If Delivery has become a bad word, then hooray!
The silent success of software development
Sometimes big successes go almost unnoticed. It only dawned on me a couple of days ago what a great success software development has achieved in the last 30 years.
Traditionally, software development was the easy victim of the blame game at work. The default company setup is anti-flow: Business wants to start everything, Operations wants to deploy nothing, and in-between is a part that is the easiest to blame.
Software is abstract, often frustrating, and either you are in or you are out. (This is why I founded The Chocolate Guild at work.)
Frustration and low transparency easily lead to the conclusion that software developers must be doing something wrong. Building software is like building houses or working at a manufacturing belt, right? The companies were ok but the teams "just didn't deliver".
Agile approaches were a reaction to the state of things in software development. The Agile Manifesto was one answer to the continued struggles in the industry.
In late 2019, when I was asked to describe Scrum in a single sentence, my answer was: “Delivering value in a complex environment.”
In recent years, however, I perceive a shift of tone: Suddenly the word "Delivery" has gotten a bad reputation, almost as if it has become a legacy term. It seems bad if you use it (alone).
The flavors that I see:
"How to deliver" has been solved. If you are still struggling with this, you are lagging behind.
"Delivery" is an illusion when being attempted alone. It always has to go with Discovery!
Delivery in software is not the problem anymore. The focus needs to be on value / continuous budgeting / the end-to-end flow / the org setup etc.
Agility gets framed as "being about delivery only". How could someone have ever been so obsessed with delivery? Ridiculous!
This is the silent success of software development. An industry that attracted a more-than-average amount of outsiders is no longer the default target of the blame game!
Not so fast, you might say. Isn't software development still considered a great choice for outsourcing to low-cost countries? Aren't software developers still viewed as low-skilled workers and treated like replaceable parts of a machine? Isn't a lack of trust toward software developers still rampant? Maybe. But it is not seen or sold as "the natural state of things" or "the rational choice to make". It is finally labeled as foolish and backward, exactly as it should have been already more than 30 years ago. If you still think, say and do this, you are old-fashioned, and out-of-touch with today.
What a great success for software developers, and what a pity that I do not read more often about this!
Oh, and bonus points if you think that software developers themselves are not there for delivery but first and foremost creative problem solvers!
Maya Jane Coles - Blame Ft. Nadine Shah