The Low-Down on Bottoms-Up

This is a completely trivial rant on the use of the phrase "bottoms-up" when I the correct term should be "bottom up". We all know what we mean when software is developed using a "bottom up" approach or that ideas in an organisation come from the "bottom up". "Bottoms-up" on the other hand is a friendly remark made before drinking an alcoholic beverage. It also can be a call to get out of your seat an do some hard work although the origin of the "Head down tail up" description of hard work is more apt for digging and cleaning than it is for desk work.

I agree with Jonathan Betz when he says

What's bugging me these days is that a lot of people are trying to describe Google culture as "bottoms up," when they actually mean "bottom up" Bottoms up means a whole different thing. So, to all you Googlers throwing around the phrase "bottoms up" like it's a good thing: please stop. It hurts my ears when you say it.

I also agree with Jonathan Nightingale

I thought it was a rather humourous typo - obviously someone had confused the drinking cheer with the development methodology on a hungover Monday morning and typed the wrong thing.

I first wrote about this in an earlier posting but I have heard it since on many occasions. I list a number of references below who fall into the "Bottoms Up" abyss. Amongst them Bill Gates is quoted a number of times using this phrase. I like to think that this was probably a journalistic mistake rather than a slip-up by the world's richest computer nerd. Bill Inmon, one of the founders of data warehousing also has a couple of bloggers accusing him of advocating a "Bottoms Up" approach but there seems enough who use the correct term to suggest that Mr Inmon himself did not advocate this phrase.

A "Bottoms Up" approach could be when the software developers go out for a drink and come back in to write some code. This would be a new approach to software quality. The phrase could refer to when everyone is tail up and is very busy but I do not believe this is the intent in most cases. Congratulations though to Chris Keyser who has his own definition for a "Bottoms Up" person suggesting some justification for using this phrase:

But I have definitely been there working with a few bottoms up people. That's the person that when I arrive at some moderately elegant system architecture diagram with some pretty pictures in PowerPoint and Visio catches the few key leaps of faith I made when I am doing my hand waving around my vague idea of implementation, and has saved my rear-end more than once.

Still more worrying is when "Bottoms Up" is used with the phrase "Tops Down". Now that does conjure up some interesting images. The best idea I found on this subject comes from a posting response:

Perhaps they have actually installed a free beer cooler somewhere at IBM, and
they really are encouraging bottoms-up development, and anticipate that enough
of this could lead to tops-down development?

References:

The Bill Gates Quotes
http://www.crn.com/software/183701538
Microsoft wants to make collaboration "simple and bottoms up" but also give users visibility into their important business information, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told attendees of the company's second annual Microsoft Office System Developers Conference in Redmond, Wash.
"We are adding new capabilities to make collaboration simple and bottoms-up, but also gives [users] visibility into business information. There are new capabilities in Office aimed at filling the skills gap," Gates said.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/operating_systems/gates_pushes_power_to_the_people_message.html

The productivity benefits accrued by companies that aren't afraid to back "bottoms-up empowerment" was a key theme for Gates during his hour-long address, attended by CEOs from Barnes & Noble, Berkshire-Hathaway, Dell, Delta, Fanny Mae, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot and other Fortune 1000 firms from around the world.

(and the next one contains "Tops-Down")
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/billg/speeches/2007/02-20BillGatesITACtranscript.mspx

The consumer Web brought in, with products like SharePoint, into an internal company environment, so you have bottoms-up creativity but no discontinuity as you're taking that bottoms-up creativity and connecting it with sort of tops-down financial systems because the kind of parts and information out of those systems can easily be imported into any of these engines or portals. We just pick a template and go. We don't have to call IT or think about it, and yet the audit trails and the rights management capabilities built into these things are what's appropriate now for this very digital environment.

The Bill Inmon Attributions
http://www.netcrucible.com/blog/2004/04/09/death-of-the-data-warehouse/

In fact, I remember Bill Inmon (the father of Data Warehousing) fighting against the spread of a particular concept of ?data mart?, since he felt it would give people the impression that data warehousing could be done in a bottoms-up fashion.

http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/expert/KnowledgebaseAnswer/0,289625,sid91_gci1173583,00.html
You'll have two basic decisions to make and numerous follow-on decisions:
Enterprise vs. Data Mart-Oriented Architecture
Enterprise vs. Bottoms-up Oriented Methodology

Other Miscellaneous Quotes
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/firstlook/2007/06/scalable_wikis_made_easy_by_mi.php
"This is a bottoms-up form of communication as opposed to a much more traditional centralized expert driven-down sort of communication," he says.

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/84664/index.html
Raising Linux Awareness: A "Bottoms-Up" Approach

http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2007/07/enterprise-architecture-top-down-or.html
(This is a rare blemish for James whose blog on Enterprise Architecture is well worth reading).

One of the more interesting things is that a person debating top-down vs bottoms-up needs to take into consideration is historically which one has had better results. Of course, top-down has the advantage that even mediocre delivery will be declared success while bottoms-up mediocrity will probably result in throwing daggers. If we ignore the whole perception is reality crowd for a moment and truly think about success, then I think our conclusions would be different.

http://www.uxcomm.com/corporate_news_ar_2007-01-09a.asp
In contrast, the "bottoms up" approach is characterized by the use of management software that vendors typically ship with their devices, or which is put in play when an Operating System (OS) is loaded onto a device.

http://www.worcestergroupinc.com/blog/index.php/2006/11/24/bottoms-up-or-top-down-the-eternal-business-intelligence-question/
[ # ] Bottoms Up or Top Down? The Eternal Business Intelligence Question

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6087566.html
Significantly, IBM chose not to define and then build a large-scale, sophisticated knowledge management system. Instead, the company is taking a bottoms-up approach, allowing contributors to have a more active hand in how collaborative work is organized.

http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/2007/10/highly-useful-jax-ws-introductions.html
I have also followed with interest the debate about web services development with JAX-WS with a bottoms-up approach (annotation Java classes and generating appropriate artifacts) versus with a top-down approach (starting with WSDL).

http://weblog.halmacomber.com/2003_05_04_archive.html
Not only is LISP suitable to this style of development, I'd dare say the language anticipates a bottoms-up collaborative approach. Not all software development is collaborative and bottoms-up, just like not all architecture and engineering is collaborative and bottoms-up. The language helps.