Michael Feathers

Thoughts on the Future of the Boutique Software Shop

You're stuck for five hours in Heathrow's Terminal 1 during (what is for you) the middle of the night.  What do you do?  For me, the answer last week was to put food in my sleeping gut and browse for books.  The selection is never great.  It's hard to find good books in airports, but last week I got lucky.  I picked up 'Humble Pie', Chef Gordon Ramsay's autobiography. 

Now, I wouldn't be surprised if many of you stop reading at this point.  Opinions about Ramsay vary.  On television, he is often shown in a volatile state, screaming at people in an effort to get them to do a better job in the kitchen.  If you see him in passing, when you are flipping channels, it's easy to see what he does as abusive theater.  If you pause your channel clicker, though, what you discover is that he is really a guy who is all about standards.  He rose up the ranks of his profession by drawing an incredibly hard line and refusing to compromise on quality.  He is hard on people, but for the most part, they understand that it is for a good purpose.  He has something to teach, and they have something to learn, and his style is to make that learning visceral. If you're a software developer, I recommend watching his shows to see his quality focus.  The American series 'Hell's Kitchen' is a good one, but the British version of the series 'Kitchen Nightmares' is better.  It's about turning failing restaurants around, and if you've ever tried to turn around a failing software organization, it's very interesting to see how someone in an entirely different field handles that sort of task.

I don't think there are any perfect analogies across disciplines, but I'm often struck by the similarities between the software development world and the culinary world.  First of all, both are (generally) team sports - you have to work as a tight team to deliver.  Secondly, cleanliness matters.  People in well-run kitchens definitely know that the way to do go fast is to keep clean.  You wipe down your knife, you keep the layout of your station.  Third, it's all about skill.  One person who isn't up to snuff can bring down the level of the team.  There are other similarities as well.  In software development, we do have places which are like the hotdog stand at the airport ("hey, I just work here and I don't think of it as cooking"), places which are like a chain restaurant ("I see myself as a cook, but it's by the book"), and places which are like a high-end restaurant ("we have incredibly high standards and you are going to have a great experience, for a price").  If your experiences are similar to mine, you know of places in the first two categories, but what about the last?  Where are the high-end restaurants of software development?

Okay, let's talk about something else.  A few weeks ago at the Agile2009 conference, I went over to the UX (User Experience) Stage to say hi to Angela Martin.  I saw she was speaking with someone so I waited.  As she came over, I said "you know, I'm feeling uncomfortable."  She said, "Why?" and I said, "Well, I feel really uncomfortable sitting here surrounded by all of these people who think that users are more important than developers."  She gave me a mock-slap and we laughed, but there was a tiny little sliver of truth there for me in that joke I made.  There is this discipline, UX, which is completely about what our software means to someone, and it kind of had to grow up outside of the development community.

I made my way into the industry as a developer, and feel that, naturally, I started with that "not so subtle" developer bias.  Yes, it takes a diverse team to build software.  You need customer interaction, testing, etc.  But, in earlier days the challenge was getting anything working at all in a reasonable time frame, and that made programming the magic art, the thing most prone to failure, and as a result I think that the importance of development was over-emphasized.  I think we're still dealing with that today in the industry.  Yes, people are recognizing that UX work is important, but I don't think they realize quite how important yet.

So, where are the high-end restaurants of software development?  One place to look is in the "boutique software shops."  I don't know where I first heard that term, but for me it is a "catch all" for all of the small software development houses that I see springing up all over the place.  I'm talking about companies like 8th Light, Obtiva, Hashrocket, and EdgeCase.  The thing which ties all of these places together is an emphasis on hand-crafting software for clients, pushing excellence.  Many of the people I know in these companies are refugees in a sense.  They did "Big Corporate IT" and left to start something smaller, more personal and focused.  As well, many of them are in the nascent Software Craftsmanship movement, they share a set of values, and they are running apprenticeship programs and trying to build a grassroots community of like-minded people.

Now, here's the thing.  I don't know what these companies' rates are.  I haven't a clue.  But, I do know that they are trying to sell something that they feel passionate about, sort of like the way that Gordon Ramsay feels about food.  But, here's the thing: in a high-end restaurant it is completely about the user experience.  Everything is subordinate to that.  I don't mean subordinate in the sense that if a customer wants a quick and dirty burger rather than what is on the menu he's going to get it, but rather that he's going to get something special which reflects someone's deep knowledge of the art of cooking, something which they can't get any place else.  Now, here's the trick.  That thing which constitutes that specialness in software probably isn't clean internal structure.  It's more likely wonderful experience as a customer both in the engagement and in their experience of the application.  To put it more boldly: it's not that development teams need UX people, it's more like UX teams need developers. 

Puzzle that one out for a minute.

Let's go back to the kitchen.  What do you need to be a world class Chef?  You need an incredible work ethic, talent, and taste.  It's hard to find all of that bundled in a single person, but typically the people who have it rise through the industry.  Steve Freeman was telling me a story the other day about a master Chef who got so angry at his crew that threw them all out of the kitchen and did the entire service himself.  He was a master because he could do it all.  Today, however, we have a schism in the industry.  It's widely noted that programmers are generally poor at UI design.  It's a different discipline and for some reason the "neural wiring" doesn't overlap often.  But, when you think about it, isn't that a bit like having great technical chefs with a tasting impediment?  Do restaurants separate the roles of taste and execution?  It's really in their interest not to if they are striving for excellence.

Years ago, I was so frustrated with the schism between product owners/customers and developers that I kept wondering why the roles had to be separate.  It causes quite a bit of stress in organizations.  It's hard for a developer to really appreciate the business end of things and vice versa.  Later, I saw that some people were doing an "end run" around that problem.  Small start-ups mixed the roles: you had only one type of person: a person who could code and do business.  I wonder if the same thing is possible for UX and development?  I'm not sure how it would work, but I do think that there is fertile ground in that direction.  And, I do feel that (if it isn't happening already) UX will become the competitive differentiator for the boutiques.  It seems that it will have to be that way.

I want to close out with just one more mapping from restaurants to software development shops, one inspired by Ramsay's book.  Historically, it has been very tough for chefs to extend their reach in the restaurant business.  If you are someone with the magic three: work ethic, talent, and taste, and you also have a flair for business, you can still only be in once place at a time.  Moreover, it is tough to maintain standards.  Gerry Weinberg used to refer to this as the 'Law of the Raspberry Jam' - "the further you spread it, the thinner it gets."  Ramsay seems to be extending his empire by ruthlessly nurturing talent within and spinning people off to head their own restaurants with equity shares.  Each of the restaurants has its own name and style, and (as far as I know) they don't have Gordon's picture on the door; the whole thing is held together with a holding company.  This isn't a new idea in business, but it is something I haven't seen in the boutique space yet.

So, those are my thoughts about the boutiques.  I feel odd mentioning the names of companies because really I know very little about their business models.  I have a development background, so I really only to talk to the people I know in them about "developer things."  The thoughts here are half-formed and I could be completely off-base, but I decided to post to get the ideas out there on the odd chance that they could be helpful.

Oh, and if you watch Gordon Ramsay and he inspires you at all, don't try to recreate his kitchen in your development shop.  :-) Every analogy has to break down someplace.

From People to Programming..

I went to the Agile2009 conference this month, and enjoyed it a great deal.  I have deep roots in that community.. people I've worked with.. people I've known on and off for close to 10 years.  For me, it is a big "catch up" thing.  I pick up things from the sessions but really it's all about the hallway conversations.. people I know and respect who are passionate about delivering software and making the workplace a better place.

I feel lucky that I stumbled upon all of this.  In 1997, I went to the OOPSLA conference in Atlanta, and I was mesmerized by the technical sessions. I was equally mesmerized by the interactive sessions.  In one, I overheard two people talking about how in their consulting job, they had to share a single desk in a half-cubicle, with one of them standing all the time while they were working on their system.  They worked for a huge consulting company, a body shop essentially, and the ethic was "this is the job, your comfort isn't a concern, do the job."

That attitude always terrified me.  I once read a book called 'The Soul of a New Machine' by Tracy Kidder.  It's about a team of young hardware developers racing to build a new computer.  It was 'Death March' before the term 'Death March' was popular. People pulling 18 hour days continually, to bring this thing to life.  The fact is, I love development, and in my 20s, I pulled my all-nighters.  It was intoxicating and fun but when it became expected, it wasn't any longer.  For me, it couldn't be fun when every semblance of choice was gone.

At that OOPSLA, I was lucky enough to stumble into a room where Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham were doing a "birds of a feather" session on pair programming. I'd never heard of it before.  Sure, I'd done it, but when I had I felt guilty.  I felt that when I paired with someone I was wasting company time.  Here were two guys who not only said this was okay and productive, they were also talking about selecting a good chair for programming.  Selecting a chair!  It's hard to convey now how much this impacted me.  Here were people who were saying that you don't have to leave your self at the workplace door, that you can do a great job without shorting yourself and treating yourself like a work tool.

It's amazing how much things have changed since then.  I think that Agile is part of it, but some of it is generational and some of it is economic.  I think that the ethic of "it's the job no matter what" is a legitimate human reaction to fear of failure in a short term situation.  You get people to set everything else aside and focus.. you take all of that wishy-washy human stuff and pull it off the table..  you get together and you climb over the ramparts, hand in hand, with your guns, and if you live, you slap each other on the backs and tell stories over the campfire - that's the life of the tactical hero.  We know, though, that software development isn't a fight or a war.  It's a long game, a game of care and consequences.  Everything we do is sensitively dependent on people, how they feel, what they think is possible in a product.  The game isn't getting through a project and delivering, it's making something very useful, something which fits the user's wants and needs and you win by cultivating startling insights along the way.  That cultivation is the essence of culture, and culture is the essence of successful software delivery in both human and business terms.

Now, having said all of this, I feel myself pulling away from it.  Not the truth of it, but the deeper involvement.  It's been going on for the last couple of years.  One obvious reason is that I'm called less for the "let's transition to Agile" work than the "oh, I've got a big messy pile of code" work.  Life lesson: be careful what you are good at.  The other reason is because I do feel a little out of my element when it comes to remaking a workplace, and let's face facts, that's exactly what transitioning to Agile is, really.  We have the mechanical bits: let's all sit in an open workspace, let's get the customer/product owner involved.  But there are also all of the situational bits, the interface of the team with the surrounding organization, the politics, the fear, meetings with people across an organization about how it all hangs together.  I still love the one-on-one coaching and work with teams.  Everyone has a different view, and what I do is flit from one person to another all day long and help reconcile views, help galvanize action.  Don't get me wrong, it's fun, but it's also..  well.. there's no algorithm for cultural change.  It's a dynamic system and, really, one of my weaknesses is that I like the rush of certainty. I want to abstract away from experience and find what works.

I once told a friend, in a kind of confessional way, that when I'm called in to do a transition, I don't really think about how to help people become more effective, I just walk in and ask myself "would I want to work here?"  And, it's not the building, the project, etc.  It's the feel.  Are people engaged, joyful and proud or are they scared and disheartened? In one particularly odd gig, I worked with a few teams in a company which was going through some rough competitive pressure and some bad history.  As my work with the teams wound down, the sponsor thanked me for all I'd done and and showed me the increase in the quality numbers.. and all that I could think of at that moment was that it wasn't successful by my terms, because I didn't impact the feel in the teams much.  It wasn't what I thought it could be.  It was at that moment that I noticed just how different my definition of success was, how most of it was in human terms.  When it works, it's wonderful and rewarding, when it doesn't you're just left sad and wondering what else you could've done. In a perfect world, human happiness and organizational efficacy would walk hand in hand every single time, but there are times when they don't.

So, I've moved almost completely back into tech.  I spend more time thinking about programming and design than just about anything else work-related recently.  I'm looking for technical solutions and technical patterns. Again, I think it's hard to say how much of this is because of the legacy thing pulling me into the thick of tech and how much is really a matter of choice.  I visit companies with cultures which are all over the map.  Some places are wonderful, some are not so wonderful.  I've seen company cultures get worse and I've seen them get better, and my focus on the team and its technical practices rather than the organization and its bigger issues gives me a bit of distance.  There are people I know who are much more comfortable with that space. 

As much as I love the people stuff, I love the programming, and the cool thing is that it is all connected.  You always have impact. The guy who moves a table to be able to do his work is not a furniture mover by trade, but the table is moved. Saying "how do you feel about that code?" or "what do you think about how your meetings are run?"  You never know where it leads.