Rediscovering Agency...

Depicting individuals who were usually isolated and disconnected from their environments, in the Nighthawks Hopper focused on the solitude and lack of agency in modern?life. This work may have been his best effort of capturing this aspect of the emotional experience as well as?the psychological inner lives of his subjects.

Transcending limiting, assymetric relationships is a valuable lesson Software Development learned when Open Source Software (OSS) was invented, but it seems we need to learn it again.

Historical Context

• Closed Source Software (CSS) and Custom Software dominated the industry in the late 90's.
• OSS came on the scene in the early 00's and allowed visibility and even control, of source code. This step empowered customers and users by increasing their awareness, knowledge, and reducing their dependency on vendors.

The Lesson

OSS demonstrated the value of a collaborative relationship among "more equal" peers compared to a one-sided relationship where customers and users of software were isolated and excluded from directly improving the code, or even "just seeing" the code.

Applying the Lesson to Developer Performance Measurement

• Developers should own their performance measurement information and methodology, tailored to their priorities and local context.
• The popular centralized, one-size-fits-all approach is counterproductive and works against self-directed learning.

The Need for a New Approach

• DORA, SPACE, and other top-down or "one-sided" approaches are useless for individual improvement (in addition to many other glaring flaws). They cannot create the type of visibility, awareness, knowledge, and agency that self-directed learning requires.

We need a new approach that reverses this trend starting with one that:

• Elevates developers’ agency and interests so they can understand their own room for improvement, progress, and how process or technology changes affect them in a deliberate, coevolving, goal-directed ways. ????
• Avoids reducing them to aggregate statistics or even "customers" of the ever-benevolent and idealistic Platform (or DevEx) team. ????

Rediscovering the important OSS lesson of "transparency + shared understanding + bidirectional control" is important for establishing bottom up improvement that puts a priority on improving developer abilities, capabilities, and software development decisions and outcomes.