Category: Tools and Techniques

The Value of Iterations

I often see comments in social media disparaging working in iterations. I’ve heard such comments in person at client sites in the past. Why do some people dislike iterations so much?

Sometimes they talk about the high overhead of repeated planning and tracking. This makes me suspect that their planning and tracking procedures are not aligned with their needs.

Estimating stories is a particularly sore point. People often try to estimate with a precision much greater than they need. If you’re working in iterations, there’s really only two needs for story estimation.

  1. Have we prepared enough work to keep us going for the duration of the iteration?
  2. Are we getting ahead of ourselves and preparing too far into the future?
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A Highly Evolved Card Wall

I’ve been promising Mark Levison since forever to describe the highly effective card wall that evolved at one of my past clients. The team started with a simple beginning, and modified it as they saw fit to suit the needs of their situation. This is not a universal model for others to blindly copy, but there is much to learn from it.

No doubt that it continued to evolve beyond my knowledge, as this team spectacularly took control of their own development process. I’ll never forget the Monday morning that I walked into the team room, direct from the airport, and saw them pulling cards and tape off the corkboard wall. “What the heck are they doing?” I thought. I stood and watched from across the room as the scurried around excitedly with much conversation. Tape and cards started to go back on the wall in a different configuration. I knew then that this team was going to excel, as they were paying attention to how things were working for them and adjusting accordingly. Excel they did, and their wall was in frequent flux as long as I knew them. It’s amazing what a team can do when they have the desire and freedom to improve.

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Refactoring Arpeggio

The other day, GeePaw Hill mentioned on Mastodon

“inline-jiggle-extract” is a coding pattern that needs describing.
If I were a better person, I would write that up.

https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/110262262154288983

As it happened, I’d recently talked about that pattern on LinkedIn

I found the sequence of inline, re-order statements, extract to be one of my favorite refactoring arpeggios.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7055994041762508800?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7055994041762508800%2C7056048897181241345%29
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Categories: Tools and Techniques Working Software

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Features and Stories, Large and Small

Imagine you work for a company that produces a videoconferencing system. You’ve done pretty well with it, but you’re middle of the pack of competition. Then there’s a worldwide pandemic, and the market for videoconference software explodes. There’s a silver lining in this terrible event. A rising tide lifts all boats, right?

Maybe not, if the competition has more of what the customers want. It’s critical to remain a viable choice in the eyes of customers.

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions Tools and Techniques

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The Order of Tests

It’s been awhile since I’ve done much coding. That’s not my day job anymore, and I lose interest working by myself. In the past week, however, I’ve had a couple opportunities to mob program remotely with the Canton Coders. With the COVID-19 restrictions on gathering in person, people are much more likely to work with you virtually.

So last week I found myself mobbing on the Roman Numeral kata and today on the Zeckendorf kata, both on cyber-dojo. A lot of fun was had by all, and I rediscovered what I know about Test Driven Development with a bit more clarity.

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More About Development Culture

Josh Kerievsky called me to task for not following up on his third version of his story of providing a quick fix before a test-driven fix. As I said, I don’t want to be critical of Josh. I will, however, cast a critical eye on the code he has shared.

For those just tuning in, the previous installment talked about differences between the culture we espouse and the culture we practice. This installment will return to that.

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Categories: Tools and Techniques Working Software

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TDD, Options, and Culture

The background for this post: Gil Zilberfeld posted a link to a blog post by Joshua Kerievsky. I had some questions and Josh’s response, to me, seemed to change the story a bit. As I suspected, the story is hypothetical, and changes to support the intended conclusion. This always makes it very slippery to talk about a story. The details matter. And in this case, the change overwrites the original, without any indication of what has changed. That makes it even harder to have a conversation about it.

The Story

I’ll give a synopsis of the story here, since it may change again. In brief,

  • “A customer reports a defect. It’s inhibiting them from getting some important work done.”
  • David finds the defect and test-drives a fix, including refactoring to re-design the code around the defect. He spends two hours doing so.
  • In a parallel universe, Sally finds the same defect, fixes it without an automated test, hand-tests the fix, pronounces it good and pushes it to production. There’s no indication of how long this took, but presumably it’s intended to be less than two hours.
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Categories: Tools and Techniques

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Visual Management Tools

Sometimes we intentionally make our work more visible so that we can more easily see what’s going on. We do this so that, as a group, we get a better picture of the whole of the group’s effort. At it’s best, this is more than a dashboard that displays information. Instead, it’s a tool that’s used by the people doing the work in the process of doing that work. Read More

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Mocking External Services

Should your tests mock outside services or not? I keep seeing discussions on this topic. On the one hand, it lets your tests be in control of the testing context. Otherwise it may be very difficult to create a reliable automated test.

  • The external service might return different results at different times.
  • The external service might be slow to respond.
  • Using the external service might require running the test in a particular environment.
  • It may be impossible to generate certain error conditions with the real service.
  • There may be side-effects of using the real service.

On the other hand, our mock of the external service might differ from it in important ways.

  • Our mock service might have a slightly different interface than the real one.
  • Our mock service might accept slightly different parameters than the real one.
  • Our mock service might return slightly different results than the real one.
  • The real service might change behavior, and we won’t notice until we deploy to production.

This leaves us in a quandary. What to do? Read More

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Categories: Tools and Techniques

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Relationship of Cycle Time and Velocity

I sometimes see clashes between Kanban proponents and their Scrum counterparts. Despite the disagreements, both of these approaches tend toward the same goals and use many similar techniques. Karl Scotland and I did some root cause analysis of practices a few years back and came to the conclusion that there were a lot of similarities between Kanban and Scrum [as the poster-child of iterative agile] when viewed through that lens. I also noticed that while Scrum explicitly focuses on iterations as a control mechanism, Scrum teams tend get into trouble when they ignore Work In Progress (WIP). Conversely, while Kanban explicitly focuses on WIP, Kanban teams tend to get into trouble when they ignore Cadence.

A twitter conversation I was in revolved around Cycle Time and Velocity. Since this is a topic that’s come up before, I thought it would be valuable to describe it more fully. Again, I find there to be more similarities than differences between Kanban (which uses Cycle Time) and Scrum (which uses Velocity) in terms of predicting when a given amount of work will be done, or how much work will be done by a given time. Read More

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