
Building Great Products Through Anarchy - scribu
http://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2015/feb/09/do-what-you-want-building-great-products-through-anarchy
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logfromblammo
Much like political anarchy, it either works really well and everyone is happy
with it, or it is conquered by the King of Tonga and subsides back into the
ocean. Or Mr. Humungus (who sounds like a reasonable feller) tries to take the
gasoline truck. Or everyone in the company dies from tubercuthrax.

But it wasn't _exactly_ anarchy, was it?

If you leave 18 baseball players to their own devices for a whole Saturday, on
a baseball field, with a stack of baseballs, gloves, and bats, you will
probably come back to discover that they played at least one game of baseball.

It's only half the story if we don't know how the Guardian assembled its
development team.

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otakucode
I don't think it bears much resemblance to political anarchy. "Developer
anarchy" has a very different character. When you gather together a group of
random people and call it a 'society', the outcome is very unpredictable. When
you gather together a group of people whose pre-declared passion is creating
neat software, the outcome is far less unpredictable. This sort of 'anarchy'
should better be referred to as 'trust software developers to know how to
develop software'. Most organizations are orgies of people with severe control
fetishes, and they've convinced themselves that nothing beneficial to the
company can be done without their interference. Perhaps they're wrong. Perhaps
software engineers like to work on good software, and will therefore produce
good software when not forced to jump through ridiculous hoops and fall to
every new management fad?

I know that when I am free to do whatever I wish, I try to create software I
can be proud of. When involved in an organizations process, I am usually just
trying to fix something so it's not broken, and there's not even an
opportunity to propose building a better alternative, even if it would have
significant business benefits. The software engineering industry seems to be
obsessed with the idea that everyone except software engineers knows best how
and what should be built.

~~~
logfromblammo
It was just a rhetorical device. I was evoking hyperbolic images of actual
anarchy to illustrate how different they are from the conditions in the
article.

This wasn't anarchy at all. It's even a bit insulting that they decided to
call it that. It's almost as if management folks resent the ability of
development teams to finish things without their guidance/interference, and
wish to poison the well with loaded prejudicial terms.

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andkon
I'd be interested to see what sort of anarchy would happen without a product
manager picking which features fit and didn't. The premise of 'developer
anarchy' seems to suggest that they'd figure it out - but I wonder how long it
would take if there wasn't one person who could call something out-of-scope.

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low-fi
Interesting take on development

