(2004-08-05) Cockburn Interview

Alistair Cockburn interview - his Crystal Clear book is moving along...

• The other thing that that points out to is to something that Jim Highsmith and I constructed as a little a catch phrase, which is that "people trump process," and that's the quote you read. And then Jim came up with a little, not a corollary, but a follow-on which is that "politics trumps people." And with those two short sentences, you actually get a lot of the story of what I found in my research. People argue a lot about process, and in many cases, the process doesn't matter a whole lot. What I found is you can generally throw out three-quarters of the process and get a net improvement in the project likelihood of delivery, and that's because at that moment you start focusing on the people... But in the history of these things as I chased it down, after World War II, Engineering took an odd turn. And as the reading came to me that I got was after the Second Word War, there was a "discipline envy," as we as we might call it, of applied physics. So, applied physics had done great things in the Second World War, we got atomic bombs, we got missiles, we got all that kind of stuff, all based on heavy application of math and a priori in-advanced thinking and design. And engineering got this little envy of this other discipline that we saw an increase in the amount of applied mathematics being shoved into the engineering curriculum at the major colleges after the Second World War. In 1967, the Dean of Engineering at Harvard wrote up a thing where he said, "I think we've gone too far. We've lost the art aspect, the contact aspect." Engineering is very sensitive to people having contact with the materials and having a deep, visceral, personal understanding of the behavior of the material they're working with, whether it's construction or electricity or whatever it could be, and was advocating a return. But the problem being that in the academic tradition that was building up at the time, the practitioners were getting devalued and the theoreticians were getting more valued. (reminds me of MBA discussion; hmm, also reminds me of [z2004-08-02-KaminskiBigWorldMomentum])

• Now here's where we veer off from software engineering. Software Engineering gives us somehow the impression, and it could be a false impression or not, but we get this impression that there's such a thing as verisimilitude, a match-up between our model, our documentation, and the truth of the world, and I don't happen to buy that!