Doug Bradbury and Paul Hagel compiled together the Software Craftsmanshup Manifesto. The Manifesto is based on an initial summit in Libertyville in December 2008. After that summit, the output was discussed over the last two months on the Software Craftsmanship Googlegroup resulting in a distinguishing list of values similar to the Agile Manifesto.
I had to immediately sign this manifesto, since I couldn’t agree more to it. Over the past one to two years I have seen crappy software built under higher management constraints lacking basic quality. Taking Jerry Weinberg’s quote “Quality is value to some person.”, I don’t see much value in most of the software I have to deal with on a daily basis. James Bach seems to have a similar view on the things. That caused him start a series on the death of quality this week; just 24 hours later he explored together with Michael Bolton a software project, which claims to deploy 50 times a day resulting in poorly received quality – at least for James and Michael.
Currently I’m hoping that craftsmanship thinking can bring the software development business back on track. Personally I would like to write code to be proud of and don’t have a bad feeling about that one class, where I screwed up. As a software craftsman I appreciate the work of others around the globe in the field and I’m very glad to exchange thoughts on their work and my work at conferences or via online tools such as instant messaging or desktop sharing. Just this week I had the opportunity to exchange some thoughts with Michael Bolton and I experienced a very nice contact in it. Michael had the ability to make me think on many things, that I have already read about – 2 years ago – but forgot to include into my daily work life so far. Just one week ago I had the other opportunity to meet Gojko Adzic at the Software Craftsmanship Conference in London. One year ago I started to give Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory feedback on their book on Agile Testing. I’m sure I could perpetuate this list even more, but personally I would like to stick to the most meaningful contacts from the last year for now.
Maybe poor received quality has become a linear feature in our software systems. Maybe most of the people out there think this is ok. This is where I personally heavily disagree. Being a perfectionist to some degree I would like to see software that delights myself, where I say “why hasn’t this product been developed in this case long ago?”. From my point of view this distinguishes mass-market software from well-crafted software.
