Agile vs Fear Driven Development

Introduction

I'd like to share some of the things that I've realized while on my road to understanding agile, focusing in this entry on overcoming fear, increasing motivation and instilling self-confidence.

In my experience in world of IT there has always been this one thing that rears its ugly head, something I like to call fear driven development. It's something I only realized I was propagating once I had removed myself from the development life cycle and I was only able to address it once I had learned a lot of new things and re-inserted myself into the development life cycle.

Fear Driven Development

I'm not writing this as the definitive guide to the official term Fear Driven Development this is just my way of saying "A way of work where we always cover own arses." and as we all know anything with fear in the title is a bad thing, except if your into that kind of thing... weirdo.

Some of the symptoms of fear driven development, are:

• High staff turnover rates, due to unhappy developers.
• Excessive working hours.
• Constant auditing of data, and data changes.
• Over engineering solutions to such an extent as to cause analysis paralysis.
• An excessive lack of trust between people, and always double checking everything.
• Over-estimation of tasks.
• "We're too busy"
• An immeasurable amount of technical debt and a high rate of software entropy, your code is barely live and everyone is already saying its legacy.
• A lack of innovation.
• Inability to achieve deliverables.
• "Work hard, play hard" is part of the culture.

And this just spirals out of control until a point where the people that you want to resign stay and the people you need to stay resign. And often working at a place like this will make you feel like you're just part of the profit margin and no amount of perks or promises will be able to make you happy. All these symptoms are due to a wide variety of cultural issues and agile provides us with a way of solving this.

How can agile change this?

I'll start by saying agile isn't just a willy-nilly concept, it was developed by some of the greatest minds in the IT industry exactly because they were tired of facing fear driven development.

Like I said it took a lot of effort for me to overcome that culture within myself and that way of thinking, luckily agile does help us solve this, and let's look at what an agile mindset means, and where to direct our focus (https://agilemanifesto.org/)

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan.

And just by starting to think in this way and encouraging this culture you'll already notice that the following happens:

• We're changing our focus from things to people.
• People start garnering trust because it stops being an "us vs. them" and "me vs you" world, because everything becomes us.
• There's shared responsibility and a shared understanding of what is going on so no more hiding, no more covering your arse the whole time because now everyone is equally wrong.
• There is a constant focus on excellence in delivering working software, not perfect bug-free software, not well documented software, just something that works.
• People start accepting that they are in fact people and don't have to be perfect, and other people don't have to be perfect either.
• We create focus, and start to create effort driven thinking where time becomes a box in which we can dedicate our effort.
• We start to think of what we deliver as a product not a project, for example Toyota still creates the Corolla but the Corolla today isn't the same as the corolla from 1988 but it's still the same product.
• We start to develop our software around our customers wants/needs, not what we thought they might want which means our products stay relevant.
• We garner loyalty because we create communities.
• We create innovation in how we deliver our products and how we ensure working products.

These are the kinds of things that fight that fearful thinking, it creates confidence and increases our motivation, and will ultimately lead to a better company and a better product.