Conventional

Do you feel under pressure to conform to conventions? To do things in accepted and established ways? Irrespective of the relative effectiveness of those conventions?

How do you handle that? 

1. With good grace, understanding the need for consensus and conformity?
2. With constructive criticism, attempting to spark discussions on the prevailing conventions and thereby change them?
3. With surly compliance, resenting the stupidity of it all?
4. With subterfuge and sabotage, attempting to illustrate the flaws in the conventions?
5. Other?

I understand all the conventional approaches to software development. I can even reproduce them through teams and development organisations if asked. But why would I want to do that? Who might need me to do that?

Way Less Productive

The simple truth is that conventional approaches are more than five times less productive than unconventional approaches. (ISBSG data indicates that there can be a three orders of magnitude (that’s a thousand times) difference between conventional and unconventional approaches, at the project level).

Fear of the Unknown

Conventional approaches are all that organisations know, of course. Unconventional approaches, almost by definition, are unknown. Fear of the unknown is a strong buttress for the status quo. And so, convention wins out in most cases. 

But what about when organisations purposely try to overthrow a convention? Why is that scenario so problematic and likely to fail?

Maybe we can take a look at this scenario in more detail in a future post, given a demand.

– Bob