書籍『Leading Lean Software Development』

Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)

• 作者: Mary Poppendieck
• 出版社/メーカー: Addison-Wesley Professional
• 発売日: 2009/10/31
• メディア: ペーパーバック

通勤の電車で読んでいたのですが、読み終えました。どちらかと言えば、エンジニア向けというよりもマネジャー向けの内容の本でした。6章から構成されています

Chapter 1: Systems Thinking
Chapter 2: Technical Excellence
Chapter 3: Reliable Delivery
Chapter 4: Rentless Improvement
Chapter 5: Great People
Chapter 6: Aligned Leaders

技術的に内容に興味を持って読めたのが、Chapter 2: Technical Excellenceです。Chapter 5: Great Peopleの中のFrame 17: Knowledge Workersも、ナレッジワーカーということで、Peter Druckerの書籍「Management Challenges for the 21st Century」を引用して説明してあり、興味深い内容でした。ナレッジワーカーの生産性として、6つの要素が引用されています。

1. Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?” not “How should the work be done?”
2. It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
3. Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task, and the responsibility of knowledge workers.
4. Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker. [Share the knowledge.]
5. Productivity of the knowledge worker is not—at least not primarily—a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important. Measure the “results” for a given enterprise and a given activity. [Don’t measure number of drawings or lines of code.]
6. Finally, knowledge worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.

赤字は、私が本に下線を引いた部分です。また、生産性に関して、次のようにも本書で述べられています。

Peter Drucker believed that increasing knowledge worker productivity is the most important management challenge of the twenty-first century. According to Drucker, “Productivity of the knowledge worker will almost always require that the work itself be restructured and be made part of a system.” He insisted that the only way to measure knowledge worker productivity was to measure the outcomes of the system in which they work. Counting the quantity of the “things” knowledge workers produce—for example, how many stories were completed—is sort of like measuring how many students a teacher has in a class. This is not the way to measure productivity. What’s important is how well a teacher educates students, or how much value stories deliver to customers.

Drucker insisted that knowledge workers must improve their own productivity. “Work on knowledge worker productivity begins with asking the knowledge worker themselves:

What is your task? What should it be? What should you be expected to contribute? What hampers you in doing your task and should be eliminated?

ソフトウェア開発の場合には、量ではなく、質を見なければならないのですが、それがなかなか難しいです。ソースコードに対する様々な静的解析ツールを用いれば、「質が悪いコードことは分かります」が、「質が良いことは分かりません」。本当に質が良いかは、人が直接ソースコードを読まないと分からないです。普通の小説（あるいは、文書や報告書）を静的に解析しても、良い小説か悪い小説かは分からず、読んで見る必要があるとの同じだと思います。