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TDD and software archaeology

Can you tell by looking at the unit test cases whether the code’s author wrote the tests first? During a TDD class I taught last week, one of the participants suggested that you can’t tell. Completed code and unit tests would look the same regardless of which had been written first. At the time I didn’t give the comment much thought.

I returned to the team I was working with at another client on Thursday, the last day of their iteration cycle. I picked up a small story so I could contribute something before the end of the day. It was a bug fix for JavaScript input validation logic in a webapp. Like many applications, this one uses date ranges to activate and deactivate certain data values that drive functionality. In this case, the input validation function neglected to ensure the expiration date was later than the effective date. Continue reading TDD and software archaeology

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Delivering provably-correct code

A while ago on this blog I mentioned the idea that a programmer’s job is not to deliver code, but to deliver provably correct code. Twitter responses ranged from strongly negative (wrong on so many levels I don’t know where to start) to mildly negative (not completely wrong, but incompletely right). There were no positive responses.

The converse of deliver provably correct code is deliver crap code, as I read it. Yet, it seems unlikely that is what those people meant to say. Unfortunately, no one followed up to explain their interpretation. I can only speculate that my choice of words has different implications for them than it does for me.

Since no one wants to explain their interpretation of the phrase, I’ll explain mine.

Continue reading Delivering provably-correct code

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Lean Kanban France 2012 will take place 18-19 October

Lean Kanban France 2012 is coming up in a couple of weeks. The conference will be hosted on 18-19 October by Valtech at their offices in the heart of Paris.

I’m honored to be included on the program of an event that features so many luminaries in the field. My small contribution will be a session entitled Structural Impediments to Lean. The premise is that the conventional organizational structures and basic assumptions regarding roles and procedures tend to present obstacles to the effective use of Lean thinking in companies. It’s a subject I started to explore in earnest a couple of years ago at Lean Kanban Europe 2010 and have continued to explore in my work since then.

Here is the session description from the program.

Continue reading Lean Kanban France 2012 will take place 18-19 October

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Cats in the monasteries of IT

Paulo Coelho wrote a nice piece about how cats came to be regarded as necessary for meditation for a few generations in Japan. The story might resonate with just about anyone in just about any context.

In my case, it reminded me of longstanding assumptions about how things “must” be done in the IT field. The following quote sums up the state of corporate IT in a nutshell: “..society continues to create some systems which, in the fullness of time, lose their reason for existence, but continue to impose their rules.” Continue reading Cats in the monasteries of IT

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Does remote work work?

First, here’s the short version for those poor souls suffering from tl;dr (too lazy, don’t read much) syndrome, that peculiar malaise that characterizes our times:

Can working from home be effective
compared with collocated teams?
Opponents are quick with invective
and full of opinions, it seems.

But what if we increased, in some way,
the ratio of signal to noise?
Could we discover a good way to
routinely deliver with poise?

And now to business.

One of the ongoing debates in the IT world over the past few years has been about the relative merits of team collocation, including intense collaboration, paired work, and continuous osmotic communication, versus solo work, including work from home and other forms of remote work as well as office spaces fitted with individual cubicles. Continue reading Does remote work work?

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How to avoid the local optimization problem when coaching at the team level

A recent Twitter discussion inspired me to re-think a few things about how to effect meaningful change at the organizational level and the team level. (Funny how Twitter seems to serve that sort of purpose, which may be above and beyond the usage pattern its creators envisioned initially. But I digress.)

During the first few years I worked in the general area of process improvement, I functioned mainly as an “agile” coach at the team level. Through those experiences I tried to understand how each method or practice worked mechanically as well as applying the “agile” values and principles on the cultural dimension, and started to learn how psychology and organizational sociology play into software development practices and delivery methods.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that the way an individual development team goes about its work actually has relatively little impact on the effectiveness of the end-to-end delivery process. I continued to look for the key leverage points in organizations that might yield the greatest positive effect for process improvement. I often found myself venturing far afield from the teams I had been engaged to coach, because time and time again I discovered that the real problems with delivery lay well outside the team’s jurisdiction.

Continue reading How to avoid the local optimization problem when coaching at the team level

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Lack of fluency

A recent article by James Shore and Diana Larsen, Your Path through Agile Fluency: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile, has generated some buzz. I have tremendous respect for the authors, as well as for the people I’ve seen posting positive comments about the piece. To be honest, though, I’m having a lot of difficulty buying into it. I don’t want to offend any of those people. On the other hand, they might just dismiss me as stupid and not be offended at all. Either way, here goes.

The gist of the article appears to be that we can effect organizational improvement in a large company by driving change from the level of individual software development teams. The major problem with that idea, in my opinion, is the bottom-up approach. The authors suggest beginning the organizational transformation initiative from a single software development team and then extending the cultural change outward. They also want to tie together the various parts of the organization by reaching out from the team. I suspect this is because their own professional background is in the area of software development, as well as the fact that both of them have enjoyed a measure of success with the approach, at least up to the second "star." But the approach doesn’t address the core structural problems in companies; it only works around them somewhat.

Continue reading Lack of fluency

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A recipe for software development

Garlic is widely considered to offer significant health benefits. It’s also a delicious and versatile ingredient in foods. Would tomato-based pasta sauce be pasta sauce at all if you omitted garlic? (Ignore American-style fast-food pasta sauce for the moment. Canadians, before you smirk, I have just two words for you: Pizza-Pizza.)

Chocolate, as well, brings a variety of health benefits. It, too, is delicious and a versatile ingredient in foods. What would a chocolate bar be if you omitted the chocolate? (Ignore "white chocolate" for the moment. Come to think of it, just ignore "white chocolate" altogether.)

Logically, then, it follows that chocolate-covered garlic cloves must surely be among the healthiest and most delicious foods one could hope for.

But why stop there? Glass is a wonderful material that adds much to our modern way of life. There is even a form of biocompatible glass that helps broken bones heal. Clearly, glass is good for the body.

Logically, then, it follows that chocolate-covered garlic cloves with tiny shards of glass embedded in them must surely be a super health food as well as a fabulously delicious snack. What an amazing rainbow of flavors and textures in the mouth! Ah, the sultry contralto notes of the chocolate, the lingering bite of the garlic, the metallic tang of the blood. And all of that still but a prelude to the inevitable conclusion.

The same logic applies to the task of selecting tools and methods for developing application software. I recall one project in particular that illustrates this approach quite well. The company wanted to maximize their chances of delivering a high-quality, well-aligned, usable product in a reasonable time. They went in search of the Best Practices Ever for delivering software, and identified three Good Ideas. Then came the flash of insight that set the stage for success: Combining all three Good Ideas on the same project could only result in three times the Goodness!

Well, in theory, anyway. In the immortal words of American philosopher Lawrence Peter Berra, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

Continue reading A recipe for software development