Zombies among us

Somewhere there’s got to be a Ph.D. dissertation on how each society imagines monsters that suit their time and place. Ancient Anglo-Saxons had ugly monsters that broke into their fortresses at night, the church-dominated Dark Ages had its share of witches and demons, the Industrial Revolution had Frankenstein embodying the dangers of technology, to be substituted by Dracula, an aristocratic vampire from a backwards land threatening the order and progress achieved.

I think the monster for our times is the zombie [1]. Or rather, the zombies in the plural -since their power lies in their numbers. They are the dark angle of that attention-grabbing issue of Time magazine giving us all the Person of the Year award: The zombies are us. We, as a group, are the horde that chews up the Earth’s resources, that demands dumbing down our culture, that swarms shopping malls, and that instantly carries viruses from the other end of the world. Individuals that wake up to this reality may fight back for a while, but sooner or later will be bitten and infected as well, joining the ranks of the mindless mass and looking for other fresh brains to spoil. The ultimate menace of this monster is the extinction of free will: each individual becoming part of the crowd that aimlessly wanders through the streets, or sits in front of the TV, with the brain switched off.

Lately it’s been a great time for fans of the zombie concept, for two reasons: First, the fabulous zombie-infestation videogame, Dead Rising, has more social commentary episodes seamlessly embedded than any other videogame I can recall. And second, there’s two recent books by Max Brooks that push the genre to fascinating and fun new areas. In The Zombie Survival Guide, he describes in excrutiating detail how to defend yourself, attack, and survive a zombie outbreak. He’s clearly been thinking about this a lot (first thing to do to defend your home from a zombie infestation? fill your bathtub with water! you don’t know when the water system will shut down and weeks from now your greatest enemy will be thirst, not the living dead!). It’s a great combination of dark humour, horror, strategic thinking, and straight-faced presentation. Required reading to survive the incoming outbreak.

I have mixed feelings about the second book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It consists of a series of interviews with people all over the world recounting the recent, massive zombie outbreak that nearly destroyed us (you remember it, don’t you?), and their efforts to prevail ever since. The book’s first half –the actual outbreak and crumbling down of our civilization– is absolutely absorbing, powerfully emotional. But then something goes off in the second half –when humans fight back–, when the narrative becomes too militaristic and formulaic: Long descriptions of weapons and ammo, the President of the United States is the world’s hero, every episode ends with a cliche. The book was not bad, but given the promise of the first half I finished feeling dissatisfied and thinking of what it could have been. The good news is that the book’s movie is coming up in 2008 (produced by Brad Pitt’s film company, apparently). If they keep the mockumentary format, and the pace of the first half of the book, it’s going to be a classic.

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[1] Runner-ups: Robots and aliens. But it’s very difficult to achieve a good narrative with artificial intelligence elements, and I can’t possibly get frightened at a group of monsters that includes E.T. and ewoks.

What’s in a word – Agile

Our choice of words says a lot about how we see the world. Sometimes inadvertently, we label things so that our beliefs are portrayed with a positive light. The abortion debates, for example, are between pro-life and pro-choice groups (and who would like to be against life or choice?).

There are many examples of this wordplay in modern life, and they are not exclusive of politics. Within the software development field we’ve had about a decade of “agile” methodologies, such as XP and SCRUM. It’s a great word, for two reasons: It truly represents the spirit of these methodologies (that is, being very adaptable and producing results quickly), and it doesn’t have an evident, good looking counterpart in the other band. Everybody wants to be agile — otherwise they would be… what? clumsy? slow? gawky? Using the word agile wins half of the debate for your project management strategy.

There should be a word that displays the qualities of the other band as well (preparedness, robustness, carefully setting goalposts, etc.). A while back, Greg Wilson found it, I think, when he referred to the non-agile approach as “sturdy“. Maybe sturdy companies can’t avoid the punch that’s coming like agile companies can, but since they have planned well ahead to receive it, it doesn’t damage them either. So, sturdy. If only people started to use it…

(An alternative, also by Greg, is to refer to agile as “planless” development instead. Highlights the negative in agile rather than the positive in the other band, but it’s also an enlightening choice.)

Controlling what you can’t measure

I recently came across Tom DeMarco’s “Controlling Software Projects” for a second time, and I remembered my problem with it immediately: The very first line in the book states that “You can’t control what you can’t measure”, and the rest of the text builds upon that phrase to argue that we need metrics to rein the chaos of software development.

But the book falls apart because the statement is wrong, and you and me are living proof of that. We control things we don’t measure, all the time. You are able to control your body (your breathing, your hunger, your thoughts) without measurements, and you are an expert at it. In some cases measurements can help –for example, for controlling your weight, or your cholesterol. In many others, however, measurements would not even make sense (do you need to measure the length and number of your hairs to know when to get a haircut?)

What bothers me is that the phrase has picked up among software project managers, and is often used to justify absurd metrics and policies: Relying on measurements such as lines of code for programmer efficiency, or number of errors found for software quality, are excellent ways to lose control over a project. They are deficient and misleading proxies for the real constructs that one wants to study.

There is a kernel of truth to the phrase, however. The unknown is, by definition, uncontrollable, and sometimes numbers help us increase our knowledge. But I would much rather read a software development book that relaxes the statement to something like “You can’t control the unfamiliar”, and builds a thesis from there. It doesn’t have the same punch, but it has the benefit of being true.

Robert Glass, by the way, puts it better than me in his excellent book “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering” (the relevant passage is available here for free):

“The problem with the saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”—what makes it a fallacy—is that we manage things we can’t measure all the time. We manage cancer research. We manage software design. We manage all manner of things that are deeply intellectual, even creative, without any idea of what numbers we ought to have to guide us. Good knowledge worker managers tend to measure qualitatively, not quantitatively.”

The Dispossessed

After a recommendation from Greg Wilson, I borrowed a copy of Ursula le Guin’s “The Dispossessed“, a 1974 sci-fi novel about a scientist and activist bridging the culture gap between a plausible anarchic society (a sort of non-authoritarian communism) and a capitalistic society much like ours today. It’s a great, intelligent book, full of unexpected little edges and juicy threads –both at the societal and at the personal level.

But it especially resonated in me because the brief segments when le Guin describes the creative cycles of Shevek, the main character, are so close to what I’ve been experiencing through my Ph.D.: long periods of apparently aimless research that turn out to be solid foundations of novel ideas; sudden inspiration one night followed by an inability to put it all together the next morning, and so on. The bits about research politics and the free dissemination of science are also spot on. Made me root for Shevek even more.

By the way, Greg’s list of recommended reading has never disappointed me. In the odd case that you don’t have anything to read next, drop by his website and pick something up –you’ll like it.

(And thanks to Juan for sharing the book with me!)