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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: SchoolsOfSoftwareDevelopment
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Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
For nth, and I'm sure not last time, I'm sliding into a
conversation about defining practices, labeling some of them as
"best", and probably the C-word (certification). It's a familiar
discussion, and although we've barely started it, I can predict much
of where it will go. It's driven by a perfectly reasonable desire to
identify who are the better software developers, and how existing
developers can improve their abilities.
When people get into these conversations, they usually end up in
trouble. Either the group gets into heated discussions and cracks up,
or the group doesn't have heated discussions and produces something
that others deride. The heart of why this happens, and why I don't see
any single, widely-recognized certification program for software
development coming soon is that there is no single, well-agreed way to
develop software effectively.
Instead what we see is a situation where there are several schools
of software development, each with its own definitions and statements
of good practice. As a profession we need to recognize that multiple
schools exist, and their approach to software development development
is quite different. Different to the point that what one school
considers to exemplary is considered by other schools to be
incompetent. Furthermore, we don't know which schools are right (in
part because we CannotMeasureProductivity) although each
school thinks of itself as right, with varying degrees of tolerance
for the others.
I'm using "school" here in the style of this definition:
4 a: a group of persons who hold a common doctrine or follow the
same teacher (as in philosophy, theology, or medicine) <the
Aristotelian school>; also : the doctrine or practice of such a group
b: a group of artists under a common influence c: a group of persons
of similar opinions or behavior; also : the shared opinions or
behavior of such a group <other schools of thought>
I came across this notion explicitly from the Context-Driven
School of Software Testing (see James Bach and Brett
Pettichord). I like their way of looking at this because it's a
model that explains why intelligent software developers have such different
approaches.
The Context-Driven folks have done some looking at different
schools within the testing world, but I don't know of any good attempt
to classify the schools within the broader world of software
development. I feel a sense of belonging to a school, one that for me
is rooted in the people I met through OOPSLA in the
90's. Object-orientation is a key practice of this school, as is agile
methods. You could reasonably argue that this is the agile school,
except I think that agile methods are a core component of this
school's thinking but not the whole picture. The leaders of this
school include people like Ward Cunningham, Ralph Johnson, Kent Beck,
and Robert Martin. ThoughtWorks is, on the whole, an organization that
follows this school (which is why I'm comfortable here).
But despite this sense of a somewhat coherent school, there's still
many open questions. Is it best to think of the agile world as one
school or many (are Scrum and XP different schools or part of the
same)? What are the major schools out there? What exactly defines a
school of thought?
I don't have much of an answer to these questions, but the key
point to remember is that there are multiple schools of thought about
how to develop software effectively. We may not think much of the
other schools to our particular one, but we are foolish not to
recognize that other schools exist.
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