Pottery class

Pottery class

Rob Austin’s characterizations of artful making (low reconfiguration and exploration costs) reminds me of a story of a teacher and a pottery class:

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.

His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pound of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an A.

At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.

There is something to be said for failing your way to success.

Artful Making Part II – Prerequisite conditions for Artful Making

Continuing with my review of Artful Making, here are some things to consider when deciding whether an more industrial approach, or an artful one will better suit your needs.

I have attempted to make Rob Austin’s points (summarized) in block, with my own in clear text underneath.

Artful making (see previous post for defn) features rapid frequent iteration. This approach only makes sense when the cost of an iteration, is cheap compared to the benefits gained from the experience. If the cost of an iteration is high (as in integrated chip, or car manufacturing), you would be better off doing more upfront planning.

Here are two factors to consider in the cost of an iteration:

1. Reconfiguration Costs

Reconfiguration is doing something once, and then tweaking it ever so slightly to do something else. When you can do this cheaply you have a low reconfiguration cost. Car manufacturing doesn’t have a low reconfiguration cost. Reconfiguration of a car design would involve retooling, new equipment, and possibly changing the layout of a plant. Reconfiguration in software development can be relatively inexpensive. Theatre production arranges and rearranges the actions and interactions of the performers, also inexpensively. Hence, software development as well as other business activities can be, in this regard, more like rehearsal than like car making.

Rob is bang on with this point. It shouldn’t be any surprise that early on our industry gravitated towards industrial, or heavily planned waterfall like methods. When you program a computer with punch cards, and a run of the software takes an evening, you are naturally going to spend more time upfront getting things right.

Things are much different today. Just-in-time compilers, databases, Object Oriented design, continuous integration tools, automated regression tests have made the cost of reconfiguring software much cheaper than 40 years ago.

Agile software engineering practices (typified by XP) have low configuration costs.

2. Exploration costs

The second component of the cost of iteration is the cost of trying something that doesn’t work well enough to continue doing it. In an industrial setting, we might think of exploration costs as “scrap costs.” It’s expensive to throw away physical prototypes. When the cost of exploration is high, you want to avoid making too many throw aways. Similarly, a doctor must consider that iteration may have unacceptable impacts on patients. Software development, by contrast, routinely generates “bad” versions as a way to explore possibilities. These versions are not released and can be fixed as early as the next day. Here, too, software development is more like rehearsal than manufacturing; in theatre, there is not much lost when actors try something that doesn’t “work” because something different can be tried in the next rehearsal.

Rob quite rightly points out that agile (and software development in general) doesn’t suffer from the “scrap costs” described in car manufacturing. The scrap costs in software development are people’s time (which shouldn’t be ignored). Still the cost of exploring new designs, architectures, and patterns in software is relatively cheap, compared to the payoff that comes with a cleaner, more maintainable system that is less expensive to support.

Artful Making

Artful Making

Artful Making is a term Rob Austin coined in his book Artful Making – What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work.

Rob describes Artful Making (paraphrased) as follows:

There is an increasingly important category of work – knowledge work – that you can best manage by not enforcing a detailed, in-advance set of objectives. Often in this kind of work, time spent planning what you want to do will be better spent actually doing. In appropriate – only in appropriate conditions – you can gain more value from experience that from up-front analysis.

Managers should look to collaborative artists rather than more traditional management models if they want to create economic value in this new century.

We call this artful making. “Artful”. And it applies well to the fields of product designs, software. New things that involve groups creating, thinking, talking, and collaborating.

This book looks promising and comes highly recommended.

Stay tuned as I am keen to sharing more great metaphors from this book, and how it relates to the knowledge work of software development.