dan mcquillan's List: social computing IS52026B - lecture 18

• hink of user stories as representing a collaboration between the customer and the developers, as opposed to documenting customer requirements. The purpose of this collaboration is to reveal and understand the details of the user stories, which are recorded in the confirmation.
• Some people write a short description of the user story on the index card, while others like a statement of the format: [Role] can [capability], so that [benefit] .

• William Wake advises us to INVEST in good user stories :
  
  1. I ndependent: Dependencies between user stories should be avoided because they can lead to prioritisation and planning difficulties.
  
  2. N egotiable: User stories are reminders to collaborate. Collaboration between the customer and the developers involves a negotiation to balance the desired functionality with the cost of implementing it.
  
  3. V aluable to the customer: Whether a user story represents value to the business or simply conveys progress it must inherently be valuable to the customer. This enables the customer to intelligently prioritise user stories. Avoid user stories that have only technical value.
  
  4. E stimatable: There are three reasons why user stories may not be estimatable:
  

  • Developers lack domain knowledge. In this situation, collaborating with the customer will help them understand a user story.
  • Developers do not possess the right technical knowledge. They should split the user story into a spike to gather information, and a user story to do the real work. A spike is an experiment that allows the developers to learn just enough about the technology to be able to estimate the user story. A spike must be time-boxed. This defines the maximum time that will be spent learning and fixes the estimate for the spike.
  • A user story is too big. It should be split into smaller user stories during collaboration between the customer and developers. When development starts on a user story, it should take between one and two days to complete (including acceptance tests).
  5. S mall: If user stories are too big they are difficult to estimate and cannot be planned into a single iteration.
  
  6. T estable: User stories must be testable. A user story that passes all its acceptance tests (and all its unit tests) can be considered complete (subject to a final visual approval by the customer). Without this capability, developers will not know when they’re done .
  
• The customer writes the user stories because she’s in the best position to know the desired functionality. Each user story must be written in the language of the business.

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• From the outside the lean startup movement could be deemed a tad cultish. Mantras flow fast and thick: "Fail fast", "Validate your vision", "Get out of the building"; there is talk of pivots and iterations, early adopters and positioning.
• a successful project is no longer centred on specifications, change requests and resource management; instead lean exponents preach continuous deployment with a continuous feedback loop.
• Truthfully, it probably means right now you're doing it wrong. Your projects are cumbersome; you're meddling with Gant charts, when you should be prototyping; you're frittering away time on project status updates, when you could be talking to your end users. 
• Working with agile methodologies negates the shame of getting it wrong; conversely, it's acceptable to revisit your idea, revise your plan. Pivoting is at the heart of this concept. The sooner your realise your hypothesis is wrong, the quicker you can revise and retest it, hence the phrase "Fail fast". A pivot is one change - a new customer segment, a different feature - it's not a full abandonment of the work so far. Whatever the amend, you're still learning

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• Himanen (2001) argues that hacking should be understood as a new philosophy of business. He believes hackers have created a new way of working appropriate to the twenty–first century that can be captured in seven values: passion, freedom, social worth, openness, activity, caring and, the highest value, creativity.

    

  “… creativity — that is, the imaginative use of one’s own abilities, the surprising continuous surpassing of oneself and the giving to the world of a genuinely valuable contribution.” [1]

• In opposition to this business orientation, Wark (2004) believes hackers are the new radicals of the twenty–first century. Hackers in their pursuit of free creativity turn out to be, for Wark, the revolutionary class of the twenty–first century.

    

  “To hack is to differ … . Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.” [2]
• Yet, from a different angle, Wark and Himanen are similar because both see the hack as a moment of creativity or of making a difference. This means that both definitions of hacking have become detached from material practices related to computer, communications and network technologies and have made hacking into an abstract process of creativity or of producing differences. Their analysis eliminates empirical specificity, lifting hacking out of time and space and making it into an abstract “difference engine”. For this reason their work has limited value despite their seeming identification of the core of hacking.
• To move an understanding of hacking forward we can adopt the claim that hacking means creativity but remember that hacks are also material practices that generally take place in relation to computer, communication and network technologies. Hacks involve interactions with such technologies and are thus also material practices, as opposed to the abstract practices proposed by Wark and Himanen. A hack is a form of material practice that creates a difference in computer, communication and network technologies.
• To this initial definition we should add two conclusions that emerge from the most significant existing empirical work on hacking which is found in Taylor (1999), Turkle (1984) and Thomas (2002). All three find that hackers are attracted to illicit acts, both in individual moments when they may transgress a law or social convention and in collective moments when they set up alternative technical infrastructures.
• From their work we can also draw the second proposition that hackers are deeply concerned with differentiating and identifying themselves in relation to each other through arguments over the quality of hacks couched in technical language.
• Drawing on this prior work on hackers, I suggest the initial definition to be that a hack is a material practice that involves making a difference in computer, communication and network technologies, which may well be illicit and be subject to seemingly technical criteria of excellence through which community relations are negotiated.
• o place this initial definition into the world we can look at, in turn, the two central types of material practices of hacking and their communities: cracking and free programming (free software and open source).
• Acts can be briefly outlined through four different types of cracks: day zero exploit, day zero+one exploit, social engineering and script–kidding. The acts are different types of “cracks”, and the community in which these actions are taken can be understood as being driven by a particular interaction between peer recognition and peer education. I will briefly outline these in turn.
• We can already see that at heart cracking is about taking a social ambition (to control a computer or network) and reordering technologies to fulfil that ambition, while at the same time starting from a technological basis (only being able to take certain actions due to the technologies to hand) from which only certain social ambitions may be realised. There are a number of elements here that need untangling and which this argument will return to, the core three being social, technological and causation/determination. Cracking is about using social norms to determine technological constraints and it is about using technological determinations to cause different social norms.
• Hacking the social and hacking the non–hack
• These kinds of technological determinism places technology at a “social” or macro level in which technological changes, usually a series of in retrospect linked technological changes, force widespread social change. Such views have been widely disproven across the social sciences, for a number of reasons but chiefly because they position technology outside of society and extended work in the social studies of technology and science demonstrates that technologies are as much social enterprises as anything else (Mackenzie and Wajcman, 1999). Yet despite the widely accepted refutation of technological determinism that social studies of technology offers, hacking suggests a difficulty with views that fail to take account of some kind of mutually determinative power between technologies and societies. An absolute rejection of technological determinism in any form makes activities such as FOSS programming very difficult to understand because of the interaction between determinations that constitute it.

• It follows that it is important to acknowledge a problem with accounts of technology that imply or argue that technologies do not have specific material and determinative effects. Hutchby’s work is relevant here [15] and he suggests the concept of affordances provides an answer.

    

  “… different technologies pose different affordances, and these affordances constrain the way that they can be read. … The concept of affordances is associated with the work of Gibson in the psychology of perception. For Gibson, humans, along with animals, insects, birds and fishes, orient to objects in their world (rocks, trees, rivers, etc.) in terms of what he calls their affordances: the possibilities that they offer for action. … Affordances may differ from species to species and from context to context. However, they cannot be seen as freely variable. While a tree offers an enormous range of affordances for a vast variety of species, there are things a river can afford which the tree cannot, and vice versa.” [16]

• Hutchby suggests that while technologies can be read or utilised in variable ways, they also possess “affordances” that constrain the range of actions that can be taken with a particular technology. This is useful for this account of hacking because captures the sense in which technologies both are and are not open to social influence and it reasserts the influence of technology on society. It is this mutual sense of determination and redetermination that is at the core of hacking. A further aspect of Hutchby is worth drawing out as, though he does not use the term, the everyday seems to be the site of these mutual determinations.

    

  “… the uses and the ‘values’ of things are not attached to them by interpretative procedures or internal representations but are a material aspect of the thing as it is encountered in the course of action. We are able to perceive things in terms of their affordances, which in turn are properties of things; yet those properties are not determinate or even finite, since they only emerge in the context of material encounters between actors and objects.” [17]
• Affordances productively point us toward the ways technologies are open to re–use and re–interpretation by different people, leading to different uses of technology, while at the same time noting that an individual technology is not open to any use; you cannot make ice cream with a word processing programme, though you can edit an ice cream–making recipe.
• This re–insertion of the material into everyday actions (leaving aside the issue whether the actor is human or not) allows a politics of technology to emerge in the ways different technologies create different sets of possible actions which in turn build different social norms and institutions. This politics is inaccessible to those who reject any discussion of determination and seek the neutrality of connections and associations, instead of the politics of affordances and determinisms. To keep this notion of politics to the fore in the analysis I have proposed, it seems appropriate to pull the notions of affordance and determination together. For this reason, hacking can be thought of as a community engaged in constant determinative affordances between technology and society in the realm of computer and network technologies.

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