Rockstars and compliance monkeys
Very interesting article on Joel’s site about the problems about software methodologies and team dynamics.
The article can be summed up by the following: “methodologies encourage rock stars to become compliance monkeys, and I need everyone on my team to be a rock star”.
His main argument is that methodologies can discounrage innovation and taking iniative. I think perhaps he also has a point about taking the control of the process away from the programmer. Perhaps methodology would be more useful if thought as a training tool? My mum’s an english teacher and she once told me that she could pick the really bright students in her classes as the one who took the writing style “templates” that they’d discussed in class and managed to elaborate on the ideas and take them further in work they submitted. Perhaps trainee programmers can use the “rules” like training wheels and as they begin to understand the development processes better and the reasoning behind the rules, they can slowly decide when the rules need to be broken.
I think the same is true of usability rules too. Experienced developers get to understand the rules so well that they know when it’s ok to break them. The really amazing developers can actually use bending the rules and norms to make a point on the site. However, when novice developers break the rules it’s because they don’t really understand the process properly and because they don’t understand the principles behind creating usable sites they can’t tell that breaking the rules is a bad thing. And if you can’t tell your work isn’t good, it’s harder to make it better.
One of the real problems with having rules is it sometimes can be very difficult for someone who is “qualified” to break the rules to explain why it is neccessary to someone who understands the rules, but doesn’t really understand the principles behind them. They can even sometimes deliberately be used to oppose good ideas and innovations for reasons of politics rather than technology.
This is also quite related to an interesting article he wrote a while back about Jamie Oliver vs McDonalds.