In one part of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is neither about Zen nor motorcycle maintenance, there are two motorcycles and two riders. John Sutherland is a romanticist who appreciates the external qualities of his motorcycle: its aesthetics, and its use as a vehicle. The narrator is a classicist who appreciates the internal qualities of his motorcycle: its workings, parts, and mechanisms. When Sutherland has a problem with his bike he takes it to a mechanic. When the narrator does, he rationalises about the problem and attempts to discover a solution.

The book, which as its subtitle gives away is “an inquiry into values”, then follows the narrator’s exploration of a third way of considering quality that marries the romantic and classical notions holistically.

Now we come onto software. Software doesn’t exist. At some level, its abstractions and mathematics get translated into a sequence of states of an electronic machine that turns logic into procedure: but even that is a description that’s a few degrees abstracted from what software and computers really do.

Nonetheless, software has external and internal qualities. It has aesthetics and utility, and can be assessed romantically. A decidedly pedestrian word to describe the romanticist view of software is “requirements”, but it’s a common word in software engineering that means the right thing.

Software also has workings, parts, and mechanics. Words from software engineering to describe the classical view of software include architecture, design, clean code, SOLID…

…there are many more of these words! Unsurprisingly, the people who build software and who change software tend to take a classical view of the software, and have a lot more words to describe its internal qualities than its external qualities.

Typically, the people who are paying for software are interested in the romantic view. They want it to work to achieve some goal, and want someone else (us!) to care about what makes it work. Perhaps that’s why so many software teams phrase their requirements as “As a romantic, I want to task so that I can goal.”

Which is to say that making software professionally involves subordinating classical interpretations of quality to romantic interpretations. Which is not to say that a purely-classical viewpoint is unvaluable. It’s just a different thing from teaching a computer somersaults for a paying audience.

And maybe that subordination of our classical view to the customer/gold owner’s romantic view is the source of the principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

and:

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

In fact, this second one is not quite true. It suggests that you could somehow “count software”, and the more (working) software you’ve delivered, the better you’re doing. In fact, romanticism shows us that people only want software in that it enables some process or business opportunity, or makes it more efficient, or reduces errors, or lets them enjoy some downtime, or helps them achieve some other goal. So really progress toward that goal is the primary measure of progress, and working software is a leading metric that we hope tells us how we’re working toward that goal.

So all of those code quality and software architecture things are in support of the external view of the software, which is itself in support of some other, probably non-software-related, goal. And that’s why the cleanliness, or architectural niceness, or whatever classical quality, of the code is not absolute, but depends on how those qualities support the romantic qualities of the code.

Real life comes at you fast, though. When you’re working on version 1, you want to do as little work, as quickly as possible, to get to the point where you can validate that there are enough customers who derive enough value to make the product worthwhile. But by the time you come to work on version 1.0.1, you wish you’d taken the time to make version 1 maintainable and easy to change. Most subsequent versions are a little from column A and a little from column B, as you try new things and iterate on the things that worked.

As fast as possible, but no faster, I guess.