Beginning of human history
Asia
Minor, more than 11,500 years ago, just after the Ice Age and 7,000 years before
Stonehenge or Cheops. No agriculture. No domestic animals. No metals. Just some
groups of hunter-gatherers. But … they have settlements,
deposit of foods and a community.
This community start building some massive stone temples. Their culture influence other groups and communities
in the same area. 1000 years later, in
that region are founded the first evidences of the agriculture and the first cities. And that was the beginning of the world history.
The first engineer and the first architect have existed before the first
farmer.
The key of the evolution - community
Making an 11,000 years’ time
travel, I want to quote from “Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship”, initiated
by Robert C. Martin: “Not only individuals and interactions, but
also a community of professionals”.
The key word for evolution is community.
The discovery of the Gobekli-Tepe temples in Asia Minor changes the model of the civilization evolution from: farming-settlement- religion-temples-cities to this one: settlement, religion, temples,
farming
then cities.
(Of course that religion exist before settlements, but it is about more structured
forms of religion).
Evolution sequence: settlement, religion, temples,
farming
then cities.
The base of civilization was the settlement,
the moment when was crystallized a stable group that share common values: from
common food deposits to a common culture and form a community.
This community was able to build temples and to distribute their culture
Hunter-gatherers, settlement,
religion, temples, farming then cities. We can translate that to: teams, practices,
sharing values, community and culture, distributing the culture, transformation:
new practices, new values and new communities.
The software new civilization: between dilution and evolution
The recent evolution of software
development has follow a similar (cyclic) pattern: the late 80s and the 90s start
with some new practices, new small communities with new values. That has been
finalized with some cultural “settlements”: CMMI, UML, Unified Process, Agile Methods and Agile Manifesto. This culture will be distributed and new communities will be
formed.
Unfortunately, the initial new
software civilization was somehow diluted during its expansion: the
only widely adopted method was Scrum (very lightweight method) and many values,
especially engineering values were almost forgotten. (See Robert C. Martin comments
here https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2010/december/the-land-that-scrum-forgot
).
There is a new wave that want to
recover the forgotten values and go further: the Software Craftsmanship
movement and the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) method are the best examples. Both are dealing with some biggest elephants in
the Agile room.
DAD want to make explicit the
Agile cultural values and practices and recognizing that context matter, this method offers
guidance for adapting the process to different situations.
Foundations of Software Craftsmanship
are older and I will remember here only some contributors of the Agile related foundations:
Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Scott W. Ambler and Robert C. Martin. The last one –
Uncle Bob – try to push further this wave with Clean Code and Clean Architecture
initiatives. Unfortunately this part is difficult enough to not see yet other valuable
contributors or even valuable distributors. A symptom of this problem is that most
of the “distributors” talk only about Martin SOLID principles, without an understanding
of the bigger picture or of other aspects. It is just a copy-paste
distribution.
There are two divergent evolution
aspects now: a distribution that dilute values and new endeavors for enhancing
and improving the original values.
Human Evolution patterns
The evolution patterns seems to
be in this sequence:
- Prehistory
- Teams & practices
- Small and slow transformations, many of them being lost because of limited distribution and sharing
- History
- Settlement: sharing common values, community, culture
- Distribution: sharing culture, new communities
- Transformation: communities generate new practices and new values
Evolution factors: communities enable
values sharing and creating of new ones
Involution factors and sequence:
- Success with diluted values
- Dissolution of communities
- Cultural regression
Involution factors: cutting the value distribution chains and the success of “non-valuable values”
The involution factors seems to
be the same in history of human civilization and in the one of software
development. The human history has several
regressions caused by “success of diluted values”: such as the Greek Dark Ages
(1100 BC–800 BC), the Dark Ages of Middle Ages. The history does not necessary represent
a continuous linear progress and same risks could affects the software development
domain. For example, the rising of new web
technologies cause a dilution on
design quality ("Architecture lost years" - Robert C. Martin), even that is only because of their continuous changes. Poor design is finally resource consuming and expensive and that
cause regression or slowing of the overall evolution.
These patterns that seems to be the ones that have "shaped" the human evolution. I think that should be considered for any aspect of evolution and for different levels, from large communities and "populations" to organizations level.
Any invention of human genius is born dead if is not shared and embraced by a community that will make that invention as a valuable step in the evolution. On the other hand, a community that does not profits from its "inventors" it is not a community. We need to enable, recognize and share the real values in order to have a community.
Any invention of human genius is born dead if is not shared and embraced by a community that will make that invention as a valuable step in the evolution. On the other hand, a community that does not profits from its "inventors" it is not a community. We need to enable, recognize and share the real values in order to have a community.
