Software Craftsmanship: Different Drums

Whenever I've thought of Software Craftsmanship, I've always focused on apprenticeship, and the apprentice's transition to journeyman.  I suppose that's because I've always been fascinated by the learning process, particularly the rapid learning process of the relative newcomer.  These days I'm becoming more focused on the long road to mastery, hoping to someday become a master craftsman myself.  On the other hand, "Uncle" Bob Martin has always focused on the practices of a craftsman, the day-to-day conduct and techniques that a craftsman should adhere to. Lately I'm seeing Micah Martin and Jason Gorman pick up on that theme and assert that the Agile community has moved too far toward process, as opposed to its original focus on working software.  I agree with them and I admire their willingness to distinguish themselves from mainstream agile thinking.  Both of these guys are trying to rally developers around software craftsmanship. Micah is hosting a software craftsmanship summit. Jason is organizing a software craftsmanship conference.

I believe the time is right for us to refocus on working software and pay a bit less attention to process. The main reason I believe this is because of the game-changing productivity gains that we've seen over the last 4 years.  I'm basing my belief on my experiences in the Ruby and web development communities. Do you realize that a few weeks ago over 200 teams competed in a contest to develop a working application in 48 hours? Yes, 48 hours, start to finish. Starting from nothing other than a blank slate Linux distro, you had 48 hours to build a functioning Ruby on Rails application.  Sure, Rails gives you all sorts of stuff out the box, and that's what makes the competition possible, but the real competitive advantage comes when teams can leverage all sorts of robust JavaScript libraries (we used Flotr for graphing interactive data) and, better yet, web APIs to consume services provided by Google, Twitter, and Netflix, to name a few.  When 4 people can self-organize to create something that fast, the game has changed.  A process that was born and bred in 8-man Java-land is just going feel heavy-weight in this sort of hyper-productive environment.

And now more people are banging the software craftsmanship drum, myself included. I've always tended to bang the little apprenticeship drum, but I think I'm ready to bang the bigger, louder drum that's all about raising the bar on code quality and professionalism. So I'm excited to attend the software craftsmanship summit next month, and I'll be paying close attention to the London conference as well.