Liz Keogh, Jean Tabaka and Eric Willeke are actively involved with the development of Agile Software techniques. They recently met up with the objective 'to give something back to the community' and this week I wanted to share what they created with you.
The output was a statement of commitment, a pledge if you will, for their group - Here's a copy of it:
“A Community of Thinkers”
I am a member of a community of thinkers.
I believe that communities exist as homes for professionals to learn, teach, and reflect on their work.
I challenge each community in the software industry to:
- reflect and honour the practitioners who make its existence possible;
- provide an excellent experience for it's members;
- support the excellent experience its members provide for their clients and colleagues in all aspects of their professional interactions;
- exemplify, as a body, the professional and humane behaviour of its members;
- engage and collaborate within and across communities through respectful exploration of diverse and divergent insights;
- embrace newcomers to the community openly and to celebrate ongoing journeys; and,
- thrive on the sustained health of the community and its members through continual reflection and improvement.
I believe that leaders in each community have a responsibility to exhibit these behaviours, and that people who exhibit these behaviours will become leaders.
I am a member of a community of thinkers. If I should happen to be a catalyst more than others, I consider that a tribute to those who have inspired me.
”A Community of Thinkers” by Liz Keogh, Jean Tabaka and Eric Willeke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Please attribute to the distributor of your copy or derivative.
Whilst I agree with the sentiment entirely (albeit a little manifesto-ish for my personal taste). The point that interests me particularly isn't as much about the code of conduct itself but the thoughts behind the need for a community in the first place... And the questions of whether we view that we're part of similar communities in our respective worlds.
The statement really acknowledges two things which I think are important to us as a community of Business Analysts (regardless of whether that involves IT development or not):
- Continuous Improvement - It's obvious but the way we do things today isn’t the only way that we can do them. We need learn from our combined success and our failures in equal measure. The world keeps moving and so must the disciplines and techniques that we use… weather that's for better product, better results or simply to do things faster and cheaper.
- Respect for Communities - A 'community' in this sense is just a boundary-less, hierarchy-free group of people who are committed to driving their industry forward regardless of their organisation, team or political agendas. The statement to me really embraces the old management cliché of 'people being our most important assets' and does this with conviction. The community are the root of the improvements, innovations and developments that we see.
Equality important is the recognition that we're all part of that community and with that comes an equaled responsibility to contribute & support it. The level of our contribution to the community directly correlates with our success (or failure) and how fulfilled we are by the roles we play both today and in the future.
I read an interesting story early this week that really brings to life the value of prototyping.
In a recent interview with Wired magazine, Lee Unkrich (director of Toy Story 3) said something that reflects an important part of any truly successful team. It's also a principle that's deeply embedded into Agile Development teams.
Technical Debt is a metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to raise awareness of some of the long term impacts of the decisions that we take to get project or technical change live.
Ward's metaphor refers more to 'debt' taken with ugly coding or patched together architecture but I think this concept expands well to design too. 
Liz Keogh, Jean Tabaka and Eric Willeke are actively involved with the development of Agile Software techniques. They recently met up with the objective 'to give something back to the community' and this week I wanted to share what they created with you.
