Industrial XP: IndustrialxpValues?  Enjoyment As Value
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Enjoyment As ValueRevision r1.2 - 07 Jan 2004 - 20:42 GMT - SomikRahaI wasn't entirely convinced about enjoyment as a value. But I've been reading "Questioning Extreme Programming" and came across this on pg. 162: "... they reveal an interesting aspect of Extreme Programming --the fact that XP considers developer enjoyment of the process important". -- RichardJensen?Rob Mee told me that Kent played with the idea of including enjoyment as a value when he was writing XP. It was not on my list of values until I spoke with my good friend III. I was telling III about the values that I felt were most important to agile development and III blurted out FUN. And it hit me - oh yeah -- of course! Fun -- if it ain't fun, something's wrong! And I was struck by the insight of it -- yes, indeed, when I've written fine code, gelled with a team or thoroughly pleased my users, I've had a heck of a lot of fun. In further talks with friends, including Russ, Tracy and Somik, we decided to call this value Enjoymemt. Definitely the most controversial value in the lot and I wouldn't drop it for anything. Let us steer our projects, our practices and our lives by enjoyment. Make your code an enjoyable place to be -- make it do things for your customers that they enjoy and enjoy the people in your project community. -- JoshuaKerievsky We discussed Enjoyment at length when formulating Industrial XP. What we discovered was that we all agreed it was a critical value, but didn't know how much people would flinch when they saw it written down. In the end, we decided that our goal is to capture what works. We reason that if people accept a process with the word "extreme" in the title, they have the plasticity to also acknowledge that real people are doing the work of software development, and that when people enjoy what they're doing, it leads to clearer focus, better aligned goals, teamwork and retention. -- RussRufer? There can be no doubt of this, at least for me. Lack of fun is nature's way of telling us to do something else. The ideas, insofar as I can read them between the sparse lines, are all good. Enjoyment is right up there ... with the added advantage that if one gets any objections to it, one knows right away that there's trouble in River City. -- RonJeffries? Here's the logic behind "enjoyment." People who are enjoying their work produce better products. Therefore, it makes sense to focus upon enjoyment, if only because it is a precondition for requisite quality. Many seem to hold others responsible for their level of enjoyment, as if management or someone else should "make you happy." We also often focus upon "making the customer happy," as if we could and as if that would somehow result in enjoyment. Most of the death march projects I've seen were focused upon making some else happy. That the management literature has largely ignored the value of enjoyment baffles me. See my new book The Blind Men and the Elephant-Mastering Project Work http://www.bkpub.com/products/productshow.adp?code=370 for some simple, powerful tools anyone can use to improve their enjoyment, what I call "Juiciness" (JuicinessAsValue) on projects. -- DavidSchmaltz? Years ago I taught Math at the high school and then college level. On each test or assignment the students had to rate their ef (Enjoyment Factor) on a scale of 1 to 10. I found that most students would accompany their number with a short explanation that helped me tune the class or the assignment. A student might write "6, would have been 10 but the test was too long" and so on. I think enjoyment is a great value and getting people to consider what is standing in the way of their enjoyment might help us tune the process. -- DanielSteinberg? |
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