f3yourmind

If you have done any development in Java-land, then surely you came across the dreaded three letter word EJB.  And you were most likely duped into thinking it was great.  I did!  Then I realised it was just a specification.  It was a great big, furry, non-executable PDF.  A specification for managing objects but the creating of these objects were just horrid.  EJB3 was a clean-up exercise, but still far from nice.

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?

In agile economics we often talk about stopping the project before it 100% complete; when you reach a point of diminishing returns; i.e. that agile fail-safe point when the cost of producing software is greater than the value of the software itself.  Kind of.

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?

Do you remember that catchy Beatles song?

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

Most agile people say big designs up front rarely pay off.  You spend so much time doing design that you delay the opportunity of feedback from real, working software.  But I sometimes do BIG DUF.  It’s not that the design is big, it’s the problem that is big.  So I need an up front big picture with just a few big parts.

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 am amazed, yet again, that people try to force others to comply to a process, standard, or whatever.  The traditional justification is to ” have governance otherwise everything will fall apart”. Surely, we have learned enough from spectacular failures that governance that does not give people an opportunity to exercise self discipline.  When you give a person a chance to develop personal discipline, then forced compliance is unnecessary.  With forced compliance, we force people into ignoring their own discipline because the system will “sort” it out for you.  It breeds an attitude of “the system failed me and it’s not my fault”.

This discipline I am talking about is a personal attitude to everything.  Some things may be the discipline to

• not check in code that is broken
• fix your own or someone else’s broken code
• find options for looming failure
• be accountable when you’ve accepted responsibility
• admit error when you make a bad judgement
• commit to learn in the face of ignorance
• share because you just should anyway

Of course, I am being deliberately idealistic.  But wouldn’t it be really nice if everyone just accepted discipline as something that needs to be developed personally.  Imagine it for a moment … so many XP values and principles seem a lot easier to adopt.  Just imagine it.

A forced compliance style of governance is a lot about trying to compensate for lack of trust and admitting that we are more likely to fail than succeed.  On the other hand, discipline is not pain, suffering and anguish.  It’s only sadistic if you implement discipline for nothing.

In ubuntu coding, discipline is a necessary quality.