Laws of Software Engineering · Pattern
Pattern
Westrum's Typology
Three kinds of organisational culture, distinguished by how information flows. Pathological hoards it. Bureaucratic routes it. Generative shares it.
How to use it. Watch what happens when bad news arrives. In pathological cultures, messengers are shot. In bureaucratic ones, the news is routed and lost. In generative ones, the news is shared and acted on. The same incident reveals all three.
How it gets misused. Used as a label for "good" and "bad" organisations. The typology describes information flow. It does not rank virtue. Bureaucratic cultures can be appropriate, for example in regulated industries. The question is whether the culture fits the work.
Related
- Principle Psychological Safety The shared belief that you can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and disagree without being punished or humiliated.
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Principle
Blameless Retrospectives
When something goes wrong, look at the system that allowed it, not the person who triggered it.
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Law
DORA / Accelerate Findings
Four numbers predict whether a software organisation is performing well: how often you ship, how long changes take, how often changes break things, and how fast you recover when they do.
Clusters
- The Culture and Incidents cluster - How organisations learn, or fail to, from what goes wrong.