For a while now I’ve been calling Atlas a methodology, on this site, in conversations and even on its own page here, and every time I write that word I feel like I’m promising more than I know. Atlas was born inside my two companies, Oroz and Sincera, built together with my partners from problems we actually had, and it works really well for us, but I still don’t know whether it’s a product methodology or just the way we work.
Process or methodology
The difference I see today, and that I’m still trying to understand better, is that a process is the sequence of steps a team follows to reach a result, while a methodology is something bigger, which explains why those steps work and keeps standing when other people, in other places, apply it without whoever created it being around.
By that measure, Atlas has a foot on each side. It has a fixed order of steps, which is the process part, but it also has principles that explain why that order exists, like writing the objects before the flows or keeping every contradiction in plain sight instead of resolving it quietly, and those principles are what make me suspect there’s something in it that goes beyond our companies. What I don’t have yet is proof that it holds up outside them, and that’s what I’m trying to find out at CodingIT, where I have much less control over the environment, as I wrote in I turned a deliverable into a process.
I also don’t know how you share something like this. A methodology that only exists in its creator’s head and in two companies’ repositories is, deep down, knowledge kept in a drawer, and if it has value I need to find a way to explain it to other people that doesn’t depend on me being in the room.
Why I started writing
That’s a big part of why I started this site. The initial idea was just to document, with no ambition beyond recording what’s happening as it happens, doubts included, like this one.
I still don’t know what I’ll do with these texts, and maybe text isn’t even the best format for this, since I’m thinking about making videos and other content further down the road. While I don’t have the time or a clear mission for what this will become, I’d rather write however I can and leave here a record of how Atlas is growing, what it already solves and what I still don’t understand about it.
If anyone is reading
I imagine almost nobody reads this, and that’s fine, because this text is, above all, a note to myself. But if you got this far and have an opinion on what turns a process into a methodology, have been through something similar or just want to disagree with something, I’d love to hear it, and my email is right below.
For now, this is where Atlas is, somewhere between a way of working that paid off and an idea that might be useful to more people, and that middle of the road is what I want to record.
Written by Matheus Sá. Disagree or want to add something? Write to me.