The Fifth Value – Respect

There’s a lot to be said about respect but for some reason this value is not stressed enough. I think that much of what troubling the software development world today can be traced back to this value. Lets face it most developers are arrogant bastards(and yes I’m a developer too).

Taken from Kent book:

Every person whose life is touched by software development has equal value as a human being. No one is intrinsically worth more than anyone else. For software development to simultaneously improve in humanity and productivity, the contributions of each person on the team need to be respected. I am important and so are you.

lets take a few examples I’ve encountered (ok, ok I’ve said those):

• “our customers does not know what they want. Ill tell you what they want”
• “our test team don’t have a clue on what they are doing and how to test the system”
• “I don’t trust our system deployment team to properly configure the system in at the customer site”

and the list goes on.

The problem is that this kind of attitude, even if its backed up with real hard facts, leads to a basic lack of respect, and this will effect the project outcome.

I try to treat everyone the same (with partial success I admit), when facing incompetency, I first try to see if this can be fixed (in many cases what looks like incompetency is a result of a simple lack of knowledge) and if it cant, I will look for a replacement. Most project I’ve worked on don’t have the luxury with the less capable.

Posted in: Agile practices.,Random Thoughts