ty.ran.ni.cal
1 of or suited to a tyrant; arbitrary;
despotic
2. harsh, cruel, unjust, oppressive etc.
"We Die.
You will never
hear these words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human
existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it. 'Life is
too short,' we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and
pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for
trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some
ever-receding definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we
bought the right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer,
the right brand of underarm deodorant."
Christopher Locke, "The Cluetrain
Manifesto"
And life is too
short for bad software. Too short to spend ten hours installing an
“upgrade”. Too short to spend two hours
trying to set up your automatic bill payments, or figuring out how to record
something on the VCR. Too short to lose a customer because your support desk
didn't have the information they needed. Too short to wait six months while
your software department implements your latest product idea. Too short to
spend weeks and months developing the wrong software for people who never asked
for it in the first place.
Software was
meant to make our lives easier, to save us time. Instead we are all, every one
of us, living in a software tyranny.
What would we
experience if we overthrew this tyranny? Software would adapt to people, rather
than people adapting to software. We would see a world where people were
excited about the future, rather than fearful. Where companies made life easier
by providing new services at next to no cost. We'd never hear people
apologizing for their software ("Sorry, the computer is really slow
today", or "I can't do that from here"). Service would get
better each week, as new software became available incrementally and without
fuss.
There would be a
torrent of new ideas flooding the marketplace. Services would appear as quickly
as companies and entrepreneurs thought of them. Organizations wouldn't agonize
over which software initiatives to pursue - they'd pursue all of them! Feedback
would be fast and furious - failing initiatives would be cast aside quickly
after low-cost experiments and successful ventures would be reinforced in days
or weeks.
Software
developers would be part of multi-discipline teams, an integral part of the
solution rather than a wearisome bottleneck. They'd get rapid feedback on their
projects, just like everyone else on the team, and feel an immediate sense of
satisfaction. Software development would be the art of exploring the possible,
discovering how to create a successful business hand-in-hand with the
customers.
So how do we
overthrow our software oppressors? First we need to find new ways to develop
software. The early adopters of Extreme Programming (XP) have developed tools
and values that strikingly improve development speed and the quality of the
finished product. XP allows complex software development processes (and complex
software!) to emerge from simple principles and practices. Some companies have
made remarkable progress by adopting XP. But there is room for improvement. We
need to discover how to apply XP more widely, and what changes an organization
can make in other areas to leverage the advantages provided by XP.
The Three Rivers
Institute (TRI) is the premier place for the emergence of software. TRI
provides a harmonious environment for individuals from many disciplines to
gather and investigate the principles underlying emergent software development
and techniques for leveraging these principles. TRI also leads by example. The
institute uses the results of these investigations in ongoing software
development projects and makes the results of these projects (both the
practices and the software applications) available to others. Experience from
these projects is folded back into ongoing research. TRI welcomes participants
from the general business community, bringing new problems and experiences and
taking away insights based on TRI research, and also participates in the
general community by presenting research in papers and at conferences and by
collaborating with other learning organizations.