What Does the Cake Icon Mean?
by Wayne Strider

Our home page says "we work with you and others in your organization on three levels simultaneously because we believe these are inseparable." The three layers of the cake represent the three levels: content, process, and human.
On another level, the cake is a reminder that nothing is as simple as we might want to believe. Cakes are not. Software is not. Certainly individuals and human systems are not. Teams, organizations, and companies are human systems.
Any cake, before it is a cake, has a lot of un-cake-like qualities. Most cake recipes have a content part and a process part. The ingredients are the content. The instructions for how to put the ingredients together, bake and decorate the cake are the process. The chef and the people who will eat the cake provide the human part. The human part includes the chef’s motivation, understanding of the context, desired outcomes, cake making skill, interpretation of feedback, and the feelings that surface from those interpretations. The human part also includes the expectations of the people who eat the cake, their coping when reality does or doesn’t match expectations, and their feedback to each other and to the chef. When the content, the process, and human part all interact in certain ways the outcome can be a wonderful experience for all.
Many people however see a cake as just a cake. They don’t appreciate the complex interactions among the chef, the ingredients, the instructions, and those who eat the cake.
How does this relate to how I work with organizations? Let’s imagine a potential client, Gina, contacts me and says she wants a class on inspections. She tells me her organization has been through a process improvement assessment and they are initiating several process improvement projects. They want to begin with inspections. Gina reveals that her management expects developers to begin using inspection techniques routinely to develop high quality software.
In this example the Content includes:

• a class on inspections
• the expectations conveyed by Gina about developers using inspections routinely
• the assessment results
• the other process improvement projects
• the developers to be trained
• the number of classes

The Process is the actions and the order of the actions taken to bring about the desired change -- routine use of inspection techniques. The actions may include:

• timing of the classes
• follow up support and coaching for moderators, inspectors, and authors
• communication regarding the purpose of inspections
• creation of realistic expectations of management regarding use of inspections
• creation of realistic phased goals for defect removal
• modifying performance appraisal systems to support use of inspections
• providing tools for capturing and analyzing defect data
• modifying the organization structure to provide focus for using the defect data to improve development processes

The Human part includes the meaning each individual makes about the content and process, and the feelings that surface including:

Possible Meanings	Possible Feelings
my peers will be examining my work	fear, anger, relief,
I will be examining my peers’ work	delight, bored, rushed
this will expand my schedule	frustrated, scared
I won’t do it right	incompetent, unsafe
this will improve the quality of our work	excited, hopeful
this skill will make me more marketable	secure, competent

The human part is universal, but the experience of it is uniquely individual. Therefore, the feeling response to the same content and process among executives, managers, and developers may differ completely. Meaning and feeling are inside each person and therefore unseen. People may confuse one another by their outward behaviors. Life will be chaotic for a while and the organization will seem un-inspection-like until each individual finds a way to safely practice and gain competence with inspections.
Some managers have told me, "a class is all we need." That’s very much like saying a cake is just a cake. Of course sometimes that is what a manager really wants. Some managers are content to raise awareness of such techniques and hope that they catch on. A class will certainly raise awareness.
But more often, as with Gina, a manager really wants his developers to routinely use inspection techniques to build software that is of higher quality. There is more than a subtle difference between raising awareness and routine use. If I cannot help a potential client understand this important difference, then I don’t take the engagement.
In this short article I’ve tried to give my meaning to the cake metaphor. I hope I’ve succeeded. I would enjoy hearing from you either way. You may think of other meanings that fit the metaphor. I’d love to hear those too.