EPF – Failing grade on collaboration
January 2nd, 2008 by Kamal AhluwaliaI have been keenly watching the progress on what started as a promising project in the Eclipse foundation. Unfortunately after more than two years of opportunity to shine I would have to give the EPF project a failing grade. I fear that when someone at IBM realizes the wasteful investment of resources in this project they will pull the plug on their participation at EPF. This will inevitably kill the project since IBM is the only committer on the tool aspect of EPF and the major committer and donor to the content aspect of EPF.
In my view there are several reasons for this failure and many lessons that I have learnt simply by following the travails of the project. These reasons are not the lack of aptitude and personal contribution of the EPF team but simply a miscalculated approach to building a vibrant self-organizing process community. Today I will highlight the mind boggling high transaction costs of submitting process content to be consumed and critiqued by a peer network. Even by their own admission, it takes “2-3 months” for the eclipse legal process to approve any process contributions to EPF. This is an anachronistic concept in today’s day and age. Communities are self-organizing. If what I contribute is useless to you, you will not use it. Period. Moreover having been tagged as someone who supplies useless content my user ratings will go down and I will have to significantly improve my game to get back my reputation. Communities give rise to wisdom-of-the-crowd, encourage meritocracy and do not tolerate back room machinations. As articulated by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail while discussing the tools needed to support a long tail, “This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require - and reward – investigation”. Elsewhere in the book he discusses how “a once-monolithic industry structure where professionals produced and amateurs consumed is now a two-way marketplace, where anyone can be in any camp at any time. This is just a hint of the sort of profound change that the democratized tools of production and distribution can foster”. In the case of software process modeling, these tools take the form of easy to use process modeling and consumption tools. With that, rather than a paradigm of a handful of processes being donated by a few process experts, one could feasibly have hundreds of process variants created, put on wikis, blogged and rated! Now if we multiply the 2-3 months timeframe for these 100 processes the EPF legal staff will be kept busy for 20 years…just on this project! Later I will discuss some other pitfalls to avoid based on the lessons learned from following this project.
Last 5 posts by Kamal Ahluwalia
- Is my process true to my methodology of choice? - January 7th, 2008
- Governance Webinar Recording - December 7th, 2007
- Webinar - Effective Software Development Governance - November 28th, 2007
- IRIS Process Central is here... - November 19th, 2007
- Jazz BOF at CASCON - October 26th, 2007
April 14th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Kamal, I have read some of your posts on the EPF newsgroup and am in agreement with them - specifically the posts on enactment/instantiation.
However this post of yours declaring the entire project to be a failure because it takes 2-3 months for new process elements to be approved and incorporated is quite off the top.
It would be quite horrendous to have hundreds of process variants out there. By definition, process that we would want created and published would be ones that have been developed from learnings gathered over many projects. Processes are similar to good patterns. It is useless to have hundreds of patterns. What we need are few well thought out patterns or processes that incorporate knowledge that has been elicited from vast experience.
It is unlikely that EPF will die abruptly, because it is an open source (lite) version of a commercial product from IBM - Rational Method Composer.