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Loomio's comment gets the gist of it. The software creation process has been moving to Agile, which beats waterfall, but there's an emerging practice of UCD.

Loomio's comment gets the gist of it. The software creation process has been moving to Agile, which beats waterfall, but there's an emerging practice of UCD. If programmers cannot find some way to work with and within UCD, a division of labor between designing the product with the end user, and writing the code to implement it will develop. This will lead to declines in programmer autonomy, and will demand changes to Agile. The seed for this change is already planted within Agile by people advocating for Taylorism. That's not my thinking - just my interpretation of the text.

dalke 13y ago
Thanks for highlighting that. I at first found the UCD reference even less understandable than the starting thesis comparing agile to unionism. I agree, btw, with the assessment that Agile is "naïve in assuming that a new system’s customer ... can adequately represent the goals." Agile seems designed for the admittedly large number of in-house development efforts, where end-user and paying customer are very similar. It does not have anything like persona development from UCD. Indeed, I am annoyed with agile's papering over of the term "customer." I agree too that software development methodologies have not, in general, been influenced much by UCD. I say from reading in 1990s the ideas promoted by Raskin, Cooper, Norman, Nielsen, and Tognazzini, and watching the jump and seemingly rapid decline in interaction design over the last 10 years. Based on that, I don't see UCD as having emerged any more now than it was 10 years ago. But since I don't see Agile as a sort of unionization which separates programmers vs. non-programmers (with Waterfall the stand-in for Taylorism), then the rest of the comparison doesn't hold together. It feels more like someone who doesn't know what unionization does. Focusing on the idea that early Agile is a non-Taylorism style, I recall that even early on, CRC cards were associated with an "IdealTime." People wanted to turn that into real time, and determined the load factor through XpVelocity. According to Fowler though, StoryPoints (or StoryCounting) are "easier to calculate, less likely to be abused, and every bit as accurate." Quoting c2.com: "Because C3 measures estimated and used IdealProgrammingTime, as well as elapsed time, I believe that it does have something to do with how many minutes per day are spent developing on the task. While I may be in disagreement with Kent on that, I'm not in disagreement on the utility of what's below. --RonJeffries"; C3 being the project which heavily influenced early Agile. Thus, I think time estimate and measurement has always been a part of Agile. The author made a reference to "Alternatives to Lean Production: Work Organization in the Swedish Auto Industry". I was curious about that, since I live in Sweden, and Saab's nearly empty car factories lie on the other side of town. That book was written in 1992, which is just a few years before the start of Saab's gradual decline. Volvo no longer has a plant in Kalmar, nor in Uddevalla, though they are still strong elsewhere. Searching now, there was a 2012 symposium titled "What have we learnt from Volvo Uddevalla?" http://ilpc2012stockholm.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/symposium-what-have-we-learnt-from-volvo-uddevalla/ http://ilpc2012stockholm.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/symposium-... . It says: > Reflective Production, implemented by Volvo in its Uddevalla plant ... [was] renounced [in the 1990s]. But some aspects of reflective production were adopted by other companies, especially in Japan. > Do we know better today the reasons for the development and subsequent abandonment of Reflective Production? ... Are they specific to the Swedish context or is it possible to find them elsewhere? It's interesting then that while the author proposes that non-lean methods are possible, and quotes from that source, that non-lean method was abandoned. Perhaps the alternative approach is actually worse than lean? FWIW, the author of that 1992 book, in http://www.akesandberg.se/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2010/05/Enriching-Production_Ake-SANDBERG-ed.-1995-2007.pdf http://www.akesandberg.se/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2010/... , "criticizes Volvo’s official justification of the closure and demonstrates the weaknesses of its calculation of cost savings", by comparing the Kalmar plant to the lean approach in the Gothenburg plant. Moreover, the quote from Alistair Cockburn takes place at the Scandinavia Developer Conference, which is in Gothenburg, the home of Volvo. You would think that if Reflective Production were still influential then people there would know about it. (Hmm, I should ask about it next time I'm in Gothenburg to talk with software people.)

dalke 13y ago

Thanks for highlighting that. I at first found the UCD reference even less understandable than the starting thesis comparing agile to unionism. I agree, btw, with the assessment that Agile is "naïve in assuming that a new system’s customer ... can adequately represent the goals." Agile seems designed for the admittedly large number of in-house development efforts, where end-user and paying customer are very similar. It does not have anything like persona development from UCD. Indeed, I am annoyed with agile's papering over of the term "customer." I agree too that software development methodologies have not, in general, been influenced much by UCD. I say from reading in 1990s the ideas promoted by Raskin, Cooper, Norman, Nielsen, and Tognazzini, and watching the jump and seemingly rapid decline in interaction design over the last 10 years. Based on that, I don't see UCD as having emerged any more now than it was 10 years ago. But since I don't see Agile as a sort of unionization which separates programmers vs. non-programmers (with Waterfall the stand-in for Taylorism), then the rest of the comparison doesn't hold together. It feels more like someone who doesn't know what unionization does. Focusing on the idea that early Agile is a non-Taylorism style, I recall that even early on, CRC cards were associated with an "IdealTime." People wanted to turn that into real time, and determined the load factor through XpVelocity. According to Fowler though, StoryPoints (or StoryCounting) are "easier to calculate, less likely to be abused, and every bit as accurate." Quoting c2.com: "Because C3 measures estimated and used IdealProgrammingTime, as well as elapsed time, I believe that it does have something to do with how many minutes per day are spent developing on the task. While I may be in disagreement with Kent on that, I'm not in disagreement on the utility of what's below. --RonJeffries"; C3 being the project which heavily influenced early Agile. Thus, I think time estimate and measurement has always been a part of Agile. The author made a reference to "Alternatives to Lean Production: Work Organization in the Swedish Auto Industry". I was curious about that, since I live in Sweden, and Saab's nearly empty car factories lie on the other side of town. That book was written in 1992, which is just a few years before the start of Saab's gradual decline. Volvo no longer has a plant in Kalmar, nor in Uddevalla, though they are still strong elsewhere. Searching now, there was a 2012 symposium titled "What have we learnt from Volvo Uddevalla?" http://ilpc2012stockholm.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/symposium-what-have-we-learnt-from-volvo-uddevalla/ http://ilpc2012stockholm.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/symposium-... . It says: > Reflective Production, implemented by Volvo in its Uddevalla plant ... [was] renounced [in the 1990s]. But some aspects of reflective production were adopted by other companies, especially in Japan. > Do we know better today the reasons for the development and subsequent abandonment of Reflective Production? ... Are they specific to the Swedish context or is it possible to find them elsewhere? It's interesting then that while the author proposes that non-lean methods are possible, and quotes from that source, that non-lean method was abandoned. Perhaps the alternative approach is actually worse than lean? FWIW, the author of that 1992 book, in http://www.akesandberg.se/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2010/05/Enriching-Production_Ake-SANDBERG-ed.-1995-2007.pdf http://www.akesandberg.se/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2010/... , "criticizes Volvo’s official justification of the closure and demonstrates the weaknesses of its calculation of cost savings", by comparing the Kalmar plant to the lean approach in the Gothenburg plant. Moreover, the quote from Alistair Cockburn takes place at the Scandinavia Developer Conference, which is in Gothenburg, the home of Volvo. You would think that if Reflective Production were still influential then people there would know about it. (Hmm, I should ask about it next time I'm in Gothenburg to talk with software people.)