Reality over the Plan
Big front-end designs are bad, because they do not match the reality. The devils are really in the details. However, the cost of changes is considered too high and the illusion of predictability makes us close our eyes on reality.
In Scrum we say that we should focus on infrastructure and architecture in the first Sprints. Decisions about our software development environment, tools and architectures are not easily reversible. The situation is much worse in the construction business. If we are building a bridge or a tower of Eiffel we can't start it again from the beginning if the base is not strong enough.
The case is not that bad in software development. We use software instead of electronic circuits just because it is easier to change software than hardware.
We need to have appropriate engineering practices to change Kent Beck's famous cost curve. Extreme programming contains many practices that are needed to make the code easy to change. In addition to these we need solid architectural principles and rigorous attitude to quality.
PowerPoint architectures outlined at the first Sprints are not good enough. We need executable architectures and extensive testing with highest priory business functionality to make sure that the quality attributes, non-functional requirements, are OK, before we continue deeper.
We don't stop to that. We require that the architectures are easy to change. Ease of refactoring and testing can be achieved with known design patterns.
My colleague has written a provocative blog entry about the current situation of agility.
Actually, we are promoting our new course: Agile Engineering Practices, which can be used as a part of Certified Scrum Developer curriculum.
Visual software design with themes and epics
My talk in Scum Gathering Amsterdam is now visible. See more about visual software design with themes and epics
The place: 10:00 - 11:00am on Tuesday, November 16 in Foyer
Synopsis: We have issues like user stories, themes, epics, UI mockups, business rules and acceptance tests that are used in creating our understanding of what to do and how. We groom product backlogs and have Sprint planning meetings and design tasks in Sprint backlogs. This IdeaCamp session pursues to tell us how to put these all together in real life projects.
The slides and result flip charts are now available at SlideShare. I like especially the idea of drawing users' value stream with epics shown by one of the groups in the idea camp.
New lean and agile books
I bought some lean&agile books to read during my summer holiday. The list is not complete because I have already read quite many of them. I got Mike Cohn's new Scrum book freely from the publisher. Thanks about that.
"Scaling Lean and Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum: Successful Large, Multisite and Offshore Products with Large-scale Scrum (Agile Software Development)"
Craig Larman;
"Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley Signature)"
Lisa Crispin;
"Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point (Addison-Wesley Signature)"
Mary Poppendieck;
"Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature)"
Roman Pichler;
"Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))"
Lyssa Adkins;
"Kanban"
David J Anderson
ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever"
Jason Fried;
"Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development"
James Coplien;
"Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us"
Daniel H. Pink
"Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard"
Chip Heath;
Origin of waterfall
A short history of waterfall
As experienced people remember the eve of software development was agile. Waterfall emerged because the prevailing management thinking embraced it. There was a quest for more rigor and predictability and we started to talk about software engineering which would improve our quality and productivity. More planning was an obvious solution when plans were failing.
When the systems grew the developers began to specialize, which was based on the prevailing mass production paradigm. Functional organizations were the norm everywhere. Because it was difficult to find skillful programmers, the tasks were divided so that cheaper and available labor could be used for defining, testing and documenting. Promotions to project managers enabled the traditional corporate ladder hierarchy.
Outsourcing was tried to solve the software crisis by decreasing the unit cost of the huge amount of work that was required for writing each single line of code only to find out that the distribution created another layer of complexity.
Massive process guides tried to catch every possible view of software development to make it predictable and repeatable. 80s was the era of methodologies. After that we got quality initiatives like CMM which created a quagmire of documentation and turf wars between them. It was still very difficult to tell how to create software because we have so many variations of it and its development. You had to write either something that is right and so generic that it does not help or something that must be applied or something which fits only to certain kinds of software development.
CHAOS reports told that the majority of software development project were not successful. Success factors were extracted and we found that the requirements and capability of making decisions are the keys to success. Systems thinking explains the failure of old straightforward initiatives. Specialization, outsourcing and rigorous processes answered well to one visible view of software development but they did not optimize the whole. Big front-end planning did not create better plans because the plans were frozen prematurely without appropriate testing and feedback.
In the 70s computers were less powerful than they are today. The programmer wrote the code to a paper based on which punch cards where created. Then the cards were read, compiled and finally executed. If anything went wrong the programmer had to make corrections and try again. The length of the development cycles might have been several hours if not days. Barry Boehm's famous paper published in 1981 about software development economics was based on studies of the projects earlier than that. So it is natural that it concluded that the cost of a change is so huge that errors should be prevented at practically any cost. Reviews and careful table testing were the ways to prevent errors.
Waterfall was born due to the management paradigms but it is useful to consider the feasibility of modern iterative development using the technology of the past. Essential practices like continuous integration and automated testing were difficult but not outright impossible in all of the projects. Programming cycle times have not prevented agility after the punch card. The “mythical man-month” of Fred Brooks was written in 1975 but this was unfortunately not enough to change the history of software development.
Unit testing EJB 3
My colleague at Tieturi, Arto Santala, has written a series of three blog entries about unit testing in EJB 3 environment. It is in Finnish but you might get the point through the code examples without our language.
As an idea unit testing has been known and used for decades but examples in blogosphere focus on simple situations instead of complex cases of real life. When we do unit and acceptance testing in industrial scale, we need to go deeper considerations about maintainability and performance of the test harness.
Command and control with pair programming
I found a revealing discussion at a popular suomi24.fi-site titled Ketterä IT-helvetti (agile IT hell ). It is amazing how often daily Scrum is practiced just opposite of Scrum's basic idea of a self-organizing team. This 15 minutes is just for the developers to say hello to each other and coordinate days activities. They need to know the situation after yesterday's work because software development is not predictable. Sometimes tasks estimated to take 2 days take 5 days and sometimes they are ready after one day. So everyone needs to know where the team is and agree on what to do next. The metaphor of chickens and pigs is meant to make sure that managers do not use that for micromanaging the people.
Command and control is bad because it destroys peoples' natural work motivation. People including developers want to achieve something and autonomy to do it - not that they are given orders and controlled tightly. Command and control reduces productivity and creativity which is really harmful in an art like software development. Psychological studies have shown that time after another.
Pair programming can be done in a way that does not decrease the motivation. As the code is owned by team and every team member is responsible of changing any peace of it the team needs a way to teach the secrets of the code modules to everyone in the team. That is pair programming. It prevents harmful specialization and at the same time decreases the number of errors in the code. Your pair is not watching and controlling what you are programming but you two work together to create great software. Two creative minds coding and discussing together is a way to learn from each other and do a great work. Pairs are changed normally on daily basis so that different angles on the problem can be thought.
Pair programming should not be a stressful situation like the one described in suomi24. The team should discuss about the situation in its retrospective and decide how to continue to find the the joy of work that agility gives when it is practiced at its best.
Vacations and creativity
Like most of Finns I have my vacation this month. As typical Europeans we have quite long vacations and sometimes people think that it is a kind of waste that reduces productivity.
It is well admitted that people need sleep to be productive. Overtime and trashing at work is quite typical in our profession. But still we ignore the agile principle of sustainable pace. After months of overtime people are so burned down that it is a miracle if they get any significant output.
The time that has not been allocated to a specific purpose might become the most productive part of all. Vacations are wonderful places for that provided of course that you do not have a tight schedule for your holiday. You may guess that I do not behave like that. Actually I live one day at a time. I have about 50 topics to this blog, several books to read and few home computers to upgrade. Most importantly I have now time for exercise. Weather has been good for walking and for work in the garden. I do not run marathons like some of my colleagues.
I have always combined walking and thinking. New ideas pop up when I walk. That is wonderful time considering them thoroughly.
I have a mini-laptop, Asus EEE 901 with 20GB SSD using Ubuntu 9.04 to be exact. It is an excellent tool for surfing the web and maintaining this new web site. I appreciate its small size, long battery life and connectivity. This is my first really personal computer - it is with me all days long. Now it is possible to take notes and have them with me. It is my extended memory.
I remember the word creativity in the title, so let's talk about that now. One part of creativity is brainstorming - a wild burst of new ideas. It is only possible if you have free non-allocated time. In a tight schedule you pick the most obvious solutions and hurry on to get things done. During the vacations you have that luxury. I do not mean that you should spend your holidays to thinking work related things but people like me do it anyway not because someone pays for it but because it is fun.
How to grow a good developer
I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers It was well worth of its cost - 7 euros, because it is well written an easy to read. The ideas were not actually new, but getting an idea of how successful people are made is made clear. Bill Gates was one of his examples.
First of all you need luck to succeed. For example Bill Gates was one of the lucky few young people who had unlimited access to computer time in 1968. Second very important thing is 10 000 hours of hard work. Creating a professional skill in any area of life requires 10 years of enthusiastic learning. You have to be lucky to have a good "university" for that. It was Hamburg for the Beatles.
Success is not as much of IQ as employers are used to think. An old study of Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology, has shown that the success of people with high IQ is not as good as we typically believe. The geniuses that he found did not succeed much better than ordinary people. Gladwell conjectures that IQ has a threshold value. Your IQ must be good enough to get in into good universities but above that other things are more important. Creative thinking is more open ended than an ability to solve puzzles that have a single right solution.
Now thinking about growing good software developers. Most important thing is to have that 10 000 hours of work. It is also important to have multifaceted experience. A 10 year career of COBOL-programming in same domain area or even a piece of software is not more than 10 times one years experience. I even wonder what has kept the person in a position where he can't learn anything new.
I emphasize attitude, the passion to do ones work. It is a known hiring guideline to hire the attitude and train the skill, but this is much easier to say than actually do. The same frustrated looser that you fired may become a passionate star of your competitor. So, it is not so much about selecting people but about creating a corporate culture. An that is really hard, especially when your business environment is difficult.
Agile and lean software development is all about people. It is not about processes and tools as should remember from Agile Manifesto. Nevertheless, the people focus on the Scrum process and kanban in Lean believing that the change of process is the silver bullet. I admit that I have seen remarkable increases in teams' motivation when they have adopted Scrum, but I assume that the correlation does not mean a causal relationship, especially if we ignore the human part of agility.
In this post I have intentionally ignored what Gladwell said about cultural background. Read that from his book 
Agile acquisition and fixed price
I have been quite busy lately and not been very active with this blog. However, discussion about agile acquisition has become more acute because there are few failed purchases in public discussion. I mean AKE and TEO, who's purchasing procedures have been questioned by Valtiontalouden tarkastusvirasto. See more (in Finnish)
General public and politicians typically react to problems by requiring more front-end design and rigor to the procedures. This makes the situation worse, because it increases unnecessary costs and bureaucracy.
At first we need to understand that hiring a designer is different than buying something that can be accurately defined before the purchase. When you buy design work minimizing the cost is not the only and not even the most important consideration. There are huge quality differences in the various solutions offered by the vendors. Comparing them is not straightforward and easy. One of them could propose a COTS solution, another something based on SOA and 3rd one a fully tailored solution. Obviously, it is not possible to define exact requirements without any idea of the implementation. Actually defining the exact requirements is exactly what the development project is supposed to do. If I knew exactly what I want I would not need the designer. The designer is hired for contributing while we work together to create the forthcoming software.
Because software development is a common endeavor with the buyer and the vendor, asking a fixed price is somehow skewed. I, as a buyer would probably get the maximum price with all of the risks included in the prise. If the competitive pressure keeps the cost too low, my vendor can very easily compromise the quality. It is also useful for me that my organization has an interest to lower the costs by removing unnecessary features. Prioritization is rarely happening in fixed price projects.
But I still have a budget, idea of return of investment. To keep the costs in bay I need to collaborate with the vendor to spend the money wisely. Monthly deliveries of done increments of functionality are a safe bet. If the vendor can not deliver, I have to stop the project (and have that allowed in the contract) and try something else.
Agile acquisition
I have added a comment to Agile Finland's forum
Neuvottelumenettely needs promotion
The Finnish law of public acquisition does not require that we do competitive bidding using comprehensive requirement specification. Public buyers does not, however, know the allowed negotiation procedure (Neuvontamenettely) that is more suitable for purchasing software development services. So, agile community should do promotion to improve the situation.
Read more details in the discussion chain. I have corrected the word neuvontamenettely to neuvottelumenettely.