It’s about time I probably asked this question about the new Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship, but seriously, am I missing something?
Firstly, the whole idea about craftsmanship applied to software isn’t too much of a new idea. I remember reading Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative when it first came out, and how the Pragmatic’s also talked about this concept.
I’m probably biased a little bit because I probably believed in what craftsmanship stood for before being fully immersed in agile for the last five(?) years. A part of me understands why this is important for agilistas. After all, I hear of stories all of the time where in many organisations that focus solely on Scrum without adopting any developer discipline still have a “crappy codebase”.
Yet I worry that it focuses on the wrong problem. I worry that it may be addressing a symptom, not a cause. I worry that it will further split our industry into two camps, those who craft (or should craft) software, and everyone else.
The real question I ask myself when going into new organisations and with new teams is, “Do people care about the quality in their work?” This question applies to all parts of an organisation, all parts of a team, not just developers.
So I’m jetlagged, tired and honestly just ranting a little bit, but I still ask the question, “Am I missing something?”.
I am not sure about the camp problem. Camps are always going to be created especially in our industry. There will never be a single school of thought. All we can hope is majority of people will be in a camp which helps things to become better.
But as you said it is not the developer but the organization as such caring about quality is most important. I am one of the first non dev (May be mainline dev) who signed the manifesto as I believed in it. Also I left a comment on Uncle Bob’s blog asking him not just to concentrate on Devs but everyone who is involved in building the software.