Can One-size Fit All?

What does one-size fits all mean? I suppose there are two ways to answer that question:

1. How well do you want it to fit?
2. What do you mean by 'all'?

For example, a clothing manufacturer is content with the percentage of the population that their product will fit, such as a T-shirt, hat or Snuggie. All in this case is just a sub-set of the actual population. It should also be stated that the Snuggie will only fit perfectly and look stylish on the most charismatic of cult leaders.

Next time you read an article about programming best practices, consider if the one-size fits all mentality is used by the author. What is their experience level, programming background, project history, or even industry? These are some of the factors that determine how well their advice can be applied to your situation. Especially, if their article only seems to consider situations similar to theirs.

Perspective

Ultimately, I want to illustrate that it is necessary to understand the context and background used by the author to describe a programming methodology or a set of best practices. I am referring to the process du jour such as SCRUM, XP, Waterfall, 6 Sigma, Crouching Tiger, d20, GURPS or what have you. Assuming that the author has found value in the development process of which they are writing, they have most likely applied it with success in a narrow range of projects compared to what exists.

I am not denigrating anyone's experience. I only assert that it is not possible to create a process that is the best possible practice for every type of development project.

Sometimes, when I read an article extolling the virtues of a process such as SCRUM, the concepts that are presented seem very foreign to me. This is in spite of having been a part of SCRUM teams that were both successful and unsuccessful in their goals. In a situation like this, I find that I become a bit defensive as I read thinking "There is no way that would!"

That is until I stop and consider the context of the article. Is the author an application developer, web developer, or a rocket surgeon for NASA? When you start to consider the author's perspective and the context for which they are writing, it becomes much easier to identify the value in the concepts they are describing. Only then is it possible to take their lessons learned and try to apply them to your context and situation.

Methodologies such as SCRUM, XP and even Waterfall have provided value and been successfully applied for a variety of teams and development projects. Also realize that these same methodologies have failed miserably for all types of development situations. Why?

Context

I believe there are valuable aspects to all development methodologies. However, many of them are specifically designed for use in a certain context. What works well for a web development team might not directly transfer well to a team that develops products for government contracts. Some tailoring and adaptation will most likely be required to see any of the benefits.

Each step prescribed by the process is presumably added to solve a particular problem that has occurred repeatedly during development. While all software development looks the same from the point-of-view of the programmer in the chair, it is naïve to think that this is true for all stages of development in all contexts where software is developed. Many of the articles that I have read either make this naïve assumption, or do not clearly state the context for which the article is written. I have seen this for both average programmers that want to share their experience and the most respected developers in the industry that speak in terms of absolute best practices.

Everyone is trying to find a way to make their daily chores simpler with more reliable development processes. This is especially true for teams where one must coordinate activities with others. This can lead to a lot of floundering for the majority of the population that is not sure what they need to improve their development processes. They discover a new process, but fail to tailor it to their specific situation and wonder why it feels awkward, or they are not seeing the improvements that they expected.

I suspect this is one reason why we often read of the complaints where teams blindly follow the steps prescribed by a development process and it simply feels like a waste of time. These teams have failed to adapt the process to their particular situation.

Experience Level

Our level of experience affects how we are able to absorb and apply concepts with respect to a subject. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is one model of this concept. Essentially, it describes the progression from a Novice to an Expert. As a person becomes more proficient with a skill, they are capable of moving away from rigid sets of rules and guidelines towards an intuitive grasp of the situation based upon on deep tacit understanding.

Novice

As a Novice, we generally rely on a rigid set of rules or plans to lead us to a successful outcome. A practitioner at this level is not expected to exercise much, if any, discretionary judgment to succeed. This is very similar to most baking cookbooks. The recipes are described in steps, and the quality of baked good often depends on how closely the recipe was followed. Attempting to alter the recipe without understanding the purpose of each ingredient and each step could lead to something that is not edible.

Intermediate Levels

More possibilities become available to a student/practitioner as they gain experience. With a greater collection of skills, they can begin to recognize patterns and differentiate between similar situations that require different solutions. As an example, let's consider the differences between making the mix for a batch of muffins vs. cookies. The list of ingredients for chocolate chip cookies looks very similar to muffins. In fact, without careful inspection, all of the recipes in a cook book look similar due to their common layout and format. However, there is an enormous difference between the two types of recipes.

With the understanding of a few concepts in baking beyond beginner level, it is possible to slightly alter existing recipes to create a different consistency. Muffins use the "Muffin Method", which combines all of the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in a second bowl. When the oven has reached its target temperature, the ingredients from both bowls are combined and briefly stirred, placed in the pan, then finally baked in the oven. The ingredients are not combined until the oven is ready, in part because the muffins use baking powder as one of its leaveners. When the acid in the egg whites is mixed with the dry ingredients, the baking powder is activated for a brief period of time and will create air bubbles. Once the batter reaches a high enough temperature, the batter will set and lock the bubbles in place creating a fluffy texture.

Basic chocolate chip cookies use the "Creaming Method". This is a step where the butter and sugar are beat together to create billions of tiny air bubbles within the mixture. This combination of ingredients adds structure to the cookies because the sugar holds the air until the cookie mix is set in the oven.

What happens if the "Creaming Method" is not strictly followed? The cookies will still probably turn out, however, they will not have the chewy consistency one would expect of this traditional cookie recipe. If the butter is completely melted, you will end up with the thin crispy cookie (hey, maybe that's what you wanted). The chewy consistency is also achieved by the gluten that is created when mixing the flour with the water-based ingredients in the mix. To create a less dense cookie, you could change the type of flour to eliminate the gluten.

Expert

Expert bakers will simply "know" a few dozen baking recipes and ingredient ratios off the top of their head and know how altering the ratio of the ingredients is likely to affect the final baked good. From this collection of knowledge, they would be able to create a plethora of new recipes to suit the needs of each situation they encounter.

Unfortunately, experts will often know a subject so well that sometimes they are not able to explain how they know the answer, "they just do." This can be intuition leading them to the answer. They have encountered the problem so many times they recognize the pattern and know the right solution. This can lead to problems for less experienced practitioners learning from an expert. Even with a decent amount of experience, we are not always able to see all of the connections to arrive at the expert's conclusion. This is one reason why I dislike the phrase "I will leave this as an exercise for the reader."

A Perfect Fit

Software design patterns are similar to recipes for a software development, though not quite. I would compare them more to different techniques in baking such as the "Muffin Method" and the "Creaming Method". You choose a design pattern based on the problem you are trying to solve. Each design pattern is known for providing a good solution to certain classes of problems.

A particular implementation of the design pattern would be comparable to a recipe. The Singleton design pattern is capable of creating solutions more sophisticated than an object that controls its own creation and limits itself to a single instance. Just as you adapt software design patterns to fit your needs when you develop a software solution, so should you adapt the development processes that you choose to use in your organization.

One final example to illustrate this point. For decades, large corporations have been adopting and incorporating SAP database systems to help optimize the logistics of running their company. When these solutions are bought, they require large multi-million dollar investments to customize these systems for the company. The SAP software is already written. However, custom integration is required to make the system usable and useful to the company.

The software development process that you select should be no different. Yes, all SCRUM processes will look similar when compared between different companies that practice this process. However, I would expect there are subtle details that differ between two companies that successfully manage their projects with SCRUM. I believe these subtle differences could be important enough that if one company were to change to the other companies process, they would no longer be as successful, or even worse, they no longer succeed.

Summary

It is important to analyze "best practices" and development processes before adopting them to determine how well they fit your organization. I have worked for a half-dozen companies in my career, and none of them setup their build process exactly the same, even though many of them used the same tools. In order to get a best-fit for development processes and practices, I would expect some level of customization to be required to be as effective as possible.