Start From The Past

After being in the computing business now for more than half a century, one thing worries me more than almost anything else: our lack of a sense of history. (Jerry Weinberg)

For a while now I’ve had a rule of thumb, heuristic, that I’ve followed when I’ve wanted to learn something new. I don’t actually remember if I learned it from somewhere or came up with it myself. Nevertheless, it’s been useful for me and I would like to share it with you.

Find Out Where It All Started From

If I want to learn something new, I will focus on the past and try to figure out where it all started from. This way I will lower the risk of being affected by Law of Raspberry Jam.

As for now, I think it’s most helpful if I share couple examples.

Case 1: Scrum

I wanted to know more about Scrum couple months ago. Considering the popularity of Scrum, its Wikipedia article is quite thorough. What’s most important, it has History section in it. Let me copy-paste the beginning of that section:

Scrum was first defined as “a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal” as opposed to a “traditional, sequential approach” in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the “New New Product Development Game”.^[1] Takeuchi and Nonaka later argued in “The Knowledge Creating Company”^[2] that it is a form of “organizational knowledge creation, […] especially good at bringing about innovation continuously, incrementally and spirally”.

After learning that, I went and read the paper. What’s interesting, paper didn’t mention e.g. sprints, daily stand-ups or backlog. It focused more on identifying characteristics. Characteristics that leading companies showed (in 1986). Later, while learning about origins of Scrum, I ended up watching James Coplien’s talk at Youtube: Patterns: The New Defacto Scrum Standard. I’ve seen it several times since then. Perhaps the thing that strike me the most, was that James said how Scrum had been affected by Toyota Production System (a.k.a. Lean).

Learning about the work of James Coplien also led me to Scrum Pattern Community & their published patterns. Based on all the previous, my current understanding is that Scrum is about identified patterns & in the end: Kaizen. Successful teams have had patterns that has been part of their success. Those have been identified and came part of Scrum. It also reminds me that every team has its own context that they operate on. This needs to be considered when trying to apply a pattern (e.g. daily stand-up) to yours.

Case 2: Agile

I’ve also activated with Agile lately (this year). Sure, I’ve been familiar with Agile Manifesto & its principles. That’s though quite simplistic & therefore it makes you wonder how to interpret it. That’s why I wanted to understand what people behind the Manifesto thought about it, when it was published. I found one good article about it where Martin Fowler & Jim Highsmith explained their thinking behind every point & principles. Good to notice how the article is from year 2001, when the Manifesto was published.

There’s a lot more, if you have time, energy & curiosity. Martin Fowler has an interesting article on his website from July, 2000, where he describes the New Methodology. Then there’s also an updated version of the same article from year 2005. I haven’t yet read those. But that’s where I will go next. These are the people who were behind Agile Manifesto, they are the ones whose thinking I want to listen, when learning about Agile.

I would be naive though, if I would assume that agile software development came to life 13 years ago (2001). There’s one great article that reminds us how people were doing things smartly already in mid-1950s. Here’s one quotation (by Jerry Weinberg) from that article (Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History):

We were doing incremental development as early

as 1957, in Los Angeles, under the direction of

Bernie Dimsdale [at IBM’s Service Bureau

Corporation]. He was a colleague of John von

Neumann, so perhaps he learned it there, or

assumed it as totally natural. I do remember Herb

Jacobs (primarily, though we all participated)

developing a large simulation for Motorola, where

the technique used was, as far as I can tell, indis-

tinguishable from XP.​​

​​​​

When much of the same team was reassembled

in Washington, DC in 1958 to develop Project

Mercury, we had our own machine and the new

Share Operating System, whose symbolic modifi-

cation and assembly allowed us to build the system

incrementally, which we did, with great success.

Project Mercury was the seed bed out of which

grew the IBM Federal Systems Division. Thus, that

division started with a history and tradition of

incremental development.

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All of us, as far as I can remember, thought

waterfalling of a huge project was rather stupid,

or at least ignorant of the realities… I think what

the waterfall description did for us was make

us realize that we were doing something else,

something unnamed except for “software devel-

opment.”

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Case 3: Testing

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On December, 2013,  I wrote a blog post about history of software testing and especially how first software testing teams were formed. It’s a good description of how testers were starting to came into software development 50 years ago. Because they concluded that it would help if there were people who were focusing more on testing than others.

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It’s good to note though that I’m talking about software testing. Testing, the mental activity of questioning in order to evaluate – that goes far back. I haven’t put that much effort on tracking the history of that yet.

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While exploring the history of software testing I ran into different kinds of papers. One particular (Evaluation of the Functional Testing of Control Programs from 1967) hinted where the demand for excessively structured testing came from.

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Other way to learn about the history is to ask from people who remember far enough. I asked for example from Jerry Weinberg about origin of test cases.

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This is a good reminder of the context behind birth of test cases. While it may be beneficial to use them in your context 60 years later, do note that access to machines is not that abominable these days anymore. If that’s the case, other reasons for using them need to be considered. This same thinking should apply to anything that you’re leaning into & haven’t invented by yourself.

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Try It Yourself

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Next time you want to learn about something new (e.g. BDD, Specification by Example, Exploratory Testing, Lean, Unit Tests), start from its history. If there are few people who are behind it, try to find what they have to say about it. Or perhaps you can even ask from them via email, Twitter or some other way. This way you’re increasing your chances of understanding the subject the same way as the people who came up with it.

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Good luck!

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To show that I’m not alone, I’d like to end this to Martin Fowler’s words:

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In order to understand something, I often find it useful to know how it came about.

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