2014/01/14/antifragile-software-ecos...

devishard 10y ago

TL;DR: 1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer by building a non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive system. 2. We welcome changing scenarios where unexpected events (Black Swans) are the real paradigm shifting entities. 3. We deliver assuring embedded and adaptive fault tolerance. 4. All stakeholders, and the broader environment, lead the antifragile organization. 5. Build antifragile projects around motivated, skilled and open minded people. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. 6. The most efficient and effective method of building an antifragile organization is building on honest, open and transparent communication. 7. Continuous exposure to faults and automatic fixing is the primary measure. 8. An antifragile organization promotes a context aware environment. The stakeholders should be able to maintain a system indefinitely. 9. Continuous attention to technical excellence, reality, redundancy. 10. Error loving - the art of learning to be antifragile – is essential. 11. Antifragile architectures emerge from self – organizing, context aware teams. 12. At regular intervals, the developing team reflects about the context situation, on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

mk89 10y ago

Why do people still keep writing Manifestos in 2016? I thought it was evident they don't work out - or that they get "abused" as political opinions. We don't need Manifestos, we need people who think about each situation and problem differently, basing their thoughts on experience, knowledge, and communication. You can write all the s* you want, but you won't get that thanks to 10 lines - which will be always ambiguous and misinterpreted, then what? Will you write another manifesto? We need experience, we need to learn, we need to improve. You literally need to fail to get any improvement. And companies need to keep their people, they need to invest in people, instead of relying on a bunch of buzzwords or manifestos to prove themselves "cool" and up-to-date. Stop doing that. Make a step back, give your people time to think, talk to them, and give them the right resources.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
We may need those things, but it's increasingly clear that we cannot afford them so far as we know. I'm using "afford" widely - if we needed those things and understood that need properly, we'd have them. It's the mythic "$20 bill on the ground" - if it was really there, someone would have picked it up by now. it's no great secret how to write robust and unfragile software. We apparently only lack the will to do it. I've been in spots where we priced a defect, and they still didn't want it fixed.
- mk89 10y ago
  I have also worked for such companies. It's more common than what you and I think :) However, they cannot afford them because they simply don't want to be the best. Look at those companies who invest in people and give them time to grow/think/be. Their products are above average. Why? When you want to be the best, you simply have no other way than "thinking" and "reasoning". Unless you are just lucky and you get one or two Einstein[s]. But even then, if you don't give such a genius the right environment, he is gonna do his best to get away from you. What you call will I call it attitude towards business. Nowadays we don't write software anymore to make a product last at least 10 years, we build companies to be sold in order to get someone (the founder) rich so that he can invest in new crap to sell. Why should he waste 500-1000 $ when that money can go to a new feature or an "important" bug (coming from a bigger customer)?

bernardlunn 10y ago

I think this is more about tools than process. Specifically tools to assess fragility (bad dependency patterns). You cam only manage what you can measure.

norswap 10y ago

I was kind of hoping for a document that outlined principles to make the engineering process truly antifragile, i.e. one that would thrive under contingencies. Honestly, I have trouble fathoming how such a thing would be even possible in the realm of software. Maybe a system that "learns" previous failures and proactively monitor failure conditions / throttles contended ressources? (Seems quite specific already) And the document surely didn't tell me.

colbyh 10y ago
I actually think the former would be more within in the spirit of Taleb's book. software is the result of a complex, sometimes problematic process and not every piece of software needs to be antifragile. when bugs or system outages pop up it isn't the responsibility of the software to fix itself, it's the responsibility of the team behind it.