Agile Lab - Training, Coaching and Consultancy: May 2012

Agile Lifecycle Management, Thinking Fast and Slow and Who Knows What Else

The thing that I wanted to get to in the original post about design is that there's too much emphasis on ex-nihilo creation (creation from nothing) and insufficient emphasis on continuing to maintain a platform. Once you've thought through the things that I was talking about in the "unintelligent design" article, you realise that having code that's testable and maintainable isn't a nice to have - it's the absolute bedrock. If you’re not paying attention to that all the time when you’re developing, you’re heading for unmaintainable legacy code.

I wish I could remember which William Boyd book it is. But one of his novels has a character whose father is a surgeon at the point where the entire profession is starting to realise the importance of cleanliness and anti-septic practices. But some of the profession – some of the senior members of the profession are still operating in blood-soaked frock coats and refuse to accept that they should sterilise their instruments, wear specially laundered clothes and wash their hands. I think there’s something of that about software at the moment. Lots and lots of excuses about why writing automated tests is a waste of time. It’s the movement clockwise around the cynefin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin) framework away from chaos and through the complex space towards the “merely” complicated. It sorts the mavericks into visionaries and idiots and maybe that’s a harsh and unfair classification but it has to happen.

And what I’m thinking now, with the work I’m currently doing – is it even worth coaching on methods when there’s such resistance to the “hygiene” of test-driven development and automated testing? Was it worth pioneering surgical techniques when 90% of the patients died of shock and the rest succumbed to sepsis? I don’t know those figures – I’m guessing. But now, I suppose the answer is yes. Wouldn’t it have been even more tragic if we’d had hygiene but no surgical skill? But isn’t it interesting the order that things came in. I read a book called “The Bluffer’s Guide to Management Consultancy” and it reminded me that surgeons were called consultants at the point where they basically new *nothing* about medicine. Consultant is what you call yourself when you’re firmly rooted in the top left-hand corner of the Cynefin framework.

I thought of cognitive dimensions almost the first instant that I started this coaching engagement. And it’s coupled to the whole thinking fast and slow thing. You want to arrange all of the artefacts and data that you’re dealing with in a development project so that they have the right cognitive dimensions – which is another way of saying that you want to foster/afford the right kind of fast thinking. For example, it would be really good to be able to visualise the backlog on a project in some way other than as a line graph. Visualising the backlog seems to one of the things that the issues tracking systems that are supposed to be Agile Lifecycle Management systems are worst at. You also need to visualise velocity in some kind of way that hampers them doing the WRONG kind of “fast thinking” about it. The minute people here velocity they want to compare it to the velocity of another team – and simultaneously double it.

In my experience, Agile Lifecycle Management tools on their own are very difficult to use. Nothing beats a card wall for tracking the stuff that you’re actually working on at the moment. And a card wall actually works as a pretty good index into the ALM.

One of the areas where I’ve seen loads of projects get snarled is around metrics. In my experience, people behave very strangely around numbers. For example, when someone senior at a previous company I worked for heard that the velocity of a ten person team was 30 ideal days for an iteration, their “fast thinking” response was to tell everybody who would hear that the team only worked three days a week and be outraged. The thing about my boss finding prime numbers more persuasive than numbers that have factors is absolutely true. And the sad truth is that you’re not going to stop these random “fast thinking” reactions to the numbers that a project produces. It’s also very dangerous and counterproductive to point out how stupid these reactions are. Likewise it’s dangerous to act on these stupid reactions.

That’s the main thing you’re fighting when you’re trying to get people to adopt an Agile approach – their “common sense” fast thinking.

What I think you need to do is fight fire with fire. You simply can’t fight fast thinking with slow thinking . You need to fight it with fast thinking. People can process visuals and charts better than they can process numbers. So what you need to do is to give them charts which “encourage” the right kind of fast thinking. I’m not sure I know the answer to what those are.

On the few occasions that people ask my advice on what they can do to improve their project management, I’m tempted to say “hire a fine art undergrad and get them to produce lots of visualisations of your project data.”

One thing I’m certain of – a burn-down is nearly as useless as a table of numbers.

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They got me - it's actually an advert for a library...

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Another fine mesh. In reply to http://stream.red56.co.uk/post/23811614242/when-i-care-about-my-work

This is great. Some random thoughts.

Don't worry about the list of things you want to write about - just worry about the next thing.
Pedantic point Haruki Murakami stole "What I talk about when I talk about running?" from Raymond Carver - "What we talk about when we talk about love."

We could try ping pong writing. What's the best time of the day for you to write? For me it's first thing in the morning, with a weird second period from about 4:30pm to 6:30pm, although just then when I write I feel like death.

Some thoughts on what you wrote. I think Ward Cunningham's concept of the system of names is really brilliant, but I've read the article and he does almost nothing with it. I think it would be worth an ethnographer looking at a bunch of discussions around software - how many of them are about name changes? Name systems. Which is also to your point about how easy it is to change names. Always a good question - what's easy? What is hard? I dread to mention this but have you seen Alan Blackwell and Thomas Green's stuff about cognitive dimensions? It disappeared up its own fundament (why are you not surprised?) but I think there was a genuinely useful set of questions about what sorts of things and what sorts of things were easy in a given notation. In software that is easily maintainable, name changes need to be trivial (possibly with some some kind of history/undo capability).

Another thought on this: when I worked with front-end developers at Wiley they told me they could tell which sites would be cool to work for from the URL's. Could you have some kind of coding language where URL's were first class objects - they are in HTTP, but not in any of the languages that support it. A web site truly is a system of names - if it isn't, it's probably a ball of mud.

One final thought about software quality. It's interesting how the work I've been doing recently Kansas has made me think over and over of the Taiichi Ohno book "The Toyota Production System." And the books by the two American guys Womack and Jones. The people who manage the "autonomated" (automated just enough) rather than automated machines are supposed to tidy up when for some reason they aren't busy doing something else. They are supposed to sweep their stations. In the American car companies which recently required bailing out, some other guys come in and sweep the stations. We desperately need an understanding that tidying up is a hugely valuable and useful part of any software process and we need languages and tools that allow this to be done and shown as valuable. Do that tie into work-flow somehow? Could we somehow show that a period of sustained development results in cleaner more maintainable code.

Just one more thing sir, I've been reading the "User Stories Applied" book and one of the descriptions of requirements gathering is as a series of trawls, with possibly a broader and then finer-grained mesh. This is my experience of working with an issue-tracking system like Jira - it's how I worked as a scrum master, I trawled Jira for various things: all the work still to do in the backlog. All the work still to do in the backlog that hasn't been broken down enough to play into an iteration. All the defects that need fixing. All the issues that are "On-hold." It strikes me that it would be really good to adopt a similar strategy for tidying up code. What would be a suggestion for some of the trawls.

A software system is a system of names. Any modification to it is a series of trawls, what would be a big mesh trawl? What would be a fine mesh trawl.

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Sorely tempted by "Sisters of the Quilt"

But I'm guess it isn't what I'm imagining...

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System Roles

As much as you can, stick with user roles that define people, as opposed to other systems. If you think it will help, then identify an occasional non-human user role. However, the purpose of identifying user roles is to make sure that we think really hard about the users that we absolutely, positively must satisfy with the new system. We don't need user roles for every conceivable user of the system, but we need roles for the ones who can make or break the success of the project. Since other systems are rarely purchasers of our system, they can rarely make or break the success of our system. Naturally, there can be exceptions to this and if you feel that adding a non-human user role helps you think about your system, then add it.

Cohn, Mike (2004-03-01). User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (Kindle Locations 1058-1062). Pearson Education (USA). Kindle Edition.

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Automated Testing - Reach for the Skywriter Font

Wherever possible, tests should be automated. This means strive for 99% automation, not 10%. You can almost always automate more than you think you can. When a product is developed incrementally, things can change very quickly and code that worked

Cohn, Mike (2004-03-01). User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (Kindle Locations 945-947). Pearson Education (USA). Kindle Edition.

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Put the spike in a different iteration

When possible, it works well to put the investigative story in one iteration and the other stories in one or more subsequent iterations. Normally, only the investigative story can be estimated. Including the other, non-estimatable stories in the same iteration with the investigative story means there will be a higher than normal level of uncertainty about how much can be accomplished in that iteration.

Cohn, Mike (2004-03-01). User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (Kindle Locations 921-923). Pearson Education (USA). Kindle Edition.

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Story size needs to be just right...

Like Goldilocks in search of a comfortable bed, some stories can be too big, some can be too small, and some can be just right. Story size does matter because if stories are too large or too small you cannot use them in planning.

Cohn, Mike (2004-03-01). User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (Kindle Locations 877-879). Pearson Education (USA). Kindle Edition.

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Stories only valued by developers

you want to avoid are stories that are only valued by developers. For example, avoid stories like these: All connections to the database are through a connection pool. All error handling and logging is done through a set of common classes.

Cohn, Mike (2004-03-01). User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (Kindle Locations 835-837). Pearson Education (USA). Kindle Edition.

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Stories have to be valued by purchases, not necessarily users

Similarly, stories like the following might be valued by purchasers contemplating buying the product but would not be valued by actual users:

Cohn, Mike (2004-03-01). User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (Kindle Locations 832-833). Pearson Education (USA). Kindle Edition.

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Heathrow to Kansas City with American Airlines - day 2

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The argument for intelligent non-design: a horse designed by a committee - is a horse.

I heard a stand-up comedy routine recently. A guy was saying that he lives in New York, so he doesn’t live with any real people. He meets people who are saying “I’m a pirate” or “I’m a nymphomaniac” or “I’m a psycho-killer,” while all the time he’s thinking “No you’re not, you’re all graphic designers, OK?”

I think that’s a funny joke, and it makes a point – that designers tend to over-dramatize themselves. And I think, maybe they, or we, over-dramatize what it is they do. Maybe that sounds too pejorative. I’m not saying that what they do isn’t important and valuable, I’m just saying that it might not be what they say they do – like the “pirate” and the “nymphomaniac”. OK, I’m struggling to get my point across – let’s go back to basics, and the Reverend Paley.

Richard Dawkins wrote a book called “The Blind Watchmaker” because of an argument from the existence of God which is based on what happens if you found a watch. The argument is put forward by the Reverend William Paley (an 18th, just 19th century) clergyman. He argues that if you were walking along and you found a watch, you would naturally imagine that it had been designed by someone – it has distinguishable parts that work together – that fit in the case, and also have a clear purpose. Actually – this is how he puts it:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (...) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (...) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
— William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)

If you find a watch- you expect it had a designer (or designers) so why, when you look at a man, or a grasshopper, or a sunflower, and see the intricate ways that all the different parts, the organs, the genes, the hormones, the enzymes, the biochemistry all work together – how could we possible assume that there isn’t a designer (or designers). If there’s a designer for the watch, there’s surely a designer (or designers) for us – and that designer (or designers) is/are God.

This kind of argument is known as an analogical argument. Also known technically by philosophers as “the dodgiest kind of argument there is about.” The normal way to attack it, and the way that Dawkins attempts to attack it, is to claim that the analogy doesn’t hold, that the complex artefacts like human beings aren’t created but have evolved. Another standard way of attacking this argument is just to call the people who don’t agree with you rude names – Dawkins has also done his (un)fair share of this.

But there’s another way of attacking this argument (I feel slightly artificial using this word "attack" but philosophers, most of whom could be blown away by a light breeze really like to use martial terms). What if the watch isn’t designed? What if the watch evolved? Do you see what I’m getting at? That’s why I kept putting the word “designers” in brackets in the discussion above. The guy who “designed” this watch – even if it was just one person - did he come up with the concept of time? Did he “design” the 24 hour division of the day, or the breakdown of the hour into minutes and seconds? Did he design the system of representing this on a circular face with two hands? Did he come up with numerals or the concept of integers? What about coiled springs? Notched cogs? What about the metallurgy of brass, and steel involved in making those cogs and attaching them to each other? Or the completely separate branch of chemistry required to produce the glass. Did the designer come up with the concept of a watch? The truth of the matter of course is that whoever “designed” Paley’s watch relied on the work of thousands and thousands of “designers”.

Isaac Newton famously said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” but for “giants” he might have said “A very large number of people of variable height.”

So this is one way to deal with the design argument. Not only does life as we know it not have an “intelligent” designer neither does the watch. Why am I bothering to upset so many “designers”, so many people in bold prints and fashionable haircuts? Well I was lying awake at 4:30am in the morning suffering from a bad case of jet lag and listening to “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts, admittedly, in the hope that it would send me to sleep. And he was talking about Taoism and the concepts of “Wei” and “Wu Wei”. I really don’t know that much about this stuff, but I think the normal way of translating these two concepts is as “Doing” and “Not Doing” but Watts suggested another possible way of understanding these concepts as “effortful” and “effortless” doing or possibly the difference between “creation” and “growth”.

And this applies to software. Software evolves. You might say to yourself as a software developer, or even as an software architect that you’re “designing” and “creating”, but, like the last watchmaker in a long, long, long, long, line, most of what you’re doing is modulating and modifying. I'm sure you're very clever, but you're not as clever as the bloke who invented the sub-routine - I've met him in the tea room at Cambridge University, and he was bloody clever, be even he relied on the work of a bunch of other people who figured out the electronics and a bunch of mathematicians and logician. And this isn’t a bad thing. This is a truly awesome, priceless thing. If it’s good enough for a genius like Isaac Newton, surely it’s good enough for most people.

My point is - and I know I've taken a long time to get there. If this is really what we're doing, not creating, but modulating and modifying. Wouldn't it be better if we understood that and acted accordingly?

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Insanity (mainly bus nutters)

So my mate Kevin wants me to talk about insanity. And I’d better get weaving because I’ve got to meet someone for lunch at 12:45. So let’s see if I can get a thousand words out on insanity in about three quarters of an hour.

I don’t really know much about it. I haven’t been afflicted by it myself. When I stopped drinking for three years, it was interesting seeing the reaction of some of my friends. Some of them ( the ones who didn’t go out drinking with me, and didn’t know what a lightweight I was) thought that maybe I was giving up because I was an alcoholic. Some of them assumed that I’d been told I had to give up drinking because I was on some massively powerful psychotropic medication which would interact badly with Newcastle Brown Ale. Then again, there were some people who assumed that actually stopping drinking was a sign of madness – like my doctor. I remember telling my doctor that I hadn’t had a drink for about 18months and he looked at me like I’d just announced that I was pregnant with alien quintuplets. “You mean like spirits? You’re taking it easy. You’re still drinking wine and beer, maybe only at the weekends?”

“No, I’ve stopped drinking completely.”

He just shook his head, as if the thought were completely beyond him. Another nutter. One thing that I have learned from the world of amateur stand-up comedy is that taking anti-depression medication stops any problems that you might have had with premature ejaculation. In fact, rather weirdly I was standing next to a friend of mine from the stand-up comedy course while another guy came out with (that’s probably the wrong phrase, considering) almost his exact same routine about how anti-depression medication allowed the train to stop in the station, but somehow stopped the doors from opening and letting the passengers off (cf Woody Allen, Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex But were Afraid to Ask, he probably knows a thing or two about anti-depression medication).

That is one thing that I’ll say for stand-up comedy it’s rare anywhere else that I am in a crowd where I feel like I’m the well-dressed, slim, sane one.

One thing I can vouch for. If you’re the kind of person that is used to getting a good solid 7 hours sleep every night, just a little bit of jet lag that means that you’re sitting up wide awake and ready for a hearty breakfast at 3:30am in the morning, just that little bit of sleep denial can make you feel like a crazy person.

I know a bit about bus nutters. I once saw a brilliant bus nutter vignette on the number 50 bus in Birmingham. This Indian bloke got on the bus he was a bit pissed up and started menacing the other passengers. You could feel everybody tense. He wasn’t doing anything more than talking to the attractive women, but he was just being a bit too loud, a bit leery, but he knew – and we knew that he was misbehaving. Then at the next stop, this enormous Irishman got on, who was ROLLING, CAN BARELY STAND drunk. He then proceeded to sit next to the lairy Indian and shout very random things in a loud, whisky-scented voice. “Fucking Tescos I’ll ear your Radishes.” The Indian guy was really upset – he’d been out-nuttered. And he was trapped on the bus by an enormous booze-soaked Irish. And so the Indian started saying to the Irishman “Please be quiet! You are offending the other passengers!” and the Irishman would just answer in random, incoherent, sweet song “There’s no grouting on my wagon wheels Colleen!!!” Or some such. Truly, there are few things as beautiful as a bus out-nuttering. And all the other people on the bus just sniggered. The beaten-down, bitter snigger of the well-worn commuter.

I once did see a Polish guy get on a bus near Paddington (this is sounding really racist, better some stories against educated white people – Ed) and this guy was even more drunk than the out-nuttering Irishman. It was during a tube strike so the bus was absolutely packed. And this guy decided he was going to argue with the bus driver about how much the bus fare cost.

Bus Driver: “That’s two pounds twenty mate.”

Obliterated Pole: “Is too much!”

BD: “That’s the fare mate, pay it or get off!”

OP: “Is too much!!!”

ENTIRE COMMUTER POPULATION OF THE BUS AS ONE: “PAY THE FARE AND SIT THE FUCK DOWN.”

He sat down. Not another word. The lizard-brain self-preservation that protects all drunks kicked in. You could see the realisation in his eyes – “Hey – if I go one more step in the direction I’m heading I will be torn limb from limb by a murderous mob of monthly travel card holders.”

Truth be told, so far I’ve been lucky. I haven’t suffered from serious insanity myself, nor have any of my loved ones. And I know that that’s lucky because, apparently one in ten of us is going to suffer some kind of mental illness during our lifetimes. And I bet when it happens it’s (mostly) not funny.

I could go on a little bit of a rant about how insane it is to pretend to be wheat and lactose intolerant (the doctors have confirmed that I’m wheat and lactose intolerant, intolerant – people who are faddy about their food bring me out in a bright red rage) but the sad truth is that I don’t have dinner friends frequently enough these days to get annoyed about that kind of shit. Truth be told, I’d eat tofu cheesecake every day of the week if it meant I could see my friends more often. When I hit my forties all my friends seemed to be too busy either working or having children to hang out .

I wonder if you know when you’re the bus nutter? Do you only realise it when you’re out-nuttered?

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Hey Toto!

Something, tells me this isn't Kansas.

No, it's a bustling cafe on the Seven Sisters Road (thank fuck).

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Noodles, maybe

I think I might be addicted to Asian food. Maybe the ethnic foods that do well are the ones that you’re capable of craving. Everybody who’s had a decent curry knows what it’s like to crave a curry. Everbody who’s ever had a pizza knows what it’s like to crave a pizza. Well, for me, sometimes, it’s the same with Asian food.

Mainly it’s egg-fried rice I crave, but every now and again it’s noodles. I used to work around the corner from Kingsland Road in Shoreditch in London. And on that road there were about half a dozen Vietnamese restaurants. One of the dishes that they did which was truly awesome involved vermicelli noodles and fish sauce with barbecued pork on top. I think I might have had that every day for several months – especially the version that mixed up the barbecued pork and sliced up spring rolls – wow, I could go for a dish of that right now.

The only down-side I can see to a dish like that is that your breath smells like a long-dead herring after you’ve eaten. A long-dead herring that ate a lot of garlic and you get complaints from the wife. There are other noodle dishes that have enhanced my life. When I worked in Ealing we pretty much ended up going every day to a Chinese/Asian fusion restaurant called “The Hare and Tortoise.” It’s a chain, they’re dotted across London – I’ve been to the Bloomsbury branch and that’s good as well. And a lot of the time there I had their Roast Duck and rice, which does exactly what it says on the tin. But sometimes I had – hang on, I’m going to have to Google a spelling of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_kway_teow Char kway toew (pronounced, by me anyway “Char coy chow”). This had prawns and bits of fish cake and Chinese sausage and chillies and chillie oil in it and it was fantastic. The only slight problem with it was that I think it was a bit heavy on the old MSG resulting in a light-headness and a willingness to eat my own weight in chocolate bars later in the afternoon.

The other great noodle dish is Pad Thai I suppose. I get why people get excited about it. I just don’t think I’ve experience a really good example. Writing about this makes me realise how ignorant I am of Asian food. The only Asian country I’ve been to is Japan, and I don’t think we ate many noodles when we were there – we ate a lot of yakitori and sushi. I would dearly love to tour these countries and eat everything - what the locals are eating and also the novelty foods – the ones that “make you strong.” My enduring memories of food in Tokyo is going into a really smoky “dive” yakitori bar in Asakusa where there was sumo playing on every telly and being served – you know that bit of cartilage on the end of the breast bone of a chicken – well we got three of those, slightly charred on a stick. This was after an attempt to mime (because nobody spoke a word of English – the horror!) we’ll have what they’re having. Pointing to the guys on the end of the counter who were deep in a conversation about sumo – or seemed to be. Asakusa is the area of Tokyo where they sell all the requisites for restaurants, crockery, cutlery, tablecloths, tables, chairs. They also have “noodle model parlours”as mentioned in the song Mondo Bongo by Joe Strummer, and what an awesome song that it, even though I had to watch the movie Mr and Mrs Smith (STODGE, see below) in order to discover it – collections of plastic models of dishes that restaurants might sell. A lot of restaurants put these models in their windows, presumably so that potential customers have an idea of what they’re getting – but also so that customers who don’t speak the language have a chance of pointing to their dinner. Curiously, we didn’t go to any of these restaurants.

One of the great disappointments of eating in the US. Actually, I think this might be a problem you get in the flyover states, I haven’t sampled Asian food on the coasts, so lets restrict this to Kansas City, is that all of the “flavours” – maybe I mean “flavors” - tend to lard and sugar and bland carbohydrates. Sweet and sour things taste, sweet. Egg fried rice tastes, fried, actually it doesn’t even taste fried, it just tastes of starch. It’s as if the taste palette has been compressed – like the idea palette and the culture palette and the politics palette – you can have anything you want as long as it’s de-tastified, de-natured, de-racinated STODGE. You are free to eat sugar or lard, you are free to vote Rabid Republican or Rabid Republican light. See how free you are? Stop it Stringer. When you travel you’re supposed to embrace other cultures. Otherwise you come across as churlish, narrow-minded.

It reminds me of a story that Mr Naylor told me. Mr Naylor was the headmaster at my first school. He terrified me. I don’t think he ever hit any of the kids. I don’t think he had to. He just had an attitude that made even the toughest boys wet themselves (I don’t think he ever bothered menacing the girls). But he was a bit eccentric. He was a stalwart of a male voice choir, as well as a 60-a-day chain smoker. And he would spend hours training us to sing hymns with choral perfection. And occasionally he would demonstrate his own singing prowess in slightly strange ways – like laying down on the floor and singing “Courage Brother Do Not Stumble” with an eight year old girl standing on his chest. I don’t think there was anything pervy about this – I think it was far weirder than that.

When Mr Naylor took a class there wasn’t any curriculum, it was just a series of diversion on whatever topic he felt like talking about. And one of the topics I remember was “Chinese torture.” I don’t know if these are actually Chinese tortures. But it seemed like an interesting topic. So we heard about “the chamber of little ease” and the “water torture”. But we also heard about a torture where a prisoner is given anything that he wants to eat, but everything is lacking in salt. And that’s sort of my experience of being right in the middle of America. And woe betide anybody who says or does anything, or reads anything “salty”.

Oh, and udon noodles go through me like they’re on a mission from God.

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Noodles, maybe,