Of media and software design

by Mathew on November 11, 2007 · Comments

Before I get started, let me just confess that I am not a programmer. I’ve tinkered with some HTML and even some CSS, but other than that I’m pretty much illiterate (a fact that my brother, who is a real programmer, would no doubt be happy to confirm). I’m an English major, after all. And yet, I have read a fair bit about the trend towards what some are calling “agile” software design, and it struck me that there are similarities between software programming and the traditional media.

A lot of traditional programming — the kind that produces software with billions of lines of code in it — involves dozens or even hundreds of people all toiling away for weeks, months or even years to produce a piece of software. It’s like a military campaign, in which the grunts do the low-level work, then it gets tested, then eventually it goes “gold” and is shipped. Then everyone buckles down for the next revision or upgrade.

As I understand it, an “agile” approach takes a much more evolutionary approach, in which the software gets put together in small chunks and then tested, then tinkered with, then tested, then improved, and so on. In that sense, the end product evolves over time, based on the feedback from users and from watching it get stress-tested in the real world. I could have this all wrong, but that’s my perception of it.

Now let’s look at the way a traditional medium such as the newspaper operates. It may not be months or years (although magazines are close to that kind of time-frame) but you still have a gigantic machine with many small cogs, devoted to producing something that is frozen in time — a lot like the software that goes gold and is shipped. Then everyone gets ready to do the revisions or the upgrade of the news the next day.

The Web, however, is not like that — or shouldn’t be. With a Web operation, news gets out quickly but in smaller chunks, and then it is tested against the facts (and the responses of those involved, or with knowledge of the events) and revised, and it evolves over time. It is never really finished. Instead of a mammoth project aimed at a single product, it is a series of small steps that eventually take you somewhere.

Just a thought.

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  • Mathew, I am a programmer (not that I've written much actual code myself lately), and I can confirm that you understand the difference between these two approaches to software development. (Some people point out, and I agree, that it's really only a difference of size: instead of doing a release every six months, there might be a release every week or two, and each such small release should still be approached in an organized and disciplined fashion -- though there's less to deal with, and there are huge differences in which programming techniques are most effective. Some supposed fans of agile approaches are simply averse to anything other than shooting from the hip, but agile won't save them.)

    That's a great observation on the parallel with media. There could be transferable lessons. For instance, in software, taking the agile approach requires a tremendous shift of mindset for those steeped in the traditional "waterfall" approach, and not everyone can make the jump. I would guess that the same is true in media. In fact, I would expect the disruption to be much worse because people would be less used to change than in the software industry where technology-driven change occurs more often.
  • Mathew
    Thanks, Rohan. I think you are right about the shift in mindset required. I see it on an almost daily basis :-)
  • Alex Beamish
    As a software developer who has moved from something like the waterfall method, based on the teachings of Systems Design at Waterloo, to a more Agile or XP (Extreme Programming) method using Test Driven Development (TDD), I'm not sure journalism can be moved completely over to an Agile method. And I don't think newspapers can be made that flexible at all, as they are tied to physical print deadlines.

    The concept of Agile or XP development is that you get a framework up and running, then add features incrementally. At any time you should be able demo a working system, even if it has a few Not Yet Implemented screens. With TDD, as you expand your features, you expand your test suite, usually by writing a test, confirming it fails, then writing the appropriate code to make the test pass. Development only continues when all tests pass -- if you've broken an earlier test by your new code, that must get fixed before you move on.

    It seems to me, trying to apply Agile or XP methods to journalism would have the journalist going back to their sources for "Just one more question". Done electronically via blog that wouldn't be too bad; done by phone would be slow and inefficient (and probably drive the source mad).

    Then again, many hands make light work, as Pamela Jones of Groklaw (www.groklaw.net) has found out. In the end, it becomes a balance between getting the news out fast, or getting a fully-baked story a little later. With newspapers you know that you're going to get a story that's 12-24 hours old. With a blog, it might be as recent as five minutes ago, but with a greater chance that part of the story may be inaccurate due to the speed with which it was reported.

    Interesting times.
  • Mathew
    I think you're right, Alex -- journalism may never be moved over completely to that model, at least while print is still around. But for the Web part of the process, it makes perfect sense -- and then at some point you take a "snapshot" of the facts as they are known, and print that.

    This isn't really all that revolutionary -- wire services have effectively been doing "agile" journalism for decades, with multiple updates, corrections, additions, etc. And newspapers have had the benefit of that -- but now they have to think about doing it themselves.

    As someone who worked at Washingtonpost.com told me, all that's really required is to move from the traditional "write, edit, publish" media mindset to one that's more like "write, edit, publish, edit, publish, edit, publish."
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