• Maintain a good Separation of Concerns.

• Craft crisp and resilient Abstractions.

• Create a balanced distribution of Responsibilities.

• Strive to Simplify

The exhortation to simplify is important. And at the same time, look at a flower. It is at once simple, and complex! Many of it's mechanisms can be reduced to quite simple terms, and yet when you look at the detail of it's structure there is so much there! Simple. And complex. That is the art and the engineering genius we strive for--to create systems that are at once simple and complex.  

The elegance in the "design" of a flower comes from its fine fit to purpose, and its marvelous beauty--balance, symmetry, color; none of it squandered or gratuitous. All fitting within the purpose of the plant, within the ecosystem in which it is adapted to play its part. 

Booch's fundamentals are very much about harnessing complexity. Stripping away the unnecessary, yes. But also by finding the natural interstices and designing mechanisms that cleanly, with elegant simplicity, address cross-cutting concerns. I noted that we can use the mnemonic SCARS for these fundamentals--appropriate since experience informs our endeavors to create systems that, taken as a mass of details, are enormously complex, but which can be viewed in terms of more simple structures and mechanisms.

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is the noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."  -- Confucius

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." Barry LePatner

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

-- Sir Ken Robinson, Do schools kill creativity? Ted talk filmed 2/2006

5/3/09 Hammered Truth

Dana mentioned a phrase that struck him reading The Floating Island to the kids a few weeks back. In the story, Ven's father told him to speak only the "hammered truth" and the king lighted at this and appointed Ven to bring him the "hammered truth" from his travels around the world.

Isn't that great? There's the truth, and there's the 'hammered truth--facts that are not varnished or hidden, but shaped straight, like steel that has been hammered... "Tell people the hammered truth and it will ring like steel against an anvil."'

The truth that has taken the pounding of time and experience. The essential truth. The consultant, and the architect as consultant, needs to find that truth when we are called on to speak truth to power. Which is not the same as using the truth to hammer our point home! The truth needs to be handled with dexterity, even delicately, to ring clearly.

5/3/09 Over the Top

I stopped by Martin Fowler's bliki and got caught up on the latest conference scandal. Now, I have to say I expected at least a murmur over Hugh MacLeod's March 8 2008 SXSW cartoon and I'm not aware of anything... I suspect this is because saying anything in this area is like going noodling!

Mike Gunderloy did something important. Leaders in our industry should not condone behavior that messages that software development is a male province.

Clearly there are a lot of people in the Ruby space who don't embrace the exclusive attitudes of the leadership of one Ruby community. But to the extent to which it is a problem, it is not limited to the Ruby space, as demonstrated by Hugh MacLeod's SXSW'08 cartoon. I didn't bring this up last March, because I felt it was better not to trigger a crescendo of publicity for MacLeod (playing the hand he dealt). On the one hand, one can defend MacLeod on the grounds that he's an artist who reflects society as he sees it. On the other, he's a marketer, and he pandered to an undercurrent in a machismo culture to market himself, without regard to the harm it does to make a woman's private interface an impersonal sex object. And "killer" is a rather profoundly unfortunate term to link with sex, especially when objectified, depersonalized and framed from the male-as-user viewpoint. Still, we're all adults and we overlook noise on the channel all the time, so no harm done, right? At SXSW'08, Hugh's cartoon (March 8) at least reflected, if not stimulated, attention to sex on the backchat agenda. If you think that kind of attention is harmless, remember that bringing "men's club" talk into the conference spilled over in the crowd behavior in the Lacy-Zuckerberg interview (March 9). That, too, raised a round of "is sexism--is not sexism" debate. 

These are not just "bad choices" in isolation. These bad choices are being made because there is a perception that they will raise popularity for the men (and women) who perpetuate them--because there is a perception that this machismo behavior has enough of an audience in the software community to be worthwhile. It is this bigger problem, subtly eroding our expectations of women as technical contributors, that we need to be aware of, for it impacts how our field is experienced and perceived. And so far, it does not show up so well on the radar of young women choosing a career, and until we have more women in the field, there will be too little experience of working with women to appreciate how much they bring to software development--even if their style is quite different. Having a more diverse team profile will make it more comfortable for men too, because men are not homogeneous in style or values either.  

5/8/09 Looking for the Women

I thought I should "look in the mirror" and "apply criticism to self before others" and so scouted a bit more looking for women architects to add to my blogroll. Which is how I came upon Lori Olsen's blog. I saw mention that she is an architect, but from a cursory look she doesn't seem to blog about architecture topics. Her cloud reference is amusing.

5/8/09 Why the Lid?               

Some of the architects Dana was working with in The Netherlands this past week asked him why I put the lid on my journal, and it occurs to me that I edited out the post that explained that! So let me repeat the gist. I discovered that

1. someone used my sketch on the right in an inflammatory rant. He posted anonymously, but used one of my images (by embedded URL reference) and as you know my name is the domain name for my website. So my name gets embroiled in someone else's flames.
2. two adult Ryans were using a picture of my son Ryan from my website to represent themselves in their youth, so not glaringly offensive but a warning of other possibilities

In retrospect, my domain name choice could be harmful (of course, I used it because name recognition is important in the "boutique consulting" trade). It occurred to me that I ought to be more careful. Now, I have adopted the style in my journal of "showing up" as a whole person, because I believe that the Industrial Era notion that we send a carbon-copy automaton to work, and reserve our creative, feeling persona for our home-life is out-of-sync with the demands of the Innovation Era--the era where innovation is both democratized and a dominant feature of the competitive landscape (cost elimination is no longer enough). So, I explore the lessons I extract from my varied encounters working with architects, reading, and in my life more generally--and they show up here, in so far as they relate to working with great architects to help them reach their goals. One of early pieces of feedback I got on my site was an architect saying how he liked that I had a small gallery of my family and interests, and I think that is a part of making people comfortable--yes, I am certifiably passionate about architecture, but my husband and kids are the center of my universe and deeply important to me.

Anyway, the downside of showing up, is that it is hard to draw the "right" line. When I first "put the lid on," I thought that scrubbing personal pictures and entries out would be more work than it was worth given other demands on my time, so simpler to just sever the link tree... but that meant Google couldn't index my site. Given all the exploration I've recorded in my journal over these past three years, that was a big loss to me! (For example, try Googling the following: agile architecture site:ruthmalan.com. 110 results!)   So I reconnected the link trail to allow Google back in, and in odd moments I've been going back over the weeks and months of entries and wrestling with what is over the line and pruning back.

On the upside, the use of my sketches by other people (they've been used not just in the bad way mentioned above) is an implied compliment to (my hokey sketches of) archman.  It just goes to show that there is some appeal to sketches that convey an idea, even when the sketch is pretty primitive, as mine are. And that is a key message I've been trying to convey: people connect with and respond to visual ideas so they are an important tool to develop and have at hand in our leadership/communication/design toolset. We are redefining what it means to "be professional," and defaulting to slick is giving way to considering what will be more effective. (Sometimes, slick is what is effective as it communicates formally "done" and "market-ready." But sometimes it is not, and rough sketches communicate "in progress" and "participation welcome".) 

On the downside, the misbehavior on the i-way is disconcerting. Associating someone else's name with a rant on an inflammatory subject should be outlawed!  And using another person's copyrighted images without clear attribution washes away at the ethical ground we rely on.

5/11/09: While I go through and scrub some of my entries, I have also been eliminating the "surface" trimmed don branches of my journal tree. I realized that everyone who "followed" my journal regularly was reading the "undercover" version anyway, so there is no point to the extra maintenance. No-one was recommending the summary surface version, nor the "undercover" version, so it wasn't my wordiness that was their hold-back. It was... just me! Sigh. Oh well, at least we know that affirmative action isn't a factor to worry about in our field. Grin.

5/9/09 Nice Words from Around the World

I don't have even a reading knowledge of Portuguese, but from Google's translate feature I have a rough idea that Marco Aurélio's post titled
 Blog da Ruth Malan - A Trace in the Sand is kind--thanks Marco. It is good to see (mostly by inference) the good work you're involved in, building the software architect community in Brazil. 

I do have a barely serviceable reading knowledge of Dutch, and G.J. Timmerman has a good summary and introduction to our "What It Takes to be Great" paper and architect competency framework. I do rather like "inspiring" being used as an adjective related to our work, since I explicitly set out to inspire --and enable, of course.

That's the framework we use for what we do in our workshops and in our writing: inspire and enable. It is also what I believe architects need to do. Even if you have formal authority, it is more effective to motivate and enable the team to create a great system: effort required? effort inspired. 

5/9/09 Recital Season

We're approaching the end of the school year, so this is school play and recital season, and we've been kept busy with piano, ballet, and recorder recitals, class plays, Spanish plays, and on, and on. It's fun though, and "Weezie" Smith's recorder students (of all ages) have a great program (the dress rehearsal was today).

Weezie Smith is a consummate teacher--she is demanding but she helps her students reach for the best in themselves by inspiring and encouraging them. Their ballet teacher, Doricha Sales, is likewise demanding and no-nonsense, but she is always talking about the bigger context of a specific learning point, and helping the children envision themselves as dancers, inspiring them. And me! Would that I were so talented a teacher!

Inspire and enable. 

5/9/09 Ban Powerpoint?

Of course not. But...

McNealy famously declared to the San Jose Mercury, 3 August 1997: "We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, 'What a huge waste of corporate productivity'. So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since. Now I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see its earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going: 'What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work'." Powerpoint: A Pig through the Python, Richard Hillesley, 2007

And Tufte famously headed a Wired article: 

"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely" - Edward Tufte

Don Norman responded to Tufte In Defense of Powerpoint. But the point, of course, is that when conversation is needed, PowerPoint may not be a good tool:

'...Oftentimes, PowerPoint creates an obstacle to an honest, shirtsleeve conversation. While PowerPoint didn't invent one-way communication, it certainly perfected it.

Lou Gerstner's remarkable turnaround of IBM from near-collapse began with a briefing he asked for on the state of the mainframe business that accounted for more than 90 percent of the company's profits, which were sinking fast. Gerstner describes this critical meeting in his book "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance" as follows:

"At the time, the standard format of any important IBM meeting was a presentation using overhead projectors and graphics on transparencies that IBMers called—and no one remembers why—"foils." Nick was on his second foil when I stepped to the table and, as politely as I could in front of his team, switched off the projector. After a long moment of awkward silence, I simply said, "Let's just talk about your business." I mention this episode because it had an unintended, but terribly powerful ripple effect."'

PowerPoint: Boon or Bane? August 01, 2007 By Abhay Padgaonka

Watching the behavior that defaulting to "talking at" (using PowerPoint as the prop for doing so), David Clarke also banned PowerPoint:

"As CIO for a global company a few years back, I actually banned PowerPoint presentations in my team for a while. ... The problem was that our attention span had become so limited that our level of conversation had degenerated to this bullet point way of talking and thinking. We were presenting to each other, not talking with each other. We didn’t know how to engage people in other ways, so we took the few minutes we got and gave them the Reader’s Digest version of the idea we wanted to convey."

Banning PowerPoint Reveals Flawed Communication, By David S. Clarke, November 15, 2001

5/11/09: PowerPoint is not the issue, really. It is comes up, because it is the de facto tool used to prepare presentations, and the issue is using one-way presentation when conversation and collaboration is what is needed. It's not just the "bullet points," it is the style of having the "podium" and managing attention to a preset agenda dictated by the slideset. In short, it turns meetings into lectures. Again, this is not Powerpoint, per se, but it is the mode we just fall into where we use a tool (Powerpoint, or our UML/round-trip engineering tool) and let that drive attention to center stage to the person with the mouse/clicker, when "people and interactions" need to be front and center.

When we want to communicate that we are fluid about our ideas--yes, we've done homework, but we're still in an expansive (divergent in the sense of gathering ideas), input-seeking mode--then drawing and capturing brainstorm ideas on a whiteboard or paper is a great medium. Yes, the facilitator still has influence over the flow of the agenda, but we don't get the same domination of the attention space as one typically gets with a prepared Powerpoint (or other) presentation. The message that is communicated is "we're open to input and open to shaping the flow of conversation around the audience concerns, goals and input."

A few points about mechanics:

• if the meeting room walls are short on white-board space, be prepared with extra sheets of paper or flip chart pads and painter's tape, and make sure that all work done in the meeting is visible at all times by taping up the paper as each sheet is completed. That way, you don't have to erase work to make room for more work.

• have a digital camera at hand and take pictures of the work--even if there is the intent to transcribe from paper to electronic form, still take digital pictures so you have a meeting record to refer back to.

• if you have designs, facts and figures, etc. to share as a backup to discussion, a (draft) white paper may be a good vehicle.

See also:

• Drawing on the Walls--It's not just for kids!
• Visual Modeling

Realizing that I'm on a "visual kick," Daniel Stroe sent me this link: Doodling may help memory recall.

We have long known the value of keeping the hands busy with something that doesn't require focus to free the mind to pay attention. That is why we use Koosh balls in workshops! I suppose we could just ask people to doodle! Still, the Koosh balls also help people when they're presenting their team's work to the larger group. Keeping their hands busy with the ball, seems to allow even shy people to be less selfconscious. It is funny, but when I tell people what the Koosh are for, fewer seem to fiddle with theirs. You'd think it would be the other way round! Watching how people deal with the tag, I've made it the first exercise of the workshop to remove it. It gets people fiddling, and gives me the opportunity to quip that it is emblematic of the evolution of man--some brute force it, some use a tool, and some apply conceptual modeling and "reverse engineer" the loop. I get an immediate hit on personality types!

As for my "visual kick"--I am, actually, actively pulling together material on the role visualization plays in architecture, so please join Daniel in sending me links and ideas, anecdotes/experiences, whatever. I'm working on a presentation for a CAEAP event. My working title for the presentation is "PICTURE IT" but I'm also playing with 'Drawing People In" which has a play on words that I like, given my message.

5/11/09 Orchesography

I mentioned the kid's recorder recital, but didn't mention that the music was mostly Renaissance pieces. At the recital, Weezie Smith recommended Orchesography by Thoinot Arbeau. Written in 1587, it presents music and dances of the period. It has an interesting annotation for drum beats on the music score and an annotation for the dance steps, as well pictures of the dancers showing the costumes and footwork. I remember Grady Booch mentioning a visual language for dance (labanotation) in one of his blog entries several years ago. Anyway, it fits my theme of visualizing--in this case using a visual language to create and record something that is inherently visual, but still hard to capture on paper without a language that is at least somewhat standardized to allow consistent interpretation. Last year I jotted some notes and thoughts on a similar topic--a language for origami.