Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick
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Tue, 12 Dec 2006

Primary Loyalties

This is an editorial that expanded on an offhand earlier post. It was rejected. While it does have two potentially offensive analogies, I figure I have more leeway in what I publish here. It's had a postscript added and is now filled with hyperlink goodness.

A recent UN report states that "New explosive devices are now used in Afghanistan within a month of their first appearing in Iraq." (Reuters, September 27, 2005). Compare that to the rate of diffusion of technology in our field. I'll use continuous integration as an example. It's a well-established technology that's easy to deploy, is practically without risk, has considerable benefit, was first widely described in 2000, and has had a solid open source tool supporting it for at least three years. But there's a reasonable chance you've never heard of it. (Note: true of original audience; likely not true of this blog's audience.) If you tried to deploy it, it might well take months and months to get permission, to round up a build machine, and to get the first people using it.

Something is desperately wrong with this picture. Why is it that people living in isolated harsh conditions where people are trying to kill them can move faster than we can in our offices?

John Robb, a software executive and former Air Force counterterrorism operative, describes what the guerrillas do as open-source warfare, and he's developed a rather elaborate theory of how that works. One underpinning of the theory is what he calls primary loyalties. "A primary loyalty is a connection to a non-state group that is greater than loyalty to a state. These loyalties include those to clan, religion, tribe, neighborhood gang, etc. These loyalties are reciprocated through the delivery of political goods [...] by the group that the state cannot or will not deliver."

Professional-class employees like you and me once had something like a primary loyalty to our employer, especially if it was a large company. In the US and elsewhere, that employer delivered "goods" to us like steady employment, guaranteed pension, medical care, a career path, and the training we needed to advance along it. Under Anglo-American capitalism, at least, corporations no longer deliver many of those things. Instead, as is described in Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift, companies have given us the opportunity and responsibility to provide those things for ourselves. For example, instead of being given a guaranteed pension, we're given money to invest. If we invest well, we'll end up with more retirement money than the pension a company would have given us; if not, well, tough luck.

Whether that's a good or bad shift, employees have acted like people in Iraq and other failed states: they've shifted their primary loyalty elsewhere. In the US, we've seen rising nationalism, increased devotion to religious groupings, and more loyalty to political "tribes" (though not increased formal party membership). None of those loyalties have anything to do with work. Therefore, according to Robb, we're missing a key part of the infrastructure that supports fast diffusion and implementation of technologies at the office.

I think that's bad. We need groups that deliver the goods and are deserving of loyalty. Existing structures (unions, professional societies) aren't working, and I'm loathe to wait for them to start. The best I can offer is the autonomous team. I'm not talking about collections of individuals who've sleepwalked through "team-building exercises," but actual teams that work together very closely (often in pairs), learn together quickly, and provide cover for each other. When a team is working, the business comes to view it as a single specialist, a unit, with authority over what happens within itself. If the team decides to try continuous integration, it will deploy it without ever thinking to ask permission.

I acknowledge that it's offensive, at some gut level, to suggest emulating killers. But if this decade has a notable example of the "learning organization", it is—sadly—groups of insurgent cells with high internal loyalty and loose connections to both each other and also to the overarching sources of goals and funding.

P.S. John Robb's ideas haven't convinced me yet—sometimes his analogies seem more than a bit strained—but you may find his site worth a read. Hacker's notion of a risk shift has also drawn some scorn, though that particular link misses the point that matters to me. If you're an investor in the stock market, you expect stocks with higher volatility to pay higher returns over time. The higher returns are your payment for accepting higher volatility, usually tagged as "risk". What I take from Hacker is that a career today has higher volatility than in the past, but that higher risk has not come with significantly higher returns—instead, the US real median income has increased by 31% from 1967 to 2005 (source, PDF, p. 5). That's an annual real return of 0.6%. For comparison, that's a bit less than the real return on short-term US Treasury bills, historically the world's least risky investment.

## Posted at 07:53 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

About Brian Marick
I consult mainly on Agile software development, with a special focus on how testing fits in.

Contact me here: marick@exampler.com.

 

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