Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior [Kindle Edition]

Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies is a collection of 86 patterns of project behaviour collected and documented by a group of 6 authors from the Atlantic Systems Guild.

Each pattern is presented with a title, a picture, a one- or two-sentence summary, and a few pages describing the pattern in more depth. This format works pretty well, and the book is both funny and very easy to read. However, when I finished reading the book and asked myself what I had learnt from it, I had to answer "Not much".

That's not to say it's a bad book, just that if you have been working in software development projects for a few years, there aren't that many new insights here. However, the book does a good job of singling out and labelling various project behaviours (usually bad ones), which is useful.

Of all the patterns in the book, the ones I liked the best were "The Blue Zone", "Practicing Endgame", "Mañana" and "Time Removes Cards from your Hand".

"The Blue Zone" describes the green zone, which is anything that is explicitly ordered or allowed by the project, and the red zone, which is anything explicitly forbidden. The blue zone is everything else, activities that are neither explicitly allowed, nor explicitly forbidden by the scope of the assignment. In the authors' opinion (and in mine, too), it is good to sometimes operate in the blue zone, in addition to in the green zone, in order to achieve the best outcome. Or, in the words of the quote ending the pattern: "The correct amount of anarchy on a project is not zero".

In "Practicing Endgame", the idea is that you should be thinking about and testing against your release criteria continuously, as opposed to leaving that till the end. The analogy given in this pattern is that of the university course, where you may have several tests throughout the term, in addition to the final exam. This "continuous" exam preparation gives better results than the one-off method of only having the final exam.

The last two of the patterns I liked the most both deal with time.

"Mañana" simply states that if your goal date is more than 30 to 90 days out, you need to set sub-goals that are within 30 to 90 days, in order to make the people on the project feel the right sense of urgency.

"Time Removes Cards from your Hand" describes how you have fewer and fewer options the longer you pretend that everything is fine, even though things are not fine. You might end up with many half-finished features, instead of a few completely finished features, and it might not be the most urgently needed features.

Except for the concept of the blue zone, which I like and which I had never seen explicitly described before, even the patterns I liked are not really teaching me a lot that I didn't already know.

In fact, if you are using agile methods like XP or Scrum, then you will recognize a lot of the patterns and advice as standard agile working procedures ("Straw Man" is another example of this).

On the other hand, there are a number of examples of anti-patterns from (it seems) process-heavy larger companies, for example "False Quality Gates" (documents are check for format, not contents), "Paper Mill" and "Orphaned Deliverables" (both deal with places where the measure of progress is documents, not working software), and "Cider House Rules" (rules are made by people unconnected to the project).

When it comes to the names given to the different patterns, there are some hits and some misses. A name that is both catchy and describes the pattern in a good way makes the pattern so much easier to remember. My favourite is "Template Zombies", which I think is pretty self-explanatory, but "One Throat to Choke" is also very good. But naming is hard, and there are many patterns that I feel have pretty awkward or non-descript names, like "Lease your soul" (about how to adopt new technology - I'm thinking more in terms of a tool-box than selling/leasing your soul to some new technology) and "System Development Lemming Cycle" (that the process used isn't tailored - but where did the lemmings come from?).

Another complaint is that the different patterns presented in the book are not organized around themes - instead they are just put in random order. I would have preferred if they were grouped together, since many of the patterns deal with related concepts.

So, in summary, the patterns in the book cover many different project behaviours. The descriptions are useful and well written, but if you have been involved in software development projects for a while, most of the patterns should already be familiar to you. Still, they may serve as a useful reminder - plus, you get (in many cases) snappy names for some of the behaviours, which may make them easier to diagnose and talk about.

Also, if you're interested in this book, check out episode 131 at Software Engineering Radio. That podcast is an interview with Tom DeMarco and Peter Hruschka about this book, and it is well worth listening to.

Patterns are all the rage these days in software development. You can't be a serious software person unless you invoke a pattern here or a pattern there. The bright folks at the Atlantic Systems Guild have named us 86 project patterns so that more of us can drop a pattern name here and there and get the mantel of being serious project folks.

Most of what you read in this book are patterns of things gone wrong patterns more than patterns of things gone right. I think that this is OK though I did find it a bit frustrating at times. There would be a suggestion on how to disrupt the negative patterns occasionally but, given the short, blithe entries, not a lot of detail. This book is more about diagnosis than about treatment.

So, read it more for enjoyment rather than serious project help. Anyway, most of the patterns, certainly the names, are all made up. "We make no claim to the universality of our observed patterns." Not measured, not tested, just observed. However, these are keen observers and I found myself agreeing with most of the entries.

The title and cover caught my eye (today!) in the bookstore and after flipping through, I couldn't wait to get home and blow through it.

It's clear why this is getting a 5-star average here @ Amazon. Written by the same folks who authored Peopleware (classic skilled-person management book), it contains ~80 patterns of project behaviour alternating between helpful and harmful.

Almost immediately I had several, "Ohhh yeah! That's what's going on!" moments. The authors do a terrific job of identifying patterns and the reasoning behind them. Being relatively new to a management gig, this sort of resource is invaluable. You might not be able to fix some of the issues, but you'll certainly be able to notice them more quickly - which is really the first step.

Each pattern is about 2-3 pages long, clearly identified in the table of contents and with pattern headings that stand out. This presentation allows me to quickly refer back to find out the suggested cure.

Most patterns are presented with prescriptive, corrective behaviour. Granted it's not a detailed dissertation on how to fix organizational issues, but enough to get an idea of the scope of the fix; work through it, or time to find another employer?

I'm already in the process of recommending this to my peers. It's such a brief, valuable read that anybody with skin in the game (from developers to CEOs) should give it a look.