Love And Software Development

During his lunchtime talk at XpUniverseTwoThousandTwo, KentBeck said many interesting things. One piece of his talk that struck a chord in me was what he said about the "L" word:

: "Love what you do. Love who you work with."

With my mind sufficiently warped from being midway through BertrandMeyer's ObjectOrientedSoftwareConstruction, I immediately thought of a way to express this in DesignByContract: Both loves that Kent spoke of are neither preconditions nor postconditions, they are invariants.

Preconditions and postconditions describe the properties of individual routines, or in this case, an individual's various actions. An invariant is a global property which must be preserved by all routines, or in this case, a personal choice that survives an individual's myriad actions in the software development process.

It helps me to consider love in this way because to me it emphasizes love as a decision and an action, enduring the ups and downs of a project's evolution. It also emphasizes to me that this love does not necessarily exist before or after the project, just during the project (though I hope that this love would survive the project).

--DaveHoover

RonJeffries on EnforcingMethods:

: "ExtremeProgramming (and leadership in general) is a work of love. If you don't respect others, you're not doing it right."

KenAuer and RoyMiller from ExtremeProgrammingAppliedPlayingToWin, page 177:

: "Pairing is about loving the person you're pairing with."