[SIGCIS-Members] [Ext] Re: CfP: „Flexibility“ and „Agility“ Strategies, Practices, and Ambivalences of a Key Concept since the 1980s

Miriam Posner miriam.posner at gmail.com
Wed Mar 30 12:54:33 PDT 2022


Thanks so much, Mar! I am actually on the list but missed this discussion.
It's true, I have a piece on Agile coming out in LOGIC any day now,
focusing on Agile as one in a line of management strategies to corral
software labor. In my research, the best critique of Agile I discovered is
Michael Eby's in the *New Left Review: *
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/129. There are many, many other
critiques of Agile out there, but I thought Eby's was the most astute, in
terms of its political analysis. You might also be interested in dorian
taylor's "Agile as Trauma": https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma. Clive
Thompson's *Coders* also has some useful information about Agile and its
relationship to continuous deployment.

For the piece, I interviewed quite a number of developers and other
technical workers, and, looking at my notes, I see that many of them
independently raised the issue of Agile's resemblance to Taylorism. This is
perhaps counterintuitive, since Agile explicitly prioritizes workers'
control over their work, but the developers I spoke to cited the reduction
of tasks into small units ("user stories"), the universal visibility of
everyone's progress, and the metrics ("story points") that have steadily
calcified from worker-generated estimates to vehicles for surveillance
(e.g., "velocity" dashboards). One developer told me that his
disillusionment with Agile started when he described to his aunt, a lawyer,
what happens in daily standup. She was appalled that a highly skilled
professional was required to account for his every decision in such a
granular way.

There is much more work to do on Agile, in my opinion. For example, one
section from my article that got left on the cutting-room floor was about
the coevolution of Agile/lean methods of software development and the
just-in-time model of factory production. (T*he Phoenix Project*, from
2018, is a weird novel about DevOps [for real] that makes this connection
startlingly explicit.)

Just some thoughts! Really interesting topic to think about.

Miriam Posner
Assistant Professor, Information Studies & Digital Humanities
UCLA

On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 1:54 PM Mar Hicks <mhicks1 at iit.edu> wrote:

> Seconding Dave’s thoughts here, and I wanted to note that Prof. Miriam
> Posner of UCLA (who may not be on this list) has a new piece coming out
> about this in an upcoming LOGIC issue. It’s titled “Agile and the Long
> Crisis of Software.”
>
> Best,
> MH
> ______________________
> Mar Hicks, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor of History of Technology
> Humanities Department
> Illinois Institute of Technology
> marhicks.com
>
> *Programmed Inequality
> <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality>: How Britain
> Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing *(2017)
> *Your Computer Is On Fire
> <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/your-computer-fire> * (2021)
>
> On Mar 26, 2022, at 6:57 PM, Dave Foster <dwfoster1 at outlook.com> wrote:
>
> 
> Luke
>
> Scrum and agile are absolutely new forms of Taylorism. This was not
> original intent but it is what they have become in the corporate world, a
> new universal program management religion that has gone far beyond software
> development purposes. In school we studied the oldies of Gantt and PERT,
> then in my working experience I have gone through various fashion waves
> spanning TQM, Earned Value, Lean/Six Sigma, etc. crazes during their
> respective heydays and most recently scrum/agile. We have spent a lot of
> time over the years and continue to spend a good deal of planning time
> setting up our stories, features, epics, etc. and working the plan.
> Software development has always been a sub-task so I don't have any direct
> experience with the comparative value on those types of projects - I've
> always worked in higher levels of overall systems development where, IMO, a
> waterfall or whatever is as good as anything else, thought this is heresy
> in the scrum/agile. I think it is the organizational pressure to institute
> a consistent framework, which is certainly a fair objective. But to me, the
> framework has never made any difference - we are fundamentally tracking
> progress and dollars. Note, my experience has been on technical development
> projects in the Defense Dept and in private sector consulting.
>
> I don't have any specific references in mind. I think that you may find
> that the primary challenges to the way of scrum & agile come from outside
> the software development world where, nevertheless, the concepts have been
> enthusiastically adopted and adapted.
>
> Best/Dave
> Texas Tech University (PhD student) and Accenture AI
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Members <members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Luke
> Fernandez <luke.fernandez at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Saturday, March 26, 2022 12:44
> *To:* Schmitt, Martin <martin.schmitt at tu-darmstadt.de>
> *Cc:* Sigcis <members at sigcis.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [SIGCIS-Members] CfP: „Flexibility“ and „Agility“
> Strategies, Practices, and Ambivalences of a Key Concept since the 1980s
>
> What an interesting conference. And what interesting questions it poses!
> For example, this one on page 5 of the CFP:
>
> "How did agile software development shape the concepts of work and
> employment?"
>
> If anyone from this listserv has some cites that speak to this question
> I'd be psyched if you shared a few.
>
> I make no claims to know anything about this subject apart from recently
> finishing Cal Newport's *A World Without Email *where he touches on these
> concerns.  Among other things, Newport wishes for a productivity revolution
> in knowledge work.  And he thinks that it might happen if we replace email
> with some of the productivity tools and techniques that are used in
> software development like kanban boards and scrum and agile work
> processes.  He insists that this can happen without knowledge work
> suffering the same forms of
> regimentation/acceleration/dehumanization/surveillance that happened to
> many forms of manual labor with the implementation of Taylorism and Fordism
> (cf. page 119).  But how plausible are Newport's claims?  Are scrum and
> agile new forms of Taylorism?  Or are they something altogether different?
> Is it even helpful to view these techniques through the lens of Taylorism?
>
> Best,
>
> Luke Fernandez
> Weber State University
>
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 8:23 AM Schmitt, Martin <
> martin.schmitt at tu-darmstadt.de> wrote:
>
> Dear SIGCIS,
>
> We will host a conference on „Flexibility“ and „Agility“: Strategies,
> Practices, and Ambivalences of a Key Concept since the 1980s (together with
> Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF),
> Helmut-Schmidt-University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg
> (HSU), SPP 2267 “The Digitalization of Working Worlds. Conceptualising and
> Capturing a Systemic Transformation.“). Keynote speaker is Richard Sennett.
> Date: 17/18 November 2022
> Location: Darmstadt
> You will find the call for paper here(
> https://www.geschichte.tu-darmstadt.de/flexibility
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.geschichte.tu-darmstadt.de/flexibility__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!7sGpzhf1Qw30f4UTimKQ8Tk8T0a9Y0f9OQw6SCuqmqL6IgPuZvKwlO5JU4M29uo$>).
> Please submit your proposed papers by 30 May 2022.
>
>
> For the SIGCIS community, especially the parts on agility/software
> programing and digital automation are the most interesting one.
>
> Best
> Martin
>
> Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter | Post-Doc | digital enthusiast
>
> Technische Universität Darmstadt
> Institut für Geschichte
> Fachgebiet Technikgeschichte
>
> Mail: martin.schmitt at tu-darmstadt.de
> Tel: +49  6151-16-57327
> http://www.computerisierung.com
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.computerisierung.com__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!7sGpzhf1Qw30f4UTimKQ8Tk8T0a9Y0f9OQw6SCuqmqL6IgPuZvKwlO5JphCCEh4$>
>
> &
>
> Assoziierter Wissenschaftler
> LEIBNIZ-ZENTRUM FÜR ZEITHISTORISCHE FORSCHUNG | POTSDAM
>
> Vice Chair IFIP WG 9.7 „History of computing“
>
> Zuletzt erschienen: *Die Digitalisierung der Kreditwirtschaft*. Computereinsatz
> in den Sparkassen der Bundesrepublik und der DDR 1957-1991, Göttingen:
> Wallstein-Verlag 2021,
> https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835333710-die-digitalisierung-der-kreditwirtschaft.html
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835333710-die-digitalisierung-der-kreditwirtschaft.html__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!7sGpzhf1Qw30f4UTimKQ8Tk8T0a9Y0f9OQw6SCuqmqL6IgPuZvKwlO5JLr9b4Jw$>
>
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