Fourteen – Zero Defects

My train was half an hour late getting into London Euston.  Had it been on time, I would have had to go to London Tall People. The Tall People Meetup was a film screening; I don’t remember the exact detail.  There would have been a downside. There is nothing more infuriating than going to the cinema and being sat in front of a giant who blots out your view, ruining everything.

Instead, I went to Zero Defects, which was the first event at half past six.  It was located in an office building situated between Liverpool Street station and Bank.  I soon found the office and after pushing an entrance buzzer I was told to go to the second floor.  I discovered a room filled with people.  I quickly found a seat.

This event was mysterious. The description consisted of only two sentences.  The first was about ‘uniting around a cause’, and the second suggested that there going to be loads of other interesting events that would take place.  When I signed up to the Meetup group, there were some weird questions, such as, ‘what are your views on testing?’ Answer: ‘it’s important’. ‘What do you think about devops?’ Answer: ‘I don’t know this term, so I can’t form an opinion’.  All I knew was that it was a technical group about software.

I soon realised that this event was a bit different to the other technical Meetups: there was no free beer. Two banners were displayed at the front of the lecture area: one that related to a company that developed user interface components that be used in websites, and the name and logo of a consultancy company that I had never heard of.  

‘Is anybody looking for a job?’ our leader, Andy, asked.  Andy was an immaculately dressed middle aged gentleman who spoke with an Essex accent.   From what I gathered, Andy’s main job was working at the consultancy firm, but he also had a connection with an IT recruitment agency, hence his cheeky question.

There were two presentations.  The first one by a chap called Dan, who talked about his journey from an academic in the biological sciences to his current job as a software architect.  ‘I didn’t do computer science at university; I immersed myself in learning… I got to see a presentation at a conference about software which changed how I looked at everything’.  I was mildly baffled: why would you make that change?  Surely the biological sciences (of which I knew nothing about) could offer a rewarding and challenging career?

The second presentation was by Andy, who told us that he was also going to talk about software architecture.  He began by asking the audience what they knew about the concept of ‘zero defects’ before talking about Japanese manufacturing processes.  He mentioned the challenge of gathering requirements and spoke about different views of a software development process, and (for some reason) the organisational structure of advertising agencies.

Within the first five minutes of Andy's talk I realised I had to endure ‘Death by PowerPoint’.  Whilst I was sitting in that office, hearing about critical paths and project management, I had a flashback to my university days.  To appreciate Andy's lecture to its greatest extent I felt as if I should have been bleary eyed, have ringing ears and a mild hangover all from a heavy night at the students’ union.

Even though I had lost the will to live a number of times throughout the one hundred and twenty seven slides of the presentation, my interest in software and software development was occasionally piqued.  Creating software isn’t just about writing computer instructions in a weird computer language, it's about philosophy.  It’s about creating a representation of a problem (or set of problems) in a language that can be understood by both humans and machines.

As coloured boxes moved randomly on the presentation screen I asked myself a question: what are the ways in which the software development cultures differ?  The software development process that Andy was talking about was very different to what the people at Yammer were talking about. There was also something else that I detected: Dan talked about software as an ‘engineering discipline’ whereas Andy spoke of it in terms of being ‘a craft’.  

There were clear tensions and differences between the two speakers.  Developers and architects, it was argued, need to find time to practice and develop their craft; creating software can be a bit like painting.  On the other hand it could be a bit like engineering, where developers bolt together known components together according to a well defined schedule.

When the presentation ended, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief; I had been subjected to more PowerPoint slides that I could stomach: one hundred and ten more, to be precise. I hadn’t learnt too much; I realised I should have gone to London Tall People.  I felt tired, hungry and grumpy; I wanted to go home. I didn't chat to Dan and Andy as I should have done; my patience had been thoroughly exhausted.

I went downstairs and out into the cool evening air and soon became lost.  London was empty; this part of the city was deserted.  It felt unusual.  I walked in the rough direction of one of the sky scrapers I recognised; the Shard, figuring that I could find a way to catch a bus to London Bridge station.