On Values, Principles and Practices, and the suckiness of Project Management

I mentioned a few posts ago that I really liked the quote from Kent Beck

It is about values, out of which flow principles, out of which flow practices.

Some recent online discussions have made it clearer why this is. Values are things that we can all share. As a business analyst or a software architect, I can talk to a client about the value of long-term maintainability of the code, or the value of time-to-market, or the value of high initial quality, or the value of low development cost, or the value of a certain set of core features, or the value of performance measures.

As an experienced software professional, I can choose principles and practices that support the values that a client is interested in. I can explain to a client that there is a cost to applying certain practices, and he may have to weigh one value (e.g. maintainability) against another (e.g. time-to-market).

I use my own judgment in these tradeoffs, but I would much rather use hard-data. I think as an industry, software development can mature if we get serious about identifying the various practices, their relative costs and their relationship with the values that a client is interested in. But that cannot happen yet, and I'll tell you why...

The iron triangle of project management grossly misrepresents the trade-offs, because it only understands the values of Time, Cost and Scope. You want to know why software quality is low? Because it has no choice - simplistic project management will steal from quality to pay scope or cost or time. Developers have very little real control over quality.

Some have suggested adding a fourth "quality" side to the triangle, or turning it into a pyramid. This misses the point. There are things that the client values. These are the things that we have to balance against each other to find the path to a successful project. Sorry, its just not as simple as a polygon of any fixed number of sides.

It has been left to the developers to try and motivate good practices that support other values, but only be able to apply them if they can do so without affecting the golden project management values. The end-result is that less good practices are used, and many developers fight against good practices as much as project managers.