I don’t feel like a Bonobo !
A while back, right at the time QCon was happening in San Francisco, Linda Rising came to the Bay Area Agile Leadership monthly meeting to give us a talk on pairing and, as it happens, about Bonobos.
As it happens the talk is very entertaining and informative (don’t miss it if you get a chance) about Chimps, Bonobos (one of the lesser known species of hominidae) and as it should about our social behaviours. Linda’s point about was that Chimpanzees are command and control, territorial and aggressive while Bonobos are not and maintain cohesion through the same means as European aristocracies did. And she asserted that agilists are the bonobos of software development. Which is kind of worrying because the Bonobos are an endangered species.
The analogy definitely has merits. And limits. I believe I am an agilist. Maybe I am wrong and only a command and control person who ignores it. Still I am territorial, aggressive and all these bad things that male humans typically are. One of the pieces of analogy was that pairing played a similar role in agile development teams as sexual intercourse do with bonobos, which is maintain social cohesion. It certainly true it has this effect. But, being rather individualistic, I am not pairing for the sake of the group. I am pairing because it makes me better at chat I do first. I do it to test ideas with other intelligent beings (because the computer cannot evaluate it yet) and sometimes, when I am lucky, to plunder someone else’s ideas and integrate them in my own conceptions and theories. That is why I pair. Even better, I find paring is a good way to let a hierarchy of developers emerge. Essentially through a series of duels.
That is where I touched the limits of that very useful analogy. It was truly enlightening to start thinking about how agile development practices may better feel our human needs for social interactions than waterfall style methodologies. It also reminded me of how software developers (as well as humans in general) have a tribal reflex. Agile methodologies in that sense let the tribe emerge while the command and control approach requires management to assemble a tribe. The latter being obviously much more difficult.
I still prefer the Greek/Roman/Barbarian analogy. Still the Bonobos/Chimpanzees one is now a full part of my mental toolbox although I find it preferable to use cross-pollination rather than copulation to define what pairing is.