f3yourmind

I just had a quick Google Wave experience with Willem Odendaal and the experience of seeing the other person type was a bit weird for both of us.

Lesson to both of us: Think before you wave!

Also, I have to remind myself to not think about waves as email, or tweets or instant messages. It’s just something else! And it has a different spin on the time dimension of communication.

I suspect that Google Wave will force us to be better at the way we communicate, how we express ourselves and the relevance of the content to the conversation.  I can imagine a wave growing over time that describes a story started by a domain expert with feedback from a developer and a nice cadence emerging between them.  It all is in one nice wave, with playback that tells you how you got there in the first place.  I wonder if this will have an influence on effectiveness of remote pairing?

I also have a feeling that if you’re a waterfall type of person, then waves will not have an impact on you.  It’s all about feedback and dealing with the changes, which is at the heart of agility.

Now I just need someone to wave with to try out a slightly modified development flow.

A team that I am coaching has settled on using BDD stories and scenarios for describing their requirements and specifications.  They’ve also chosen cucumber as their acceptance testing tool.  All well and good, but they are making very slow progress and seem to be really struggling with the change in workstyle.  I think I’ve spotted the reason for this.

The feedback loop is missing.  They view the stories as a spec that has been handed down.  And they have not made the connection that spec writing is design work that is intended to clearly illustrates concepts in a domain.  It is a form of writing code.  But it’s just that this code is, maybe, non-executable.

Here’s my workflow and how I close the loop.

• write story and scenario
• Sketch a design if needed – helps when pairing to be on the same page.
• Start writing test for scenario
• ooops … test is getting complicated? stuck?
• maybe the domain is not understood enough? Dig deeper, improve scenario, design (as needed) and continue writing test
• or maybe the scenario was badly written? Ignore scenario structure, continue writing test.  Refactor scenario later.  We’re in deep discovery mode here.
• get test to pass
• refactor code
• refactor scenario
• … cycle the red-green-refactor until happy.

Acknowledging when you’re in discovery mode and knowing that you are allowed to refactor requirements is the trick.  Nothing is cast in concrete.  That’s why I like frequent feedback loops with tight turning circles.

No feedback loop, no progress.

BTW, I really don’t like explaining such things as flow-charts and sequences.  You got to find your own style.  It’s not a recipe or rules thing.  The above is something that is about as close to what I do but it changes when the need arises.  That’s also another key feature of being agile – adapt or die in the waterfall.

I have received a lot of positive feedback from many new faces for the SPIN talk I did this week.  Thank you.

But I am worried.  In the 45 minute talk, I did 5 minutes with Ruby code and cucumber.  Now so many people want to use cucumber.  Good for cucumber.

I think I should have stressed my point a lot more.

Take-Home #1: Find a way to make the life cycle of requirements part of your workflow.  Should it be a hard dependency?  If the requirements change, then do you want the build to break?  When requirements have a life cycle independent of the code’s life cycle, then you are opening yourself to waterfall-ish problems.

Take-Home #2: Agile in name and process can only take you so far.  You have to live it in your head and in your life.  For me, agile has a very Zen-like characteristic.  You need to live in the moment, absorb the feedback in that moment and adjust your next action in response to all this stimuli.  We are just like an amoeba that reacts to changes in pH.  But the difference is that we are capable of controlling our re-action or subsequent action.  An amoeba is agile by process only.

Take-Home #3: BDD can help you to change your coding and architecture attitude for the better.  It is subtle in its intrusion, but profound in its impact.  The subtley makes it dangerous.  It is not about the clever use of words, it is about the way those words impacts on your code and your resulting architecture.  So find your own cucumber and that does not mean you should go looking for another gherkin.

Perhaps I was not responsible enough.  My actions and words have affected people in a way that I did not intend.

At the 45th SPIN meeting in Cape Town tomorrow, I will be sharing the “stage” with Karen Greaves.  Karen will be talking about the lessons she has learned in rolling out Scrum to a large enterprise.  I have a feeling that it is about scaling Scrum out to more than 10 people.  Karen has done this for 80+ people and I am certain that her experiences will reach an audience outside of Scrum circles as well.

I will also be giving a talk about Agile Requirements.  It’s about behavior driven stories that go beyond traditional, fully dressed used cases.  However, I will focus a lot more about the process and thinking behind this approach as opposed to the code behind the stories.

I always meet very interesting people at SPIN.  Please take 2 hours from your evening and join us for some great geek chat at the Bandwidth Barnyard at 6.30pm on 15 April.

Update. You can get the presentation here.  The size is optimized for iPOD and is quite viewable on your desktop as well.  The tiny bit of ruby code is included in the zip as well.

The last two geeky conversations I had, stumbled upon the same thing – how do you measure the effectiveness of requirements in describing the business to the business and describing the specification to the developer?

So, I posed the question “How far away are you from executing your requirements?”. If you are going to go through various steps and stages to get to compilation and then execution, then every step is an opportunity for valuable information being lost in translation. If you can compile your requirements immediately then nothing will be lost.

Each additional step between requirements description and compilation and execution is an opportunity to confuse the user and the developer and everyone in between.  That’s why fully dressed use cases are not so effective as fully dressed behavior driven stories.  And that’s why BDD is very agile and a great asset in DDD and use cases just don’t cut it anymore.

Right now, my favorite tool is Cucumber.  I can execute the requirements and that raises the clarity ranking of my requirements super high.