Two Schools of Macro Economics

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the Schools Concept for Software Testing, generally based on Brett Pettichord's 2003 presentation at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. Cem Kaner has a good blog post on the subject, and Brett has continually revised and re-presented his talk.

One of the things I hear often is that the schools concept is divisive. My typical response is that those divisions already exist; the schools concept just abstracts those differences down to labels. Now labels can be helpful or insulting; it's all in how you handle it.

Consider, for example, the austrian school of economics vs. the Keynesian Schools. Oh, I'm not going to bore you or put you to sleep, I promise. To try to summarize: The Keynesians see the economy as the result of a series of dials. By controlling interest rates, creating stimulus, government spending, and so on, the Keynesians believe they can manipulate the markets. Keynesians tend to have formulas, equations, and metrics, just like physics, to make arguments and draw conclusions about economics.

The austrians think differently. They see the economy as organic -- as people doing things. They also see that bailouts reward the wrong thing and that dial-twisting distorts markets. An austrian economist my argue that those statistics don't mean anything. In other words, you can't add the money spent to dig ditches along with money spent do to things that genuinely benefit society, like farming or manufacturing, and reduce the total to one number. Likewise, that ideas like 'stimulus', printing money and spending it, have unintended consequences like inflation.

Whew. See how it's easier to label those instead of the full description?

Seriously, the way we see the world will influence the solutions we turn to. This, debate, and dialogue on how we see the world is important. It turns out the Macro-Economists are having the debate, and doing it well:



It starts a little slow, with a few in-jokes, but by two minutes in, you'll see the basic arguments of the two schools described well in a rap-video style. (No, really, it's a rap video. It can actually hold your attention, which is kind of hard for this subject.)

If you enjoy the video, you might want to check out the Reason behind the scenes interview. Notice towards 4:14 in the discussion turns to a discussion of emergent order to solve problems vs. central planning, about the use of mathematical models, trying to make the discipline more like physics, verses the idea that the mathematical models are naive and overly simplistic, that we need a more humanistic, systems-thinking approach. The author even uses terms like "scientism not science."

These folks are having the same debates as we are!

I'm not opposed to the school concept. I think it can be done in an insulting, crude way, or it can be used to advance the debate.

I'm for the latter.

I'll be at CAST 2011 August 8-10, where we have an emerging topics track, and also at STPCon in October.

The emerging topics track is not full yet, and because the theme of the conference is context-driven testing, I'm personally interested in proposals, panels, discussions, and debates on the schools concept, aspects of it, and it's impact on context-driven testing. (Did I mention I am co-organizing the track? *hint*)

Let's take this to the next level ... together.

I hope to see you in Seattle in August.

New Article on TechWell - "Software Testing Enters the Cloud"

The folks at TechWell have just published my new article "Software Testing Enters the Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges."

It's my first article with TechWell -- I'm not even sure if I should have a space in between or capitalize the W. The website comes from the folks at SQE and StickyMinds.com, so it has a fair bit of reputation behind it.

In this article, I focus more on the capabilities that cloud computing can bring to make testers more effective, regardless of the development strategy. There is a little bit of discussion around the risks for cloud based apps, but the "How to Test Cloud Based Applications", well, that article or short series of articles is still in the works.

More to come.

The Past Through Tomorrow

(With apologies to Robert A. Heinlein)

Strictly speaking, predicting the future isn't just hard -- it is impossible.

Yet predicting the future is something testers are called on to every day, with so simple a question as "will the customer be happy with this version of the product?"

For that matter, is something project managers do every time they create a product plan, something management does every time it produces an annual plan.

We could joke around all day about the impossibility of fortune-telling or the fantasyland that many project plans reside in, but the reality is that we do have to plan for tomorrow.

Likewise, I can't say for certain if you'll get up next monday and go to work; with a few thousand readers, it's likely that some will be sick or on vacation or something ... but I might be certain enough to bet on it.

I don't have a problem with this sort of analysis and educating guessing. We have to do it, and, if you do it well, over time, you can have better results than your peers.

That takes me to the annual futures study produced by the American Society for Quality.

As some of you readers know, I was invited to be a member in the ASQ "influential voices" program, which involves writing blog responses to their own monthly blog post. This month's entry is about that annual futures study.

The ideas behind the study make sense -- to observe the changing landscape of industry that impacts the quality professional, and provide you information about those changes so you can react. This year the study identified eight issues, which I will (briefly) summarize below:

1) Social Responsibility. Government and popular pressures are causing companies to take the environment, sustainability of the business, and how they treat everyone in their supply chain a lot more seriously. The ASQ analysis indicates this is not about philanthropy, but about better business and profit.

2) Consumer Awareness. This blends with #1; people are using new tools to do more research on the companies they purchase from. Get on the bus, or people will purchase around you.

3) Globalization. Not a whole lot of meat here. The study says globalization is coming (check it out; I wrote that in 2003!), which will bring new opportunities, new markets, and new potential suppliers, but also transportation and oversight challenges. They do point out that consumers (I really dislike that term) are more and more interested in locally-sourced products. That's a fancy term to say "I'd like to buy vegetables grown by a neighbor, not ones shipped from a different continent."

4) Increased pace of change. Nanotechnology, reduced product cycles, and within our grasp is the potential to solve some of these enduring problems of our age like HIV, hunger, etc. It's a truism, but I'm not sure what to do with it. In his book, The Management Myth, author Matthew Stewart points out that the management literature has been talking about these problems for at least the past thirty years, going back to "In Search of Excellence" in 1982.

5) The Workforce of the future. Okay, I have real concerns over this one. Here's what they wrote:

The Workforce of the Future will challenge our notions of talent, work, workplace, and learning. While hard to fathom we’re being told unemployment, as we think of it, will become a thing of the past. The number of jobs will soon exceed the number of people available to fill them. Demographers predict organizations will find themselves competing for talent and that competition will move jobs around the globe. High tech companies already report this reality. This search for talent, along with technological advances will change the nature and place where work is done and organizations will grow increasingly flexible in their definitions of work engagements. Those who of retirement age will be re‐attracted to work with flexible hour arrangements and work that can be done without commuting.

I'm not sure if these authors are incompetent and full of happy-talk, or scarily competent and using very specific words for a specific reason, to convey one feeling but actually mean another.

Take for example the term "While hard to fathom we're being told unemployment, as we think of it, will become a thing of the past." On it's face, that's crazy. This is a guide written for members of an America Society with historical roots in manufacturing. They've seen their jobs systematically outsourced, offshored, and just plain eliminated for the past three decades. The trend is exactly in the opposite direction of the implications here!

Or is it? One trend I see with employment in the USA is a move away from lifetime employment with pension, toward project-at-a-time contract work. If that's the case, "unemployment" stops being a safety net for people temporarily out of work, and becomes a regular part of the freelance/contract lifestyle. If that is the case, well, I guess unemployment doesn't mean what it used to -- but that's certainly not what I got from a cursory reading of the study!

Yet the next claim is that the number of jobs will exceed the number of people. Yes, we do have an aging population (more about that below), and yes, certain high-skilled folks may be called back from retirement to keep the machine running. What I haven't seen yet are any statistics or data to back up this happy-talk.

This is a public study, done on behalf of the members of a professional society for the benefit of it's members. I originally wrote "somebody should get fired over this one." Perhaps that's a bit harsh. I understand the demographic data the team pulled to come to those conclusions ... but I wonder if the authors of the study would care to make it interesting ...

6) An Aging Population. The baby boomers are going to retire, and that will create both a crunch in the workforce (#5) and a need for elder-care services. From healthcare to in-home nursing to that cell phone with the big buttons, demand for services will increase. (One trend the study didn't note is that when these people retire, they will start to sell off their 401(K) and stocks, instead of accruing them. That will change the supply/demand ratio for the entire stock market. Now that is a trend to consider.)

7) 21st Century Quality. I read it twice. I still don't really know what this section is trying to say. My best guesses are that how people look at Quality will change, that Quality will be more important in the next century, and that global companies will increasingly need to look to quality across the entire value chain -- from raw supplier to retail sales.

8) Innovation has become a buzzword. (No, really, the study actually says that.) The basic idea here is that innovation is increasingly important to stay competitive, which, yes, reminds me of Matthew Stewart and his argument that we've had some crisis or another in business for thirty years, which sure seems to be a good way to sell books on excellence.

What do we have here?

It seems to be me that the study isn't pointing out trends as much as making predictions. Due to the nature of fortune-telling, I guess the predictions are okay ... as far as they go. I'm still not sure what to make of number seven or number eight; you can read the study yourself and perhaps chime in with your two cents.

As for me, I'm left with mixed emotions. On one hand, change is inevitable and I think it is good to think about what the future might bring. The eight bullet can be a sort of roadmap -- they can tell people what kinds of change might be helpful to think about.

Still, it would have been nice if the study had connected the dots. For example, the stock market predictions I mentioned earlier, and, in the United States, the increasingly precarious position of our Social Security Administration. This means retirement will be increasingly uncomfortable for people; they'll be retiring later and later, and, most likely, more cost-conscious than in the past. That means those products and services for that market had either better help you save money (generic drugs) or else face stiff price competition.

Another example: According to the study, innovation is important. Yet fifteen years ago, ASQ stood up and gave it's complete support to international standards on process, things like ISO 9001, and the whole idea of registrars and certifications for process compliance.

These process standards codify process into procedures. By doing this you create a defined process and defined process actively resists continuous improvement.

Thus we if we split innovation in half: Product Innovation and Process Innovation, we find a significant constituency within ASQ has been actively fighting the second, and not much discussion of the first.

I don't have any easy answer for that, but raising that issue would have been a fascinating outcome for the study.

My bottom line here: These ideas are okay. They are some food for thought; they have some potential. To see real value out of the study, though, we need to move the ideas from theory to action -- to get to practical application for the membership, or at least heated discourse.

How we get there I'm not sure. If the bloggers on this influential voices program can be part of that, well, I'd sure like to try.

Enough

For the past several years, whenever I work with something and things go ... odd ... I remember it. Often I will go to a peer I respect and tell them the story, as a sort of "Gut Check." One of the common responses I get, when I do mention names, is "Well, Matt, you have to remember, Joe is a businessman, after all."

I have no idea what that means.

From what I can tell, it seems to mean that businesspeople are allowed to do scammy/arse-hole-ish things, because, well, their primary interest is making money, so they are going to do what it takes to make money.

Something about that doesn't sit well with me.

Then I read the opening words to John Bogle's new book, Enough:

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Catch-22 over it's whole history. Heller responds "Yes, but I ave something he will never have ... enough."

As you can probably guess, the book has a different feel than most other "business" books.

Instead of writing about getting money and success, Bogel is writing about professionalism. In fact, he goes so far as contrasting the two, saying that the objective of business is to make money, while the objective of the professional is to do work that benefits society -- and provide a nice life in interim. While the businessperson is always grasping for more, the professional is compensated in other ways in addition to money, and it is possible for the professional to have, well, ... enough.

Instead of writing about Business, Bogel writes about character. One of the main thesis of his book is that the financial industry is set up with an inherent conflict of interest; that the industry is designed to benefit the consultants, lawyers, and marketers, not the clients they ostensibly serve.

He also talks about the numeric obsession so common in our society, beginning by quoting Einstein "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

This is a guy who walked around the offices of his building, leaving notes on desks, again and again, year after year, that said:

For God's sake, let's always keep VanGuard a place where judgment has at least a fighting chance to triumph over process.

In other words: This guy is one of us.

One of the strongest points he made in the book, the point that struck me, were the points on professionalism and serving our clients. According to Bogel, this sense of professionalism is being diminished across all aspects of society; even the traditional professions are being slowly undermined. For example, when Arthur Andersen was paid by Enron to audit it's books, the very company that should have been blowing the whistle was actively involved in hiding fraud. Notice that, again, this was fraud by the 'professional management' against the shareholders of the company -- the ostensible owners. (Or, as Bogle named his chapter "Too Much Salesmanship, not Enough Stewardship.")

Of all the ways he explains professionalism in the book, I was most struck by his quote from Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on it's definition of professionalism:

1. A commitment to the interest of clients in particular, and the welfare of society in general,
2. A body of theory of special knowledge,
3. A specialized set of professional skills, practices, and performances unique to the profession,
4. The developed capacity to render judgments with integrity under conditions of ethical uncertainty,
5. An organized approach to learning from experience, both individually and collectively, and this of growing new knowledge from the context of practice.
6. The development of a professional community responsible for the oversight and monitoring and quality in both practice and professional educators

Bogle goes on to refer to these as "Eighteenth Century Values", using Benjamin Franklin as an example -- a citizen, statesman, inventor and yes, entrepreneur, someone who's long-standing work was of lasting benefit to society. And, as much as I agree that we in testing need should improve our models and methods, I have to share a reluctant concern over our 21st century values.

I'm afraid I don't have the energy nor the vision right now to go into the depths to review this wonderful book reminds. I hope, however, that saying the three things that follow will help:

FIRST. At the end of the book, the 82-year-old Bogle lays a top-ten list, "reasons why I battle." One of those, number three hit me hard in heart:

"Because what I'm battling for - building our nation's financial system anew, in order to give our citizen/investors a fair shake - is right. Mathematically right. Philosophically right. Ethically right. Call it idealism, and it's as strong today - maybe even stronger than - it was when I wrote that idealistic Princeton thesis 57 years ago. How could an idealist fail to fight such a battle?"

We may not have the chance to have influence, or make a difference on the same scale, as John Bogle may in the financial industry, but I hope you agree that we are also engaged in a battle. And it is right. And it is noble.

I think it is worth talking about.

SECOND. Speaking of that fight, I further submit that hose of us that work in testing (and in the greater field of software development) seem to be in the midst of an identity crisis. Clearly we want to be professionals; we hear constant exhortations about professionalism and appeals to "act professionally." We have conferences and websites with names like the Software Test Professionals. Yet, all too often, our models of professionalism are cheapened into becoming about making more money, or protecting our jobs, or some soft of certification scheme.

We can do better.

THIRD. Beyond 'testing' books, I try to find books about testing. Last year, for example, I read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Talib. So far this year, far and away, my pick is Enough by John Bogle. (If you want a second, related book that is directly about our field, consider The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert C. Martin)

Please, consider getting a copy. It's a quick read, and if money is an issue, I expect that you could likely get it free from you library.

Whether you can find the time to read the book or not, I will make one more request: Let's advance the debate about professionalism in testing.

This doesn't take much; you can do it over lunch with some colleagues, at dinner with you family, or at your one-on-one with the boss.

Let's talk about words we don't hear much these days: Value. Responsibility. Duty.

We may not change the world ... but isn't it time we tried?

And now ... more articles!

I've been busy writing and interviewing the last several weeks, and the articles are starting to come through the pipeline. Let's see here ...

* 25 Agilists to Follow on Twitter, my stab in the dark at twenty-five people to look into -- and why!

* Building a Better Build System", an interview with Peter Smith

* Cloud Computing Conundrum, an interview with Chris Moyer

* Beyond Process and Tools" with the Authors of the new book Individuals and Interactions: An Agile Guide.

* I interviewed my friend Shmuel Gershon on Fuzzing and Fault Modeling

* And also the folks at Menlo Innovations on establishing and growing a test practice.

Then there's the dead tree editions

* A few months back my colleague, Robert Martin, asked me to contribute the foreward to The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers"; it ships this month and is available now for pre-order from Amazon.

* Speaking of books, our book "How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing" will be out in September, but you can also pre-order it from Amazon. By our I mean, well, our. The book is a contributed work; my role is senior editor and author of one chapter. The list of contributors is a veritable "Who's Who" in software testing, from Jon Bach to Cem Kaner and Selena Delesie.

Don't worry -- plenty more to come.

At Liberty

My six-year-old daughter, Rachel, likes to go for walks in the woods. To be specific, she likes adventures. Given a choice between a nice, clean, well-maintained trail and the brush and brambles, she will pick the hardy woods every time. It seems that, to her, adventures must be hard, must be challenging. To her, In some way, it seems almost morally superior to take the hard path.

You probably guessed it by now. Socialtext had a restructuring and reduction in force. As of May 3rd, I will be at liberty to take on new assignments. I am open to different kinds of engagements, from contracting and consulting to yes, the possibility of full-time employment. (The best way to reach me is probably by email: matt.heusser@gmail.com)

I've spent the past three years working in West Michigan for a company based in the Bay Area. I believe we have proven the remote model, but I'm still open to travel for short-term contracts. Especially Chicago, Indianapolis, or Detroit, which I might consider for longer-term contracts.

It's been a great run at Socialtext. Three wonderful years. Those who know me well also know how much I value being consistent; the Matt Heusser you see in private is the same one you see in public. That means that the things I said in public were true. It was a great working environment, and wonderful team, and, perhaps most importantly, I was really proud to help make a good product people can actually use.

I didn't mind spending time on the clean, nice, well-maintained trail. Still, all the while, in the back of my mind, I was aware of a little bit of risk, and yes, it's happened -- time and circumstance have forced me on the brambles.

That's okay.

I suspect it's time for an adventure.

Get Your "They Live" On

As the old saying goes, there are two ways to make money. When selling salami sandwiches, sure, you could improve your marketing, expand, experiment with better flavors, and try to make better things ... or you could slice the salami more thinly, thus getting more sandwiches for less cost. Sure, with the second way, you provide less to your customers for the same price, but it's a lot easier to do salami slicing.

Have you ever noticed that North American Culture has, well ... stopped making stuff, in place of salami-slicing and ponzi schemes?

I'm serious. Look at the major institutions of our society, and the things we used to make. Now look at how we make money now.

Family Owned-Businesses give way to stock-owned corporations. In an effort to make money, the public companies stop making things and do something like this:

- Mergers & Acquisitions, then lay off "redundant" staff at the acquired company (Most commonly HR and IT)
- Buying and selling "brands" then extending the brand
- 'Making money' by cutting benefits, or replacing pensions with 401(K) programs
- Increasing productivity and layoff off staff
- Or 'increasing' productivity by laying off assemblers, then buying complete parts (outsourcing), thus having 'more' parts developed per employee

It's not just big companies. Private Equity Firms do the same thing with smaller companies, taking on massive loans that are used to expand the business. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

It's not just companies either; from investment bubbles to Social Security to the Federal Reserve, ponzi schemes are everywhere. (Search "Jobless Recovery" on the Wall Street Journal's Website, for example.)

Yes, some people are benefitting from these changes. In many cases, when the plant shuts down and weeds start to grow in the parking lot, some small group of people got a disproportional benefit.

And yes, sometimes, in the times we don't care to admit, we may be tempted to take up golf, or buy fancy suits, or join the economic club, the country club, or do whatever it is those people do in order to join the group that is benefitting.

If you've ever had those feelings, or noticed those changes in society -- you might enjoy watching "They Live", John Carpenter's 1988 Action/Adventure/Suspect movie. It is available on Google Video for free until April 28th, and I just found a version on YouTube that seems to be available indefinitely. (Some obscenity, one small very short partial nude scene.)

No, I am not saying that our society is being taken over by shape-shifting aliens.

I am, however, saying that "They Live" -- and there are some of us left who still make things.

Quality Metrics (...and other Fine Myths)

When I look at our North American (or at least developed nation) public systems, I am, well ... sad.

Education, Health Care, Government, pick any area of public life and you are likely to see waste, declining performance indicators and increasing cost.

It seems strange. For twenty-five years we have had this resounding gong of public education reform, but despite our best effort, things keep getting worse. It's all most as if we are applying Weinberg's 1st Law Of Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.

Yet I have hope.

You see, while I believe things are getting work in many public sectors, I believe that is accident, not essence. I believe it is possible that those things can be managed well. To borrow a line from Dr. Deming, the systems we have set of guarantee a certain outcome based on human nature, but it may be possible to change the system.

If I had to give a label to this idea of improvement, one label that might fit is quality. I am a strong believer in the idea of quality, in everything from pride in work to effective work to continuous improvement; I am even a card-carrying member of the American Society for Quality.

Now over years there have been a number of ways to look at quality. You can look at it as a toolbox of techniques, or a philosophy, or, as I prefer, a sort of systems thinking approach to problem solving. In any event, the term can mean different things to different people and I am okay with this; the root of qual is sort of an intangible that defies measurement. (If you could objectively measure it, it's not qual anymore, it is quant.)

Enter Quality

Now about this idea of quality improvement as systems thinking. That suggests that instead of numerical targets, we seek to understand what is actually going on in the process, optimizing for the things we value the most, using numbers as indicators but not for control.

I may have worded that poorly, but something like that is what a great number of systems thinkers advocate, from Deming to Weinberg, and, most recently, the British Consultant Mr. John Seddon.

Notice the inherent conflict between systems thinking and "management (control) by the numbers." With control by the numbers, you can look at numerical targets and, if the process is within specific control limits, well, you don't have to worry about it. The numbers are a sort of report card which allows you to have an understanding of the system without having to be directly involved in the work. Many control-oriented management thinkers often believe that separating management from the work is essential for success.

The problem comes when the report card itself is causing the dysfunction. John Seddon put it this way in a recent lecture:

Twenty-five years ago or more I was studying peoples behavior in organizations. You know, it's kind of odd that you take honest, God-fearing people off the street, put them in a building, call it an organization and they behave in very strange ways. It wasn't until I got to the work of Deming that I saw that it is actually the system that governs their behavior ... do you remember in the 1970's people went to Japan to find out what they did? They woke up to the Japanese Miracle so they go over and 'let's have a look', and they came up with the idea that this was quality circles and suggestion schemes and then it became kind of TQM and it failed, didn't it? Because they couldn't see the thing you need to see, which is a different way of thinking about the design and management of work.

Now back to my words

If we take Mr. Seddon seriously (and I do), then we will want to scrutinize applications of 'quality tools' to make sure the measurements make sense, and, even if they do make sense, will they introduce dysfunction into the organization. (The most common form of dysfunction I have seen is exploiting the difference between what is measured and the actual desired outcome, but another common form is when optimizing individual parts of a process hurts the whole.)

All this brings me to Mr. Paul Borawski's recent post on the ASQ national quality blog about the Pewaukee School District. In Paul's words:

Dr. Sternke is a passionate and committed leader. She has personally invested in understanding her school district as a system and applied the tools of improvement in the conduct of the district’s mission. It’s all there: A mission, objectives, strategy, and metrics. And over time, by concentrating on the vital few, Dr. Sternke, and the devoted staff of the school district have driven performance to ever higher levels. Success is measured in the classroom, but the business of the school system to support educational excellence is managed, too.

All this sounds pretty good, right? Here you have a professional looking at education as a system and overhauling it; that's good. The plan is public; that's good too. They have a defined strategy they can track against, which is good. So let's look at those goals.

What's your goal?

I originally had several thousand words here, listing some of the goals of both the local district and the school. The district requirements are exhaustive, and include everything from revising 100% of the curriculum to comply with "power standards" to getting a certain number of twitter followers to training a percentage of the teachers to use computers at a certain level of competence.

Instead of going through all of those, though, I decided to save your eyes and review just one document; the high level review of the high school performance in 2008-2009:

Academic Goal #1: Identify essential concepts and skills in all subject areas by June, 2009.

Results: Collaborative Department Teams developed Power Standards in each subject area in preparation for the 2008-09 school year. Power Standards were articulated to students via course syllabi and many staff members posted their standards on classroom walls for display and review. Essential concepts and skills were continuously reviewed and updated in all subject areas. Essential concepts/skills are clearly articulated in unit Curriculum Maps and they are the basis for the development of daily Learning Objectives.

Academic Goal #2: Evaluating the Pewaukee School District’s non-fiction writing program.

Results: Data collected during the 2008-09 school year focused on the frequency of non-fiction writing assigned. Individual teachers collected student samples and anchor papers for each formal writing exercise. Curriculum Maps and end-of-unit assessments were revised to reflect our focus on non-fiction writing and data clearly indicates that students wrote consistently and continuously throughout the year. PHS staff members played an integral role on the District Literacy Committee where the overall writing program was evaluated.

Academic Goal #3: 50% of all Common Unit Assessments will be comprised of mid to upper level critical thinking questions/activities as measured by Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Results: Data collected at the end of the 2008-09 school year indicates that nearly two thirds of all questions/activities found on end of unit assessments require students to think critically.

Is this kind of improvement really going to change a school system?

Forming a strategy

Notice that all of these goals are process goals -- none of them are actually tied to outcome. To get on my soapbox just once, this is a classic middle-management mistake. Measuring the process gives management a sense of control, but it does very little (or less!) to indicate that the outcome will be good.

When you think about it, measuring the process will tend to put our focus on the means (the education process) not the ends. (An educated citizenry? A productive citizenry?)

What is the real goal of the school system? With a strategy written in this way we don't know.

Now If I were looking at forming a higher-ed strategy, I'd start with asking the teachers what they need. My guess was it might involved new textbooks, guest speakers, time to develop materials. Then I would ask the teachers, parents and students what success means to them.

Somehow I doubt it would mean a percentage of questions have a higher level in Bloom's Taxonomy, that the school had created across-the-board standards, or that a certain percentage of classes had complied with a new special way to teach.

Indeed, instead of "standards", I would likely let the teachers experiment with whatever they would like, the use whatever external tools I have (state standard tests, pass/fail rates, AP test scores, student and parent qualitative evaluation, peer review) to measure outcome.

Then I would ask the high-scoring teachers what was working for them.

You see, first I would study the system to see what was working, then ask how we could improve improve.

Along the way, I might identify some obstacles in the nature of the work; for example, many schools are set up like a factory, with a "batch" size of thirty students or so, instead of using lean concepts like one-piece flow. Ideally, it would be nice to customize education to meet the child, so I would be talking about balancing that one-piece flow against other economic realities. I'd be talking about tough choices, about why we had to done thing and not another. (I can't help but notice the term budget does not appear in the goals, nor does opportunities or obstacles.)

I wanted a quality plan, but, I am afraid to say, we got a

C'mon, Matt, do you really believe this batch size vs. one-piece flow stuff?

Well, let me tell you this: I did not realize it at the time, but when my parents moved me from a school with a 30-to-1 student/teacher ratio to a private school at ten-to-one, it was in order to avoid the stigma of my failing out of 2nd grade. Within a few years of private school I was dramatically outscoring my peers.

Being a believer in continuous improvement, we decided to homeschool our children, driving the student/teacher ratio even lower. So yes, it does matter.

Except, of course, you will see no mention of that in the strategy document for the district.

I can't really blame the administrators or leadership of the Pewaukee School district. Given what they were given, I don't even think they did a terrible job.

You see, the school district lives within a greater system, the American Public Education system. That education system has it's regulations, mandatory tests, departments, laws and state offices, that frames the problems of education, and creates rewards and incentives, that make this kind of strategy very sad ... but all-too predictable.

Over the part decade we have seen a huge increase in education delivery by internet, in charter schools, homeschools, and in competition. It is competition in which I have hope. Competition is the opposite of standardization; it allows a thousand flowers to bloom, and then us to pick the best flowers by outcome, not process.

Perhaps, over time, we can pick the methods that seem produce good outcome. But to do that we need to experiment.

When you think about it, without the Pewaukee School district trying something, and doing it in public, we never would have had this essay. They are experimenting. In many ways, they should be applauded.

But make no mistake; you can't just make up a bunch of new standards and give them numerical targets and call it "quality."

It's got to be, like, good and stuff, ya know?

UPDATE: I shared the first draft of this interview with a few of my fellow "Influential Voices Program" Bloggers. One of them, Aimee Siegler, pointed out to me that her children in Wisconsin, in a district near to Pewaukee, are involved in programs that try to provide individualized attention, adjusting the program based on the child's ability level and less on age ... decreasing the batch size.

So it is happening. For some reason, though, that isn't on the radar for "continuous improvement" in the school system.

I think it should be.

Configuration Management and Release Management

I keep hearing these term, Configuration Management and Release Management. I am slowly coming to some awkward conclusions about them. Before I come to a final conclusion, though, I would like your help: What do these terms mean to you? Are they helpful? Do they represent opportunities for improvement? In what environments should you be using the term?

Before I come to a conclusion, I'd like to hear what you have to say. I appreciate the input.

It *was* a big deal

Last February I blogged a bit about privacy issues with Google Buzz.

While there was a fair amount of interest, at the time, the general response was "meh."

Well, It's been a year, and the chips have fallen.

After a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission, Google reached a settlement, including independent privacy audits for the next twenty years.

Look, I've been at companies before with a "save the world" mission, I understand the pace of development, and I know how hard it can be to take a few minutes to look around, think, and say something like "Wait ... this feature has some unintended consequences."

Likewise, we don't know if anybody at Google said that -- a few might have. Perhaps they were transferred and the project went forward without them.

I wasn't in their shoes, and it is easy to nitpick after the fact.

Still, I think it's fair to say: Privacy is a big deal, and so it testing for unintended consequences of the specifications.

As for "meh", it turns out ... not so much.