Consulting Constraint, Consulting Activism, Judicial Constraint and Judicial Activism- unlikely bedfellows?
*WARNING- work in process. Multiple revisions and reposts to come.
Software development always involves a client and thus always involves consulting to that client. How much and how active that consultation creates a spectrum of consulting constraint and consulting activism that is not at all unlike the ideas of judicial constraint and judicial activism. We need to adopt the concept of constraint and activism and look at ourselves and then at our projects with that knowledge of how we tend to lean. To do otherwise leaves us at the risk of our inclinations and without clear indicators to others of how we might approach problems so that our counterparts can counter-balance us as our peers.
You may ask yourself if I am about to go on a political tirade. Nope. I was watching a series on the supreme court on public television the other day. Very compelling television. Not simultaneously but in similar time period I was reading the ACM Communications magazine/journal and reading a few articles in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) on leading clever people. For some reason all this came together in my head.
The concepts of judicial constraint and judicial activism can be applied to consulting and to the process of software development. Just, as in the early 70's (need a cite here- look for the edited post), the physical art of architecture influenced software development with the idea of known and repeatable patterns. I propose we could now make a study of the nature of law theory specifically judicial constraint and judicial activism.
As software developers and consultants we always have clients. Agile, if not earlier, gave us the common usage of the client term and mind set (cite). We could easily define a judicial client as the case before it. The court's deliverable is the law in the form of a ruling or only guidance on how the law should be applied. A judge and most specifically a higher level judge must decide on how to treat their client. How much judicial constraint will they show or how much will judicial activism come into play. We should be doing the same analysis and self evaluation of our predispositions from the outset in software development and design.
*Note -- I fear the term judicial activism because of the unfounded and improper stigma that has been attached to the term. I will use it because I lack a better term.
Let me define the boundaries for my terms. Right, wrong or in disagreement with your own definition I am defining judicial constraint as the choice that the court should take the most minimal approach possible, leave the smallest footprint and defer to other authorities wherever possible. I am defining judicial activism as the court taking the approach of a body with a mandate to set actionable precedence where it may not exist and to see itself as a defining force within it's bounds to provide interpretations of the law that may not defer to other authorities and has a greater footprint. As consultants to our clients on the process of software development we come at the problem just as a judge does with mind sets predisposed - will we be more constrained or more activist.
Some would say that Agile Development is much more aligned with judicial constraint. I'll call this "consulting constraint". While other more rigid methodologies we might consider as "consulting activism". In consulting constraint we much more passively take the role of providing product with the least footprint and try to chant the mantra "You ain't gonna need it" (YAGNI)(cite). Do only what needs to be done and nothing more. To use another common phrase- "Do the simplest thing and no simpler" (cite). In consulting constraint we defer to the business authority just as a judge inclined to the theory of judicial constraint will tend to defer to other authorities where possible. Consulting activism takes more of an approach that though the business is tightly integrated that the client needs greater guidance (consulting) to make the right long term decisions. Not that the analogy I am about to make is looked upon with much more favor than the term judicial activism, but I would offer up that consulting activism would lean in it's extreme to being a "catcher in the rye".
I think that we as consultants come at problems predisposed for leanings of consulting constraint or consulting activism. The spectrum is as wide as is the spectrum in the judicial world and just like in the judicial world we sometimes have a leaning to one position but then act very much in the pattern of the other position. The problem comes when we are not making this decision for movement along the spectrum with clearly defined reasons but instead are being lead to the opposite end of the spectrum by out latent tendencies for constraint or activism.
A good example of a consultant with constraint leanings that ends up being very much the activist is when the Agile champion consultant tries to influence the process of consulting/development itself differing from the mechanism of how the business desires to work. That's consulting activism at it's height. You don't perform agile development without business buy-in and despite the constraint leanings of the agilist they are often the most activist in having this adopted.
In a parallel comparison the leanings of the consulting activist may at times lead to a lot of consulting constraint. A case in point being when the client has caught onto some new technology or process and wishes to run with it on the next project. The consulting activist who may have been prepared to educate the client on such a thing now becomes consulting constrained and defers to the business desires potentially to the detriment of the client. If this is the wrong project type with which to apply the technology or process the consulting activism has blinded them to the idea that now is not the time to become consulting constrained.
This isn't restricted to Agile, RUP or other well known and well defined processes. This comes into play at many levels. We as providers to our client seem to increasing becoming polarized between our definition of ourselves but without ever using terminology such as constrained or active. I think we provide a great disservice to ourselves in not identifying ourselves as such and making decisions with that in mind. Just as a conservative judge is generally considered to follow judicial constraint and a liberal judge to follow judicial activism. We as consultants need to begin to evaluate ourselves in terms not of conservative and liberal but where we lie along the spectrum of constrained or active.
Ideally, we are all centrists but too many consultants tend to come too close to ideologues. Consultants must carefully decide how to approach a client and their desires not based on ideologies but making a specific and conscious decision on whether the situation requires consulting constraint or consulting activism. I believe we need to study what judicial constraint and judicial activism has brought about in various times and situations and learn how those patterns apply to our microcosm of consulting and delivery to our client. I propose there are patterns that we can learn from. We can evaluate where each of these judicial approaches was breached by their classic followers and evaluate the outcomes good or bad and the outcomes when they followed their labeled inclined approach. How in the end did these various actions meet the good of the client. What I propose is subjective but more important is the thought and the process of evaluation than some sort of finite and discrete analysis- the latter would be very consulting activist. The idea of thinking about ourselves and our approaches as constrained or activism is already activist enough.
What are the criteria for moving along the spectrum from constrained to activist and what are the criteria for moving along the spectrum in the reverse? That is what we must define. I would argue that the criteria for movement in one direction is not the antithesis or even the simple opposite of the criteria for moving the other direction. The shift in one direction will have very differing variables from the reverse direction. These need to be conscious decisions on where to begin along the spectrum and how we move along the spectrum even within the same project.
We definitely don't know the answers. We don't even have a hypothesis, yet. We do now have a proposition and challenge that consulting constraint and consulting activism exists. We do now have a proposition that constraint and activism can be identified loosely along a spectrum and patterns can be found and applied on how to move along that spectrum. A further proposition is that we must accept and identify ourselves as predisposed to live in given locations on that spectrum in general and in given circumstances. Lastly, we have a challenge in defining the patterns and analysis points for determining intentional constraint or activism.