- Property 1.Frequent Delivery
- Property 2.Reflective Improvement
- Property 3.Osmotic Communication
- Property 4.Personal Safety
- Property 5.Focus
- Property 6.Easy Access to Expert Users
- Property 7.Technical Environment with Automated Tests, Configuration Management, and Frequent Integration
- Evidence: Collaboration across Organizational Boundaries
- Reflection on the Properties
- Footnotes
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Reflection on the Properties
I don't believe that any prescribed procedures exists that can assure that projects land in the safety zone every time. Nor, with the exception of incremental development, do I show up on a project with any particular set of rules in hand, even though I have my favorites. This is why Crystal Clear is built around critical properties instead of specification of procedures.
A Crystal team works to set the seven properties into place, using whatever group conventions, techniques, and standards fit their situation. The conventions may vary by project and by month. New techniques get invented with each new technology (and usually go out of style again a few years later). These seven properties, on the other hand, have been applied on good projects for decades.
My intention with Crystal is to not invade the natural workings of individuals on the project where possible, and to allow the most possible variation across different teams, while still getting those diverse projects into the safety zone. To allow variation, I must remove constraints. Removing constraints means finding broader mechanisms that provide a safety net. The ones I choose to rely on are these:
People are by nature good at looking around and communicating.
They take initiative when provided with information.
They do better in an environment that is safe with respect to personal and emotional safety and particularly freedom from personal attacks.
They do their best work if they can satisfy their need for contribution, accomplishment, and pride-in-work.
The Crystal Clear safety net is built on those things. Personal safety gives people the personal courage to share whatever they discover. Osmotic communication gives them the greatest chance to discover important information from each other and does so with very low communication cost. Reflective improvement gives them a channel to apply feedback to their working process. Easy access to expert users gives them the opportunity to quickly discover relevant information from the user(s). Frequent delivery creates feedback to the system's requirements and the development process. The technical development environment including automated tests, configuration management, and frequent integration allows people to safely make changes to the system, synchronize the multiple minds that are in motion at the same time, and get feedback on the system's intermediate stages quickly. Focus allows the team to spend their energy well on the most important things.
Ron Jeffries once characterized Crystal Clear as, "Bring a few developers together in peace, love and harmony, shipping code every other month, and good software will emerge." He is close.
You should be asking at this point, "But what is special in all this about small projects? Shouldn't all project teams set these properties in place?"
The answer—with two side notes—is, "Of course." The properties that make a small-team project successful should be very similar to making any project successful, but should be optimized for the small-project situation.
The first note is that the properties are easier to reach on a small project. Personal safety is easier, since the people interact with each other more often and come to know each other sooner. The feedback loops are much smaller, and the rest of the properties follow accordingly.
The second note is that osmotic communication, which lives from background hearing and communication along lines-of-sight, really only works with small teams. Larger teams will set up osmotic communication within subteams and close communication across subteams.