Talk Like A Duck

In my thirty-two year career at IBM, I can’t begin to count how many times I was bothered by
the IBM software development process.

When I started, in 1974, I found myself trying to swim under the waterfall. Everything
hinged on “Requirements Documents,” “Initial Functional Specs,” “Design Reviews,” etc.
Managers were constantly wanting line of code estimates. Far more effort was wasted on
process rather than progress. Sometimes the process overhead was fatal. My first project at
IBM was part of IBMs major initiative in the 1970s to replace the IBM/370 with a new system
called “FS”. One of my heroes at the time was John Sowa who worked in the architecture
department and whose role seemed to be the resident iconoclast. In one of his memorable
memos available on his web site,
John made the observation that the system architecture specification comprised fifteen
registered IBM confidential documents, each with an individual need to know. A fact which
effectively prevented anyone in the company from understanding the system
and its problems.

So, it should be no surprise that I came to an appreciation of what are now called
agile methods, early on in my career, and fought for the processes and technologies which
enable agility inside IBM, and evangelized such approaches to IBM customers.

Fred George was one of my allies during part of this struggle. Fred was a middle-level IBM
manager who came to the IBM lab in Cary, NC about the time we started using Smalltalk, and
I was developing a prototype application development tool which morphed into VisualAge.
I worked in Fred’s organization and claim influencing him on dynamic OO technology, and agile
methods.

Fred now works for ThoughtWorks, and blogs about agile methods. Recently he has been
writing about how to push back against bean-counting. I get the sense that Fred shared
many of my frustrations with the old IBM process.