Allan Kelly - Business Patterns for Software Developers

This edition first published 2012

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Foreword

I love books. I believe that all patterns fans love books. I remember in the early evangelical days of patterns introduction, arriving at a corporate site to talk about design patterns, hauling in my usual stack of patterns books: the Gang of Four (of course), the first of the PoSA series, several by Christopher Alexander and a PLoPD book or two. It was a lot of work, especially in the summer in Phoenix when the temperatures could be above 110 F. But it was worth it. Participants would immediately gather round, pick up, leaf through and start to read those books. It's often been said about Alexander's A Pattern Language that you start thumbing through, and then it happens the book draws you in and soon youre reading and reading and reading.

Good pattern books are all like that. Actually all good books are like that. It's one reason why I miss bookstores. You can't, even when selections are available online, browse books in the same way. I think you'll find Allan Kelly's book is the same. You'll pick it up. You'll see a particular pattern that catches your eye because it calls up a problem you've had or are having, and pretty soon you, too, will be reading and learning. One participant at a long-ago patterns talk, when asked about the attraction of books, said, Some of my happiest memories are about books.

I think that books have this power for us because they are proxies for the longest-lived form of learning listening to others tell a story. Allan mentions Steve's Denning's work on corporate storytelling how a good story is the most effective way to persuade others to hear your compelling idea. Readers will like the format for Allan's patterns, because each one opens with a short story.

Mary Lynn Manns and I decided to adopt that format for the patterns in Fearless Change after feedback from our reviewers. We had not taken the time to find good images for the patterns, believing that we could do that at a later date. We did, however, include a lot of known uses stories from contributors all over the world who had used the patterns. Our reviewers noted that these stories, especially the more powerful ones, seemed to embody the message of the pattern they were almost a stand-alone explanation. The suggestion was that we move an archetypal story to the opening of the pattern as a replacement for the image. Readers could then create their own images, in the same way that radio listeners used to. I remember many happy hours after school listening with my brothers to The Lone Ranger on the radio, and was almost disappointed the first time I saw an episode on television it seemed to be missing all the detail from my eight-year-old imagination.

Good stories reflect the author's expertise. It's why we want to hear good storytellers. We're all looking for answers. We want some suggestions for new directions, experiments we might try in our organisations and in our lives. You will definitely find that in Allan's book. The expertise shines through in the stories, in the understanding of the challenges we face and in the powerful solutions. This is one reason why patterns books take a long time to produce. It's not a simple matter of documenting the idea we had in the shower this morning. Patterns capture expertise, that of the author and of those who contribute known uses, examples or stories of their experiences using the pattern. It takes considerable effort to gather all that valuable material.

I can recall the first time someone asked me a very important question about books: can you think of at least one book that changed your life? I struggled with this question when I heard it, but then the obvious answer appeared. The book with the most impact on my life was one I had written: Fearless Change . Over the ten years it took to produce that book, I changed from a techie, a software designer, to someone intensely interested in the people side of development, especially the psychology of human interaction. The amount of research from the cognitive scientists that appears almost daily is overwhelming. It all has to do with us as humans, and has enormous impact on our software development and business process. It wasn't an overnight change, since the book took ten years to create, but it turned my life and career upside down. My personal mission statement is to translate as much of the research in this area to those in software development who are willing to listen.