A couple of months ago I ran into OSGi again, but with SCA on top of it.  Horrid!  SCA is yet another warm and huggable specification.  But it’s so ugly to work with.  Everything feels so over the top complicated and restrictive in expression.  And the tools that I saw built on this SCA implementation were just awful.  Beyond being buggy, the enforced paradigm was just counter-productive.  When will tool vendors realise that talented developers do not want a diagramming interface to write code?  But the root cause is that the SCA specification describes the diagramming notation. Yuck!  Same reason that I do UML sketches with a lot of bastardisations with no tie-in with my code.

And let me not go into domain specific big vendor specs, designs, blue prints, etc. like IBM’s Insurance Application Architecture (IAA). Nasty stuff.

More commonly, I see so many self-confessed agile teams fearing the dreaded big design up front, and the big requirements up front document thrown over the wall.  If there is such a fear for big-x-up-front, why is there no fear for big-industry-and-vendor-specs-up-front like EJB, SCA, IAA, etc?

Why?

There are deep lessons and principles lurking beneath this surface.  Agile demands you to be a lot more aware of actions, decisions and consequences.

So why do you choose not to be agile when you are trying so hard to be agile?

So let’s try a weird-ish thought experiment.  You’re in such a project and you’ve reached this point.  You are about to start the dead last sprint and then it’s over.  The team will be disbanded, but the software will live on.

You have just one more opportunity to work on this product, with this code base, with the people on this team.  Your legacy is in this software.  Every decision you made is sitting in a vast time line of deltas in your version control repository, all the way back to day 0.

What do you choose to do in this last sprint?

Oh yeah, I´ll tell you something
I think you'll understand
When I say that something
I wanna hold your hand
I wanna hold your hand
I wanna hold your hand

So what made me think about this?  That frustrating construction of the new M5/N1 interchange in Cape Town!!  When you’re sitting in traffic, you can’t do anything but look and think.  And I’ve seen this scaffolding get taller and taller and wider and wider and longer and longer and more and more people appear on it each day.

Sourced from http://www.capetown.gov.za

I know that one day, they will remove the scaffolding and the concrete will just hang there in mid air on those massive pillars and walls that they’re busy building, and I won’t be sitting in traffic any longer, and it will all just work.

What a shame that software is not like that !!  So many people get turned on by scaffolding.  And The Beatles sang on …

And when I touch you i feel happy, inside
It's such a feeling
That my love
I can't hide
I can't hide
I can't hide

And just like the M5 construction, so much scaffolding gets built, and so many people climb on.  But then, they don’t climb down.  And they don’t tear down the scaffolding.  And it just stays there mashed in with the concrete bits.  And then they ask people to use it.  And it takes strain and then it’s a performance problem, or a load problem, or it just crashes down.

I do use scaffolding, but most of the time it’s in a spike and more often it’s in a test, just to get me over my point of fear.  Deploying software with scaffolding is just dangerous and negligent.  I really don’t want to drive my car over the M5 interchange while those thin steel pipes are holding up the concrete slabs.

But above all of that, the most important scaffolding is social scaffolding.  It’s better to provide human scaffolding to support each other on a team that is focused on delivering quality software.  It’s worse to plug in weak struts in the code base that will just collapse when the next developer builds on top of it.  Very un-ubuntu!

So, the Beatles song still holds true, but only for social scaffolding.

Yeah you, got that something
I think you'll understand
When I say that something
I wanna hold your hand
I wanna hold your hand
I wanna hold your hand
I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-a-a-and

It helps me conquer and divide.

That’s not a bad thing.  What I find really painful is casting the design in concrete.  When your design is cast, then your mental state is already cast in concrete too.  And that means that it is a lot harder to do the right things.  So, more gets added to the concrete slab and it’s real hard work to break anything off.  When I have a BIG DUF, I often look at how to reduce it, rather than increase it.

I don’t think it’s wrong to have a  BIGDUF, it’s worse if you have a BIGDIC (BIG Design in Concrete).  That concrete block will hurt you later … a lot.

In other words, the size of a BIGDIC does not matter, it’s the rigidity that’s the problem (– That’s so lame, I could not resist!)

I guess I’ve got quite a lot of reading coming up and it will be fun to read what is coming out of the research channels and cast my own weird industrial perspective on things

That’s why I’m giving the TEST FIRST TDD course next week.  If you want to go beyond just learning about an xUnit API and step on the path of a personal journey to changing the way you create software, then come along.  I don’t have miracles but I can do better than just shining a light.  I will step into the darkness with you and help you move towards the light.

I’ve tried to keep it true to the book.  I’ve aslo added a reference to a couple of additional patterns right at the end, after some quick chats with Eric and Jimmy.  Given the space constraints, I decided to leave out the CQRS work.  It feels better anyway, since this meant as a cheat sheet for people starting out.

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rjb-1.1.9/lib/rjbcore.bundle: dlopen(/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rjb-1.1.9/lib/rjbcore.bundle, 9): no suitable image found. Did find: (LoadError)
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rjb-1.1.9/lib/rjbcore.bundle: no matching architecture in universal wrapper - /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rjb-1.1.9/lib/rjbcore.bundle

It turns out that I needed to rebuild rjb, the ruby-java bridge, but that failed too.

extconf.rb:48: JAVA_HOME is not set. (RuntimeError)

I was certain that JAVA_HOME was definitely set and it was pointing to the 64-bit Apple 1.6 JDK.  Digging in extconf.rb, it finds JAVA_HOME from the ENV hash

javahome = ENV['JAVA_HOME']

So, nothing weird about that too!  What’s going on?  I was installing buildr like this

sudo gem install buildr

The problem is that once you sudo, you are running with another environment, one without the JAVA_HOME variable.  So, the quick fix is simply

sudo env JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME gem install '1.1.9' rjb
sudo env JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME gem install buildr

I completely forgot about this side-effect.  Like all side-effects, it was painful – it just cost me an hour of  digging around looking at all sorts of other things.  But, more importantly, breaking fundamental assumptions (e.g. my environment is the sudo’s environment) and zoning in on the root cause of the problem resulted in a very simple solution.