I referred some time ago to an article by Robert L Glass published in IEEE’s Software magazine entitled "Greece vs. Rome Two Very Different Software Cultures". You can purchase this article but I find it a bit expensive for a two pages column. It is based on The Olduvai Imperative by Peter DeGrace and Leslie Hulet Stahl. Unfortunately this book seems out of print (although it can be found from specialty book shops online).

The author of the article describes three work cultures. The greek one where workers are "(…) individuals or self motivated members of teams" that were behaving like contractors and the roman one where the worker is "(…) sacrificing himself for the good of the organization, giving up his individuality, and closely identifying with his group." are taken from the book. He adds a third one, the barbarian.

He goes on to describe the compared values of each culture (I would have to reprint the whole article to give them here and I don’t want to infringe on the IEEE and Robert L Glass copyrights). Let me go straight to the conclusion as it applies to Agility: "Greeks would fit pretty well in the Agile Camp, Romans would be working mightily to improve their CMM level, and barbarians would say "huh?" if you mentioned either one.".

The article finishes with an excellent tale (taken from the book) telling what many of us have witnessed for a long time. The roman produces a great deal of external activity and produces a lot of artifacts showing more productivity. He beats the greek who took time to think of a simple solution that did not display enough effort. But Robert L Glass adds that in reality the barbarian wins by coding like crazy, introducing tons of bugs and then saving the day by fixing them. The barbarian, in our current software culture will be celebrated as a hero.

I know it is a very sad story. I blame Microsoft Windows a lot for that, having ingrained in the popular culture that bugs and crashes happen and are a normal part of software. But that is only my personal nag.

This is sort of my bottom line for this conference.

I was very happy with it. Most of the talks tickled my imagination and that is the primary thing I was looking for. Many others gave me details on more technical subjects that I wanted to learn about.

I was a bit disappointed by the overall scientific level, meaning that a lot of the talks were about practical, particular experiences and I would have loved to see a bit more of hard science on the program (or maybe there was and I did not pick the right sessions). It also seemed to me that the overall computer science (and more broadly science) culture level was low (once again this is my perception, I may be awfully wrong, please feel free to flame me in that case) which made me reflect on Neville Holmes complaints in IEEE Computer about the training of software practitioners. This coming from someone who has mostly abandoned the scientific practices and principles I was trained with.

One final perception about this conference. All the speakers seemed to be familiar with each other and had made similar presentations in other conferences. The really good part about this is that all the sessions are sort of tied together. On the other hand it made me wonder if we were not falling into group think: a group of people with similar opinions reinforcing the consensus while (consciously or inconciously) excluding dissenting thoughts. This feeling is even stronger when the ties of many of the participants with thoughtworks are made visible.

Anyway, bottom line is it was great but, there as anywhere, you should not forget to be curious and skeptical.