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[epf-dev] BUP Fundamental Concepts and Collaborative Principles Proposal

Hello everyone!

 

I’ve created a very, very low fidelity (vvlo fi) mockup of a possible BUP welcome page and subsequent guidelines pages (it’s a good thing I don’t make my living as a web page designer). The purpose of this mockup is to propose that we specify from the welcome page BUP’s fundamental concepts, collaboration, iteration, architecture, requirements management. I am presenting this to you to begin a discussion of how to capture and present to BUP users our intentions behind BUP.

 

This effort began when I started thinking how we could include collaborative principles into the BUP. For this I turned to the agile methodologies because they are more about collaboration than specific software development techniques. In my view the success of the agile methodologies is how their principles capture and communicate the intention of the methodology designers to the users. When the methodology users understand the intention behind the methodology, then it becomes much easier for the users to apply, adapt, and grow the methodology to fit their specific needs.

 

Therefore I believe the best way to communicate our intentions to BUP users is to capture our intentions a set of principles rather than specific rules, tasks, and guidelines. These principles of course shall help guide users understand BUP tasks, and guidelines and more importantly give them the confidence to know how to apply and adapt them. These principles are really patterns and in the examples I have drawn a couple of example patterns from “Patterns for Effective Use Cases” and from “Organizational Patterns for Agile Software Development”.

 

One thing I would also like to point out, I have been conducting an informal survey of groups who have dumped RUP in favour of an agile methodology. Ok, I only have three data points, but they are from some rather large IT shops like the National Institute of Health and Ameritrade. In a nutshell, these groups adopt agile methodologies because they want an iterative methodology. How is that for a kick in the place that hurts the most? The RUP is so overwhelming that it is not seen as an iterative methodology.

 

Therefore I want to distill BUP into a set of guiding principles, that are easy to remember, can be easily taught in a one (or two day course) and immediately put into practice by a software team after the course. The specific practices, roles, tasks, work products, guidelines, etc. all become like a BUP reference or specific how to. But the fundamental understanding comes from the principles which are included as part of the methodology.

Tour and explanation of the pages:

Splash Page and Fundamental Concepts

As a bit of humour towards our name debates I’ve code named our process TPFKB (The Process Formerly Known as BUP). The welcome page gives the vision for TPFKB (an iterative process that is minimal, complete, and extensible). Following this is the infamous hump diagram (can we use this or are we violating copyright? Finally the meat of this discussion, the BUP Fundamental Concepts, collaboration, iteration, requirements management, and architecture. I have given each of these concepts a memorable metaphoric phrase to capture its intent, therefore collaboration is “it’s the people”, iteration is “do it again, and again, and…”, requirements management is “know what they really want”, and architecture is “long live architecture”. The “long live architecture” metaphor has multiple meanings. One meaning of course is the intention that our objective with architecture is to create an architecture that sustains the long term evolution of the system. The other meaning is to defiantly declare the discipline of software architecture is still important.

 

These fundamental concepts are intended to be headliners to longer narratives that describe the essence of the concept. In our language, these headliners are pattern names and the narratives are like patterns, captured knowledge that may be shared. I’ve been reading through a number of papers that relate fast cycle times (the core of agility) to heuristic narratives that help people take the initiative within the organization in a harmonious manner. In my humble opinion, this is what we must capture and build into the methodology.

 

You will also notice that I included on this page a section called Project XYZ Guiding Principles. This opens up the opportunity for a development organization to include project specific “guiding principles” In this example I used principles that are specific to a client that I am currently working with (we are using BUP on this project). They are re-engineering a legacy system and you know how easily legacy replacement projects can go off track, hence a set of specific principles that we harp on again and again to keep the developers focused on what is important.

It’s the People

If you follow the link to the “It’s the People” page you will see how I may describe collaboration. First I start with why collaboration is important, because success through agility is based on culture. In my personal opinion we must emphasize this concept that success is a rooted in culture. The agile methodologies have successfully publicized the importance of culture and if BUP is to meet our goals we must do likewise. The text that first appears here is derived from USAF Colonel John Boyd’s study of strategy and fast decision making cycles.

 

The collaborative principles are intended to be the half dozen or so “guiding principles” or patterns from which emerges the collaborative culture. I have included a few patterns from various sources to provide an example of what these patterns might be. I have tried to give the patterns metaphoric names. However you have to remember I have a twisted sense of humor and I can already guess that a name like “come to Jesus” isn’t going to go over well with most people. Just as an aside, that name is really a place holder for a “retrospectives” guideline or pattern. The phrase “come to Jesus” is apparently the slang used by employees of Southwest Airlines for their weekly retrospective meetings.

Share the Vision

If you follow the Share the Vision link you will see the pattern (or narrative) for share the vision. This specific pattern is taken from “Patterns for Effective Use Cases”. It describes the problem, the forces and the solution. What is relevant to BUP is the additional sections that show specific BUP practices (or as I joked TPFKB) support this pattern. In this example I just quickly wrote down that tasks like Define Vision and work products like Vision support this principle. This connects specific BUP practices to the guiding principles and helps BUP users understand the intention behind the practices and the work product.

So Where to From Here?

I don’t know if you agree my proposal for the welcome page, but I would like to start the process of creating the collaboration principles. So that is that is the task I want to propose is that we (I guess “me”) create and write a set of collaborative principles that are an intrinsic BUP feature. So before I start plunging head long into this I want some feedback and a casual straw vote on whether capturing collaborative principles in this manner as either narratives or patterns is a good idea. I believe linking the principles to specific BUP work products and tasks is important. I’m hoping that a few of you are also going to jump up and say “good idea Steve, can we participate in this?” J

 

Chat with you all tomorrow.

 

Best regards,

Steve Adolph

 

Attachment: bup welcome page sample.zip
Description: Zip compressed data


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