There’s an expression my mother used all the time. (Hi Mom!) She would say something like this about me or my brother, when we were both in high school:
“Well, we had to drag him kicking and screaming to the first lesson, but now he wants to go twice a day.”
(Dragged kicking and screaming seems like a lovely metaphor until you encounter your first enraged 3 year old. Dragging a child who is kicking and screaming from point A to point B is no figure of speech, though it could be considered a ‘presentation’, since it usually occurs in a public venue.)
Anyway, I hijacked the phrase, and I teach it to my teams and use it as a kind of coded language.
It means that we resisted breaking a rule for as long as we thought wise, but finally decided to break that rule openly and explicitly.
Sometimes We Break Agreements
Moses Laying Down The Law
Sometimes, we even break methodology rules, which are often considered more sacred than team agreements! But if you puzzle for a minute, you’ll realize that methodology rules are really just team agreements anyway.
Here’s a sample methodology rule: “We always split a story so that its parts preserve business value.” Here’s a team agreement: “We always reserve the big name changes until after 5 pm so most of us are safely checked in.” Not much difference, really.
Anyway, breaking one of these from time to time is both normal and healthy for teams.
It can be a way of pressing to find limits, places where the existing agreement doesn’t work. Often enough, we even discover new agreements while breaking or re-negotiating our existing ones.
In fact, a team that never breaks a rule is likely to be a team that is significantly slower to adapt and rise to meet the changing demands of a marketplace.
Breaking Rules Carries Two Risks
First, breaking a rule carries the obvious risk of just plain not-working-out. The team is not entirely stupid, nor is the methodology, and these agreements are usually made for a reason. This kind of risk is easy to see, examine, and recover from, if we talk about it.
The other risk is far more subtle and dangerous.
“Chiefly Honored In The Breach”
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One could say that the coding standard agreement is chiefly honored in the breach, which is just high-falutin’ talk for “ignored”.
Ignored agreements can be deeply damaging to a team. If rule #21 can be quietly ignored, why not #4? Why not ignore any rule at all, if it suits a developer to ignore it?
Yikes. Teams live or die by their agreements. In fact, over and above the question of a rule’s actual efficacy, the set of team rules is a large part of that team’s self-definition.
Casually undermine identity, and your team will turn to mush.
And Yet, Sometimes We Break Agreements
So. We’re damned if we follow team or methodology rules too rigorously, and we’re damned if we just quietly ignore them.
The trick then, is hidden in that word quietly. What if we went ahead and broke a rule from time to time, but never break a rule quietly?
Dragged Kicking and Screaming
To say that we are dragged kicking and screaming is to say that we did our best to follow that rule, but finally decided we had to break it, explicitly.
Harking back to our methodology rule above, if a team couldn’t split a too-large story so that it still provided business value, they would say “we were dragged kicking and screaming, and we wound up splitting it arbitrarily just so it had the right size”.
Development Can Not Be Rule-Driven
It’s astonishing to me how many folks think that all you need is some peon/typists and some very strict rules to develop software.
But that’s not how it works.
