[Off-Topic] Compilation: "Processes and Methodologies Won't Help You!"

This is one of the oldest subjects I explore on this blog. Many of the principles, philosophies, and thoughts behind it are in my infamous (and long) Off-Topic posts. Since it’s many years of posts, I decided to compile what I consider the foundations of what everyone needs to know about this long bikeshedding called “processes and methodologies.”

Start simple with the article that lends its title to this compilation, Processes and Methodologies Won’t Help You, which I published on Abril’s blogs in 2011. To start by understanding what processes, methodologies, and procedures are.

Next, go straight to the more recent Agile: the Truth Behind the Method and understand once and for all: no methodology or magic recipe will ever save incompetent or bad-character members of any team. After trying to argue for improved attitude and training, and it doesn’t work, you only save a team from these elements in one way: by replacing the members. Nothing saves a Net Negative Producing Programmer. Many are left with that feeling of “waste” like “man, but we’ve invested so much in him, what if we invest a little more?” and that’s from the failure to understand that Sunk Cost is better than increasing your Opportunity Cost.

On the same “Agile is Dead” theme — or, more explicitly, “Agile-by-bikeshedding-consultants is Dead” — it’s worth recalling the old theme of The Problem of Credentials and Argumentation through Intimidation. And the credential guy who has the easiest job in the world: showing up at your company to implement “practices” that he has no real practice in (no, trying to implement at one or half a dozen places is hilariously and ridiculously the same as nothing), and when it “seems” to work, putting it on his portfolio list as a “success case,” or when it goes wrong, saying “you didn’t do it right.” Terrible.

Forget pompous names, different schools of methodologies — everything starts from exactly the same principle: Scientific Method vs Cargo Cult, where it’s clear no one understands the main thing about the method: it doesn’t pick sides or root for any team.

The phrase “it’s proven to work because I’ve seen it working in 100 places” doesn’t exist.

Anyone who uses a phrase similar to this is clearly an amateur. By Karl Popper’s principle of “Falsifiability”, instead of trying to prove something works, it’s better to try to disprove that it works. Because it doesn’t matter how many tons of evidence we manage to accumulate that something is true — a single piece of evidence that makes it false is enough to destroy any hypothesis. That’s why the scientific body is robust, not because we have mountains of evidence in its favor, but because what we’ve accumulated so far hasn’t been proven false.

But human beings are fallible — our non-rational brain, a leftover of our long evolution, is still exceptional at seeing patterns where none exist, as I describe in We Are Mathematically Ignorant and Processes, Methodologies and the Human Brain. This is the most accepted hypothesis: we tend to confuse correlation with causation — because “A” came before “B” we tend to think that “A” caused “B,” and most of the time this isn’t true. The world is more random than we’d like to accept. Shit just happens.

This leads to the pseudo-intellectuals who want to push their “Southbeach Diet” of the day, becoming mere trolls or haters, as I describe in this post: Math, Trolls, Haters and Internet Discussions. Creating more and more diets as I talk about in #noEstimates Debunked or Demystifying the Kanban method and Watch Out for Kanban-butt.

And all of that I linked above is just the introduction to the most important thing of all: Be skeptical all the time — nothing is automatically true, no matter who’s saying it. And as Carl Sagan would say: “extraordinary claims DEMAND extraordinary evidence.” In the end, we always come back to the theme of Enemies of Reason.

The problem is: if none of this works, what do you do? Yes, it’s much easier to say what’s wrong than to say what to do. And the problem isn’t “which recipe,” it’s “which decision” to make. Everything is a sequence of micro-decisions, macro-decisions. Decisions bring consequences, which lead us to new dilemmas, which require more decisions. As Neo would say in The Matrix Reloaded: “The problem is choices.” And here’s the question: there simply IS NO magic recipe, magic diet, magic methodology, that will make you make better decisions all the time. The desire to seek an external tool, an external source of “validation” (which, by the way, is one of the worst words invented in recent times). The problem is that decisions carry consequences and most people simply wish they didn’t have to bear them, and that’s the root of the problem. This is the comfort zone: everyone complains and wants something, but no one wants to have to make decisions, much less face their consequences.

The only way to make better decisions is to study and train, as much as possible, all the time, continuously, eternally. Experience isn’t doing the same thing for 10 years straight but becoming very good at 10 different things during those 10 years. Following the trend won’t help you, just as following magic diets will leave you a bit thinner at the beginning and soon after you’ll have a rebound that will leave you heavier than you were before you started — and that’s why Processes and Methodologies Won’t Help You.