Andy's Mind

Departing from my usual topics I want to share an observation on the big picture that we are being fed by politicians, mainstream media and most of the Internet.

This big picture is – in short – that we humans are damaging the planet Earth, causing catastrophic global warming driven by CO2 emissions due to burning fossil fuels (mainly in cars), as well as having kids, eating meat etc. We are also facing a huge energy crisis, economic crisis, swine flu pandemic and terrorists. Doom is just around the corner, there is no hope unless we submit to a whole portfolio of totalitarian policies proposed by the very same politicians in the very same media outlets.

Apart from whether all of this picture is true (most is not) what is interesting here is a complete lack of any positive program for our civilization.

It seems the only thing our elites can come up with is downsizing humanity by all means possible from contraceptives to choking off industrial production with this whole "carbon tax" scheme. But this is not a positive program, it is at best an idea on how to prolong status quo for those left, especially those on top of the chain. Let’s suppose we will cut human population by 90% (as some "ecologists" – or rather antihuman madmen – are suggesting) – what next? Where is the path upwards, not downwards?

What is amazing is that people in general are not noticing this lack of any long term prospective. They seem so scared of (mostly fake) dangers they see in the media each day they don’t see our leaders have no idea what to do. Or, worse, they have an idea, but it doesn’t include most of us.

All of this is extremely short sighted. Notice that in all of those doom scenarios Earth is being presented as a limited, closed environment – something akin to Eco Spheres. Global warming models, for example, generally don’t factor in the influence of the Sun, space radiation, Earth orbit cycles & changes and so on. So do those who talk about energy and resources scarcity.

The fact is, however, that Earth is just a part of the unimaginably huge and complex system called the Universe. This is our world, not just this tiny rock. And universe is full of energy and matter. Even our own solar system is full of energy and matter way beyond anything we humans may need for centuries. Just the solar energy descending on Earth in the visible spectrum every day is way beyond all energy needs we have or may have in foreseeable future.

Also, as it has been shown, the limit of Earth’s atmosphere is as much a hard limit for life as the water surface is for fish. Fish can’t walk on the land, we can’t get to space without lots of energy and technology – but it doesn’t mean the world just ends there (like they thought flat Earth ends in Middle Ages). Even the limit of Earth’s atmosphere is just an arbitrary line drawn by humans to simplify things – in fact it is a changing continuum between the dense atmosphere on the ground and the vacuum of space above it (and even that vacuum is not completely empty). And that space influences what happens here on Earth in a powerful way – much more so than anything we humans can come up with.

How all that relates to the current picture of doom and gloom? Well – my question is: if we know we’ll run out of resources at some point why we are not trying to get to the resources beyond what is available on Earth? And since when did we forget that for any sane human being fellow humans should come first, before whales and bats? Why instead of trying to kill off humans (or prevent them from being born) – which is what our leaders seem to be busy doing – we are not trying hard to make sure that a) everyone is fed and b) we can have a future in space?

It’s not a problem of technology or money. The technology is there – we have heavy lift rockets, most are just not being produced anymore (like the famous Russian Energia). We even have nuclear technology that could give even better lift and could propel us further than just the Low Earth Orbit, but it never was really used. In fact it seems that when it comes to space technology we are not advancing, not stagnating, but actually falling back.

The money is also there – just the bailouts for the “too big to fail” would have funded NASA for years. This is not mere rhetoric. NASA’s budget for FY 2008 is approximately $17 billion or 0.6% of US Federal budget. The bailouts did cost between $4 to $8.5 trillion according to different sources. That is between 235 and 500 years of NASA’s funding. Or 29 to 63 Apollo programs (cost of whole Apollo program is estimated at $136 billion of 2005 US dollars). And some say the total cost of bailouts etc. is $23 trillion – you can calculate yourself how many trips to Moon, Mars and elsewhere would that buy – even at NASA, known for its wastefulness and reckless spending on bureaucracy etc.

Those numbers show how mad this is, how we risk our collective future by massive misallocation of resources. Can you imagine how much technology and knowledge we could have obtained if just a fraction of those heaps of money wasted on Wall Street would have been allocated to space exploration? How many good, real jobs would have been created – jobs that actually create something, not “service” jobs that mainly mean people flipping burgers and waiting tables?

So something just doesn’t add up here. Either all our leaders just never look up into the sky at night and can’t use their brains for anything other than campaigning – or there is a barrier there we are not being told of. In any case instead of pursuing the only positive path we are being told the best thing we can do is planet-wide civilization suicide.

Which is why I’m sick when I see attempt by mass media and major corporations to create an illusion of grass-root support for the Copenhagen meeting and tax on breathing they want to impose there on the whole world (like this one). What’s really sickening is that this scam seems to work, that people do believe in this whole heap of lies they are being told without questioning them, without thinking. And without realizing there is a positive path – we just don’t follow it, we don’t even consider it.

In the the world of Scrum & agile there is an ongoing discussion about contracts. Main problem is clash between agile approach of flexibility based on adaptation and the world of RFPs, RFIs and fixed contracts. I’ve seen many good talks and presentations about this, including also on the last Scrum Gathering. One thing I don’t agree with is the way the problem of risk is being handled almost in all of them.

People usually start their talks with the notion that in the basic time&materials contract (the only truly agile contract if you ask me) all the project risk is on the client’s side and other contract types somehow move some of the risk to the supplier. Some go as far as to say that in a fixed bid contract (fixed time, scope & cost) all the risk is on the supplier side.

First time I heard this I thought this is clever, but over time it dawned on me that this “risk sharing” is as much illusory as is the security of the fixed bid contract. Here is why.

The single biggest risk anyone faces when they build something is that this something won’t fit the purpose it was intended for. Causes for this can be numerous: the needs might have been not understood properly or the idea doesn’t fit the market, the needs have changed or the thing built can’t be used because of defects. Finally, the thing being built may be delivered too late for it to be used as intended.

No matter how hard you try the biggest share of this risk is always on the client’s side, because it is the client who won’t get expected benefits in the end. You may add as many penalties and harshly sounding clauses to a very fixed and rigid contract as you want, you still won’t get away from this risk.

Imagine you’ve spent 3 months writing the initial spec, then next two months on RFP/bidding process, then contract negotiation, then two years on developing your complex software system only to discover at the end of all this that the product is not exactly what you intended, is full of bugs and is irrelevant because in the meantime the world moved on (the usual, flawed, waterfall process). What then? Yeah, you can sue the unhappy supplier all the way, but how much good will it do to your business? You can not pay them and even bankrupt them if they were not careful – will that repay all the lost opportunity? Make up for lost time? No way!

This risk is like a boomerang. I’ve heard someone define a boomerang as a piece of wood that no matter how hard you throw away from you will come back and smack you in the face. Very fitting. The harder you try to move away from this risk with complex contracts the more you will be hurt in the end. You don’t need rigid relationship based on distrust to tame this risk, you need an adaptive relationship with people you trust but can check all the time.

That’s exactly what agile offers: tight control of the product being developed in short inspect&adapt cycles. Instead of trying to write clever penalty clauses and waste time on lawyers clients can closely monitor the progress of the team(s) that build their software. They can spot any problems early on and correct them. Or readjust the backlog to changing situation keeping their product relevant. Or change the team.

I’d say there is way way less risk here. What clients pay with for this is their time and involvement – they have to see test builds at least every sprint, they have to speak to the team, readjust the backlog and overall stay on top of their project. But all the time they have all the tools and controls to navigate the project to a successful end. A fixed contract just kills all the outset.

So, next time when people will again define contract negotiation as risk pushing I’ll definitely interrupt them with my little boomerang analogy, because I feel we must all realize this is yet another (paper) illusion.