Yuri Gadow

In software development we agonise over esoteric processes and practises. Product life-cycles. Lean principles. Agile methods. In the end, we’re looking for ways to bring human creativity and innovation to bear on commerce in a sustainable, systematic way. We use a variety of tricks. Tight, fixed deadlines. Artificial commitment. Empirical process control. Kanban. We have many rationalisations for these. But, all we really want are creative teams. Unfortunately, a team can step through the motions of the best methodologies and still be devoid of creativity, innovation, and learning. Lack of mutual support, homogeneous expertise, distrust, and disinterest are some possible culprits. In the field of enterprise software development the most likely cause is insufficient intrinsic motivation. It is a field saturated with high salaries, material perks, but devoid of strong intrinsic motivators such as altruism, conviction, or moral urgency. So we rally around structures. Processes. Practises. We’re Agile; so we put people before all else. But, even that is a process. Wisdom would say we should first focus on the basis of creativity and secondly on frameworks for harnessing it; we must bring personal value to what we do. The bad news is that this may not be possible in some software fields. The good news is that the competition is probably just as bored.