Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies

I’m a big fan of patterns, as I find that codebases employing well-known patterns (such as MVC) are much more approachable for developers new to a project, making them easier to maintain over their lifetime. Of course, patterns aren’t limited to just code, but are also found and applied in other fields, from architecture to medicine, because they help quickly communicate a shared understanding of a situation or approach. This allows discourse to more quickly move to the relevant bits, rather than just getting up to speed.

My predisposition to patterns is one reason I enjoyed Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior by Tom DeMarco, Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister, Steve McMenamin, James Robertson and Susan Robertson.

If you don’t recognize those names, it’s the Atlantic Systems Guild, the same group of people that wrote Peopleware. In Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, the guild outlines common project and organizational patterns that they’ve observed throughout their careers. Many of the patterns tend to be anti-patterns, rather than traditional patterns you would want to emulate. This is also why so much of the book struck me as humorous, if only because they may be familiar from your own experience.

My favorite pattern in the book happens to be the first one, which is Adrenaline Junkies. From the book:

You probably recognize the characteristics of the adrenaline junkie organization: Priorities are constantly shifting; everything is needed “yesterday;” there’s never enough project time before delivery; every project is urgent; and the urgent projects just keep coming. Everybody is frantically busy . . . all the time.

People in these organizations do not think strategically. Work gets done on the basis of its urgency alone. Unless a project’s “frantic factor” is high, it will be ignored – even though it promises a significant long-term advantage. It will remain ignored until it suddenly (surprise, surprise) becomes urgent. Adrenaline junkies believe that the best way to work is not by planning but by running as fast as possible.

Most of us have probably seen individuals, teams or entire organizations exhibiting this behavior. It’s all too often to find an adrenaline junkie developer, as they tend to be the types who see their entire job as the act of writing code. If they aren’t writing code, they’re wasting time, since planning, design and research are more strategic actions and not directly related to that urgent bit of deliverable they’ve just been asked for. The pattern even highlights the fact that adrenaline junkie organizations tend to “enthusiastically embrace the customer service ethic: They confuse responding to urgency with admirable responsiveness.” The truth, of course, is that treating all requests equally based only on urgency, without thinking about the larger value (or even usefulness), is actually a disservice to your customer.

The book’s goal is to capture and identify common patterns, and there are dozens of other patterns which are equally interesting. It only glosses over what can be done to fix projects or teams that exhibit anti-patterns, but understanding the behavior is the first step to addressing it in any event. It’s a good read that is likely to give you a better understanding for behavior you may encounter during your career, while also entertaining you. If you’re at all interested in the soft skill side of IT project work, I recommend checking it out.