This morning my newsfeed came up with an interesting read from Gizmodo, an article interpreting cybersecurity as a war against haunted objects. The idea of securing the "internet of things" as an exorcism is rich, nuanced and perhaps even poetic. I'd encourage you to read it, as it is unusual to consider technology through a spiritual lens. While reading the article, I was reminded of another lens through which I view software development, the cargo cult.
These spiritual movements originate during and shortly after World War II, in Melanesia. In their initial contact with western technology, the first people of that region saw spiritual significance and, through imitation, sought to gain the material wealth and social place possessed by occupiers. Their rituals sometimes involved building (non-functioning) radios, airports and vehicles from wood. They believed such tokens would enable their ancestors to send cargo (material goods) to them from the afterlife. I think one of the most interesting things about cargo cults is that, at a deeper level, they subvert social order imposed from the outside with an emergent order based on the first peoples' traditions and values.
On a superficial level, it's not uncommon to invoke the concept of a cargo cult when discussing agile software development. Many developers and especially project managers obtain certificates as scrum masters. Through the rituals of an agile methodology, they expect to produce high quality software with efficiency and flexibility. Parallels can be easily drawn with cargo cults: agile practitioners can indeed fail to grasp the underlying mechanisms and invoke ritual motions devoid of their original purpose. This theme has been addressed by James Shore, Joel Kuiper, CIO magazine, Scrum Alliance, and that's just part of the first page of Google results.
My point in this post has to do with a deeper function of cargo cults. As mentioned earlier, cargo cults function as a force of social subversion, one in which the occupied group attempts to recast social order imposed by colonial occupiers. Often the social order in a software organization cannot be questioned directly, especially not by low-level employees. Without a direct vehicle for addressing culture, social reordering seeps into other processes, subverting a dominant social order enforced by management in favor of an emergent order controlled by developers.
Agile practices are a natural repository for this seepage. Through scrum meetings, sprint planning, retrospectives, planning poker and other agile rituals, teams involved in agile processes can optimize the social order rather than value to the business. For instance, engineers can challenge senior management by redirecting negative attention about lack of progress onto agile rituals instead of directly addressing core challenges. Agile development rituals can mask technical debt, poor planning and incompetent engineering.
Agile and lean toolsets can efficiently regulate work queues, optimize throughput and provide flexibility to project owners to address changing business conditions. These practices are ineffective when team members use them to challenge the dominant social order on the team. Difficulties implementing agile practices can be symptomatic of a larger cultural problem, and not one that should be shrouded in ritual practices.
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