Alan Skorkin reminds us that much of what drives current software development process came from the more general study of process for all kinds of work, including manufacturing. When you decide to adopt a particular process, you do so to reach a goal and for that vast majority of businesses, that goal is productivity - more profit per time period. (For a few very small operations, less time period to earn the profit / income sounds far more humane, but is still based on a desire for higher productivity.) Whenever you adopt a process instead of just telling your staff to do whatever you want, it's because you don't think they would be as productive left to their own devices as they would be under the direction of the process.

As Alan points out, there are two very different thoughts behind this basic position. One says that workers are lazy and shiftless. They'd rather chitchat, smoke, or daydream than produce what management wants them to produce. Processes built on this thought are all about measuring and controlling and proving that people have or haven't done what they should have done. The second, christened Theory Y in contrast to the first, which got dubbed Theory X in order to tell the two apart, says that workers are much happier when they know they are productive, and need management to help them achieve productivity as a co-operative goal. Processes built on this thought are full of collaborative work and empowering and the like.

He goes on to draw some specific conclusions about Lean that I will leave aside. I think it's useful to look at the process you work with day to day and ask yourself - is this process founded on Theory X or Theory Y? What image does the management at your firm have of the workers at your firm? Does process control them or support them? Is the motivation for workers assumed to come from inside themselves, or to be imposed by management? No matter what management says about what developers can and can't do, the process you work with will tell you their founding principle. It might be an eye opener to think about it like that.

Kate