I found myself at the bookstore today with the family and I spotted a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer. I've never read it so I bought it and started it today. In reading the Preface, the book mentions the Japanese term kaizen. They define it as:
"the concept of continuously making many small improvements"
This immediately made me think of a running joke we have on my team. We often say "we're sucking less a little at a time" or "I try to suck a little less each day". It's not that we really believe that we're immersed in vats of suckage; it's more that software development is hard and we're working to make it less difficult a little at a time.
I've heard the term kaizen used in relation to Scrum but I couldn't remember what it meant exactly so I looked it up on Wikipedia to get more information. It states that there must be three principles in place for it to be most effective. One of them is:
"a learning, non-judgmental, non-blaming (because blaming is wasteful) approach and intent will allow the re-examination of the assumptions that resulted in the current process."
That's a great principle (as are the others). This is a main part of Scrum's sprint retrospectives which have been very effective in my experience. Blaming is indeed very wasteful. People should be held accountable for their actions, but spending more time debating who is at fault versus working on the solution is pointless. Blaming is all about assigning fault which often is met with resistance. Conducting educating about mistakes sounds a lot less harsh.
In a development team, it's important to develop a culture where people feel that it's ok to fail. If you can accept your failures, then you can begin to do something about them. If people feel as if they will be ridiculed for making errors, they may shutdown and become indecisive. Team members need to be able to say "I failed" once in awhile without feeling insecure.
I'm sure the book will have more insight on the subject, so I'm looking forward to it.
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