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Leaner Programmer Anarchy

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01:00:31

Summary

Fred George discusses Programmer Anarchy, a development process where programmers are not just empowered to act but the driving force behind a product, leading to substantial increase in results.

Bio

Fred George presented at JavaOne with Martin Fowler, and assisted in XP Immersion sessions with Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Robert Martin. Fred spent a year as a visiting lecturer at N.C. State University teaching Java programming to over 800 undergraduates. He joined ThoughtWorks in 2003, then he joined Forward in 2007, bringing Agile practices to all aspects of the business.

About the conference

QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

Recorded at:

Mar 24, 2011

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Community comments

  • it reminded me "Quando o scrum começcou a atrapalhar" by Caelum

    by Antonio Carlos de Souza,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    At 24:30 the presentation makes me remember a Guilherme Silveira's presentation, from Caelum, "Quando o scrum começcou a atrapalhar"

    www.infoq.com/br/presentations/quando-scrum-pas...

    [],
    AC

  • Conclusion

    by Jeff Hain,

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    Stop trying to educate your managers, just get rid of them.

  • Re: Conclusion

    by Bob MacNeal,

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    +1 Sweet!

  • Inspiring Talk

    by Bob MacNeal,

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    Wow. Many truths spoken here. This talk is pivotal and could well be the antidote to what many developers experience in toxic organizations: Agile-off-the-rails

    Two nit-picky criticisms:
    1. Don't use the word "lean" or "leaner". Lean is for machines, not people.
    2. Never refer to people as "resources" (e.g., Resource Rumble).

  • Re: Conclusion

    by Assaf Stone,

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    Hmm... And after you got rid of all of the managers, will the developers draw up the contracts, get the customers, take care of payment and other administration stuff?
    That's like the branches cutting off the trees.

    No, there's a reason that managers are needed (as much as I hate to admit that), and they do need to learn how not to get in the way of progress...

  • Re: Conclusion

    by Bob MacNeal,

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    Assaf,
    Yes, many organizations need sales and administration. But unless managers are carrying water for the developers or clearing impediments, I haven't experienced demonstrable value w/ managers.

  • Re: Re: Conclusion

    by Jeff Hain,

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    Assaf,
    As pointed out in www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/complexity.pdf, p.14 (13th one), software is "invisible", at least for people that don't practice it, as are mathematical spaces for non-mathematicians.
    The main reason I see for managers being possibly harmful, is that they often don't practice development enough, if at all, and have therefore decisional responsibilities in a very complex and subtle field of which they don't understand the constraints and the possibilities.
    As for drawing up contracts, getting customers, etc., of course there is room for specialized people here, but they need to work in close relationship with software guys.

  • Today's Dilbert seems to have gotten inspired by this :)

    by Per Spilling,

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