Planning a journey to Santiago de Compostella
(eXtreme Programming)

by Karel Thönissen

[draft]

Suppose that you are living in Amsterdam, you have sinned and you must make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella in Spain. However, you are also an IT-professional and you want to make this journey as quickly as possible, before your IT-skills have become worthless (developments are quick after all). How would you plan this pilgrimage? Do you plan or do?

Really, this article is about development methods, not about trekking or pilgrimage, so stay with me.

The planner
The first option is careful preparation. Still in Amsterdam you buy detailed maps of the route between Amsterdam and Santiago. Obviously, you first needed a global map of the Benelux, France, and Spain to know which detail maps to buy. Unfortunately, most detailed maps are not in stock, so you will have to wait a few weeks before these expensive maps arrive. However, they arrive finally and you have your collection of 50 maps complete. Now planning can really begin. Using the maps you decide which roads to take. Every hill, every bend, every dent in the road is written in the road plan so that there will be no surprises. You determine carefully what distance can be done on each particular day. Using the map, tourist guides and the inevitable Internet, you can plan the hotels, hostels and refuges to stay in and the campings to stay on. You can also see the good and affordable shops and restaurants along the route. Then you make a detailed planning in which all this information is gathered and use this for the journey. Then you start walking, with just the road plan (the 60 maps are too heavy to carry from here to Santiago), exactly enough money to do the purchase as planned, without a French and/or Spanish dictionary, and without the ability to speak French or Spanish. Bon voyage!

The doer
The alternative is simpler. Buy a simple map of western Europe, take enough money and the dictionaries and start today. Do not plan in advance, just walk 8 hours a day. If you walk for 8 hours every day in globally the correct direction, you will eventually get there. This is why you do not need all the expensive and heavy detailed maps. There is no detailed road map, so you will go wrong sometime somewhere. So be it. You have enough money with you for these contingencies, plus a dictionary, plus enough knowledge of French and Spanish to ask the local population for help.

Who gets there first?
It is true that the route that the doer will have taken when he arrives in Santiago is unlikely to be the shortest route, but I put my money on the bet that he will be there before the planner type. If the planner gets there at all. The planner took weeks, just to make the planning. In that time the doer was already walking, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. These are 40 hours spent on walking, not on chit chatting, visiting local cafés along the route, or site seeing. Sure one can visit a nice village and socialise, but that is only after the daily budget of 8 hours walking has been spent. Every week the doer is walking about 200 kilometers. Given the few weeks' headstart, it is hard for the planner to overtake the doer. The journey is about 2000 kilometers, and it is unlikely that the doer's route is off by many hundreds of kilometers. But there is more. The approach taken by the doer is very robust. Road blocks, hotels that went bankrupt, campings that are full are no immediate problem, because his plan has enough slack. All the doer has to do to avoid this problem is make a simple plan at the start of the day. Being in the area already, many people can tell him what can and what cannot be done on that particular day. The first unexpected road block, bend, bump, road works and the journey of the planner comes to a grinding halt.

You might ask why the doer is only walking 40 hours a week. There is a simple reason for that. Walk more, and you will likely get serious injuries. Get injuries and you will never reach Santiago. But what is the likely course of action for the planner? In the first few weeks he made no distance at all. Realising that he is lagging behind the doer, and possibly behind his own schedule because of the fragility of the schedule, he starts rushing. He starts making long days. His feet get painful, his body gets tired. Since he is making up for the lost time, he has to abandon plan, only to find out that he is worse off: his plan has become completely useless, but he has not got the money, the global map, the dictionary and the language fluency of the doer. The journey turns into a death march. You recognise this scenario from your own work?

Back to programming projects
Extreme programming is the software development equivalent of the approach of the doer. Do not waste time on elaborate planning, because this is a waste of time in the world of rapidly changing technologies, requirements and social contexts. Just get going and work 40 hours a week, but so not waste time om chit chat, office politics, etc. Let people work more and you cause burn-out, stress, problems in personal relationships and so on. Remember that your best personnel is often your most experienced personnel. These people are older (so is the nature of experience) and have families that they usually value more than the work at your company. Require them to work 60 hours a week, even if properly compensated, and they start looking for another job. The extra money is not worth the stress and missed family time. Remember that good personnel is scarce, so your best and most experienced people will go first.

An important point of the way of working of the doer is strictly separating the work and the social activities. Eight hours of straight walking, no other activities during the hours designated for walking. Does that make this type of journey dull? No far from that, because the doer has the evenings and the weekends off. Completely no obligations during these leisure hours. Now that really clears the mind. The doer can always ease his mind when he gets in Santiago second thinking: 'well I did my best, I walked steadily for 40 hours a week, and making more hours could have caused serious injuries'. Now compare that with the planner who is always under stress even in his leisure time, because in practice he is always late and effectively no longer has planned leisure time. So what he does is taking many small breaks during the walking, which add up to much more then the planned leisure hours by the doer. Although the planner has much more hours spent on socialising, he experiences stress nonetheless. He gets in a negative spiral. And the frequent short breaks bring their switching costs that have a negative impact on the hours spent on walking. Leaving the road to walk to that nice café and back is neither productive walking, nor socialising or stress relieving.

I do realise that this observation is context dependent. Experience is not the same as being familiar with the latest marketing fads and hypes. If that is your business, then you can hire fresh university graduates who have no families and who are willing to make an 80 hour working week. However, these people, no matter how talented, lack the experience how to write quality software. If a quick time to market is your primary objective, if quality is of no concern, if the customer does not come back, and you have the money to burn, then this is a viable strategy. This is the strategy that many dotcoms took during the Internet-bubble. Let that be a lesson.