Friday, October 25, 2013
Techne: Goodbye Waterfall, Hello Agile
HowlRound: We often consider technology an imposition on both our craft and our business: social media putting pressure on everything from marketing to performance, for example, or IT budgets draining resources from “more important” work. But the etymological root of technology is techne: the Greek word for art. To paraphrase cartoonist Walt Kelly, we have met the enemy, and it is us. Every month, this column will investigate the ways in which technology can inspire us, transform us, and help us chart a new course in the 21st century. Thanks for—to use a radio metaphor—tuning in.
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2 comments:
I love the agile software development process. It's rough, messy, and will annoy the heck out of me if I'm heading a team, but it's so much more freeform and creative and open to change. At the same time, though, it's structured. It's not entirely organic, and it doesn't need to be. If you're planning everything down to the letter every step of the way, you should expect to need to change it. Every member of the team understands what agile means and doesn't get upset when a few hundred lines of code or a couple of drafts get thrown out, they know the process and are often used to it. It's a very go-with-the-flow place to be, and I think it makes for a fantastic workplace environment.
I have a friend who recently graduated from the School of Music who wrote a musical and got some actors to rehearse it.. And then invited an audience and rehearsed it. And then rewrote it. And invited an audience to critique it. And then rewrote it. And I don't know where he is in the process at this point, but it's an iterative process for him. There is no deadline on this, not specifically, but iterations of research and revision make each draft different. How else can you change and improve?
This reminds me of a group exercise called the marshmallow challenge that asks teams to come up with the tallest spaghetti structure they can that holds a marshmallow at the top in a certain amount of time. In a TED talk that explained the exercise, it was shown that kindergardeners tended to be better because they essentially followed the agile method of development -- they started building right away and figured out what worked and what didn't as they went instead of doing what most adults did, which was to plan first, then build. The adults' structures were more scientifically based, but the first one they built usually was the last because they ran out of time. In terms of theatre and software development, it does make a lot more sense to have a product as soon as you can in order to get more feedback for improvement, instead of being stuck with the first idea that you come up with -- things rarely ever work out the first time through.
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