A Tool By Any Other Name…

“Only a handful of animals, including some birds, insects, dolphins, primates, and, of course, humans, have the ability to use tools.” - California Academy of Sciences

Driving the California coast provides a view of some of the wonders of nature. Enormous humpback whales, towering redwoods, hawks circling over golden fields, and sandy beaches filled with sunbathers are sure to catch your eye. One of my favorite scenes on that entire coastal drive comes at Monterey Bay, where you can watch otters spend carefree days grooming and eating shellfish to their heart’s content.

Otters are especially fun to watch as they surface after a long dive, popping up to the surface with a clam or a crab it has hunted in the depths of the bay. Otters will turn on their backs in the water, place a stone on their stomachs, and smash their catch against the stone to break the shell and get at the tasty morsel inside. Otters are one of only a handful of animals that have learned how to use tools to help accomplish a task. It’s a fairly exclusive club.

Humans happen to be another proud member of the world’s tool-using club. Humans have used tools for thousands of years to hunt, farm, create shelters, build aqueducts and bore through solid rock. Recently (in the historic sense), some humans have even started using tools to get crazy and build software.

Agile discussion boards are great places to catch lively discussions over the usage of tools. These discussions are usually started by someone innocently asking for tips on good software applications (I think I may know of one ;). Unfortunately, these discussion threads can sometimes turn into heated debates between the purists and the pragmatists. Often when it gets to this point, someone will post a statement that essentially says “We don’t use tools. We use index cards.” This post always makes me chuckle. “I’m sorry to tell you,” I think to myself as I click through to another post, “but index cards are tools.”

As sure as that stone is used as an anvil by the Monterrey Bay otter to help it eat, index cards are tools used by software teams to help them plan and track their work. So are whiteboards, Excel and, oh yes, even VersionOne.

The unfortunate direction of these tangents in the discussion is that the debate turns to one of using tools or not rather than focusing on helping the original inquisitor understand the range of appropriate tools for the job. A small team huddled together in a single workspace with an on-site customer (or product owner depending on your terminology preference) can very well use index cards and whiteboards as their planning and management tools to run an incredibly effective agile process.

There are reasons to go beyond simple tools, however, and discover the need for a more advanced planning and tracking tool set:

• when team members are distributed across multiple locations
• once someone steals your index cards
• as the tracking spreadsheet gets locked up when someone went to lunch and forgot to close it

Good agile teams are those who will continue to adapt and improve. These teams are going to find ways to improve their communication, their engineering skills and their processes over time. Improving the tool set to cover evolving needs is no less important.

The otter in Monterrey Bay found an appropriate tool for cracking through a hard shell. If I needed to crack through a crab shell, I could take a page from the otter handbook and bang it against a stone. I might call undue attention to myself if I tried this in a fine restaurant. Another option would be to use a tool such as a nutcracker that is better suited for restaurant use. It’s easier on me and those around me, so we are all happier and can eat our dinner in peace. Both tools can be appropriate. A quick assessment can help me select the tool that is appropriate not only for the task, but for the situation as well.