Action stations!

When I started this blog, I swore to my self that this was not going to be one of those blogs, that only have 3-4 post and then just stop. And here I am and it has been more than 4 months since I updated it.

Luckily I happened to watch this little fun video earlier today. Since it's core message is to take action, I decided to take some action and make a blog post. The part about taking action is one I have mentioned earlier in this blog post.

So this is the first post of the revival of this blog - please do come back and check regularly - I promise there will be more posts soon!

Cat herding – best done by cats?

Managing creative people are often compared to herding cats (link 1, link 2, link 3). And that can be a daunting task as cats are known to do mainly do what they want to do.

However this is not a blog post about the usual answers to leading creating people. As usual  I have connected som related things and got this crazy idea that I just have to share (and I hope that ranks me as one of the creative peole).

Well, leading creative people may be like herding like herding cats, which sounds stressful, and often taking part in a software development project is almost the definition of a stressfull environment.

This is a bit funny as actually research shows that owning cats have many benefits. One of the benifits are that having cats around reduces stress. Having worked from home the last couple of month I can attest to that having a cat sleeping on your desk next to your keyboard while you work has a very soothing effect that lets you concentrate on the job. And if you need a quick laugh just take 2 minutes watching a cat play with a string (not my cat, allthough one of my cats are called Arthur).

A couple of month ago, I stumbled over a refence to cat cafés. At that time I thought it funny, and was wondering if a cat café would work here in Copenhagen where I live. But recently I have thought further – what about cat offices? Would it be an improvement to an office if there was a cat or two present?

On the top of your head you will probably call the idea ridiculous but try to give it some more thought. Cats are very clean animals and they sleep 60-70% of the day, and are generally not hard to keep. It is a very little expense and that could easy be recovered if they help create a less stressfull enviroment with a less negative mood that increases the productivity.

I am not saying this is an idea that will work for everybody – perhaps it will only work for a few – but on the othe I hand I do believe it should not be completely written off either.

Do any of you know offices where they keep cats? Then please leave a message in the comments.

The user is never right

The user/customer is never right – at least when it comes to designing good IT systems. This might seem like a odd statement to come from someone like me that thinks agile is great. Because agile places a lot of weight on commucation and customer collaboration, and most agile methods uses user stories or use cases as their basis for development. And if we base our design on user stories they must be correct, right?

Well, sorta but not quite. In the recent massive amounts of articles about Steve Jobs that have appeared after his death I came upon this qoute: ”You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.". I know from personal experience that this is often the way customers act when you present somenthing to them. There is always changes or imperfections, or their problems and processes have changes. I am sure many other developers out there know the feeling.

So if we do not trust the user/customer to supply us with what to do, should we then just do what is awesome? Well, that often do not work either. I found this qoute in a blogfrom CCP about the problems they face when developing (they use Scrum): ”..when we start off with an awesome idea rather than an actual problem we want to fix or a feature that has a clear, functional and necessary goal, it generally requires painful fixes further down the road”.

Does that leave us with a catch-22 problem? We can't rely on customers and we can't rely on what we find awesome.

No – we actually have all the tools needed in agile thinking. As I see it much of the agile way if thinking is based on that the user never really know what they want. We – the developers – need to help them. So lets look at it that way.

First – as agile developers we are always ready to respond to change over following a plan. We know we can not trust the user/customer to know exactly what he wants, so we make short iterations and continiously deliver stuff to the user, so he can see if he can use what we have made – if the system solves his problems.

Secondly we collaborates with the user/customer. This is usually done by frequent interactions with the user/customer to build trust between them and us – we need them to trust that we understand their problems and that we will deliver something that helps them.

Which leads me back to user stories and the qoute from the CCP blog. User stories is a great tool if used correctly. They are however not requirements. They are a tool that facilitates communication with the user/customer, and grounds our – the developers - understanding of their problem. It is not the solution to the problem – the solution is experessed in deployable code that solves the problem.

When we look at the standard template for a user story (*) it has often struck me, both as a developer and business analyst, how often the last part is omitted – the benefit. But that is crucial for understanding the problem that we want to solve. It is the benefit that creates value not the action. So I find that the trick to creating a good solution is to focus on the benefit and how to achieve that and not so much on the action. If we can find a better/faster/smarter action that achieves the same goal surely we will deliver value. But if we assume that the user/customer is right, we often focuses on the action – which is usually also easier, but also leads us much more in the direction to focus on contract negotiation instead of customer collaboration – afterall the system can do all the required actions, right?

In my experience it is the projects that take user/customer inputs as absolute requirements that fail – at least in delivering value. The ones that succeed is the ones where the developer solve the user/customers problem often using novel technology or solutions that the user/customer did not think of. So the user is never right – but neither is you – but that does not matter if you have a little faith and trust in each other and look at the problem and what creates value.

(*) "As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>" 

Poetic simplicity

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. ”

                                                   - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Since I first saw this qoute a few years ago I have had a piece of paper with it in large letters hanging by my desk. I find that it captures the the way that I the best way to develop somehting and that it also catches the essence of agile. Essentially I read it as saying, that if you can create a shared vision in your team and get everybody passionate about reaching the goal, then the team will self-organize and use all their enegy to reach that goal.

I have long wanted to write about this quote but each time found that I extracted more and more meaning and the post got longer and longer and still did not really catch the spirit of the qoute. So today I realised that perhaps I should do it the other way around. Because the qoute is short and simple and yet expresses so much, lets just keep it simple and remember that agile is about simplicity and that sometimes less is more.

This qoute has helped me a lot when both planning and executing a project – I hope it will help you to.

When you have to code … code! Don't document.

The inspiration for this blog post has very different roots. I have for a long time wanted to write a blog post about the ”working software over documentation” part of theagile manisfesto but could not find a good way to write a blog about it. And then suddenly a podcast I heard yesterday, a book I read last week and and qoute from a movie from 1966 made it all clear: It's all about getting things done.

Yesterday I was listening to the danish tech podcast Harddisken where they had visited the startup weekend  and talked to several of the participants. One of the participants was asked if he was not afraid that once you had told people about your idea in a public forum like the startup weekend that it would be copied by other people and diluted. And he said no – the idea is not the important part – it's about making it happen and that require the correct team – and the startup weekend was a good place to meet smart people that you could recruit for your team. An idea has no value in itself – it is the execution that matters.

Last weekend I stumbled over a book by Joel Spolsky called: ”Smart & get things done”. It adresses how to hire the best programmers which is something that has been a problem in all the companies I have worked at so I eagerly read through it. The thing that is interesting for this blog post is that it is not enough to hire smart people – you have to hire smart people that get things done. Again an emphasis on execution.

The last thing is this scene from the film: ”The good, the bad, and the ugly”. I have had it on my list of stuff that I felt embodied agile and leans pragmatic approach to making software, but could not fit it in. But the other two things put it into context. So when Tuco in the film says: ”If you want to shoot .. shoot! Don't talk.” he is in a way saying that ideas and intentions do not really matter if they are not executed.

And that leads me back to the agilemanisfesto and ”Working software over comprehensive documentation”. This part of the manisfesto is for me all about execution. Beacuse while some documentation is necessary the documentation in itself holds no value – only the working code holds value – and you could probably even expand that to that only working deployed code holds any value. And getting the code done and deployed to the customer that is all about execution. You can have endless good ideas, make tons of documentation but without execution you have no value. And to me that pragmatic getting things done is one of the things that have always attracted me to agile and lean methods, and I find that valuing working software over comprehensive documentation is a good hands on approach to gettngs things done.

So remember: When you have to code … code! Don't document.

Why is it good to fail fast?

The concept of failing fast seems to be part of much agile and lean thinking. However the concept is not in the agile manifesto nor the principles behind it. Traditionally failing is not seen as something good so that got me wondering why agile think it is good and if there is both a right way and a wrong way to fail fast?

In agile we do want to be able to respond quickly to changes and most agile methods (1) prefer short iterations and it is also one of the guinding principles that we should deliver software frequently. The reason we want short iterations is so we can quickly get feedback, and respond accordingly.

But failing fast is not just something related to iterations and feedback – failing fast has also become somehting to strive for in the daily work and coding. For example in this article by Jim Shore he tells about failing fast in code and how that can help you debug faster and build more robust code.

However if I was to tell a team to fail fast and gave them Jims article as an example, it could still easily be viewed as one one to solve a particular problem and not an explanation of why it is generally good to fail fast.

Reading the article something else hit me when Jim starts to talk of assertions, how and when to put them in your code, and how to structure the message that you want the assertion to give. Perhaps it is not the failing fast that is important, it is the fact the we get good information about a problem early on – or in other words: we get structured feedback that lets us act on it.

That harmonises very good with this article by Braden Kelley that I found while researching why failing fast is good. The authors advocate that the central question you should always as yourself when experimenting is: ”What do we hope to learn from this effort?”. And I think that is the same that Jims does with his assertions – he only inserts them when he can learn something significant from them, and uses a lot of time structruring the information he gets back – i.e. he thinks about what he hope to learn from inserting the assertion at precisely that place.

So to me ”fail fast” cannot be seen as a meme in itself – it has to be put into a context and serve a purpose before it becomes valuable. Failing is just one outcome of an experiment and unless you have procedures in place to learn form it (like the Deming circle: Plan-Do-Check-Act) or it holds no value.

Being a language oriented person I agree with Braden Kelley that failing is a negative word, and since what we really want people to do when we say fail fast is learn fast, why not just say that: ”Learn fast”. To me that much better catches the thinking behind agile and lean than fail fast.

1. I say most because I do not know all agile methods out there. However all the ones I know prefer short iterations.

What playing games can teach us about organizing work

I have for some time been thinking of doing a series of blog posts that focus on what we as software developers can learn from other parts of life to make us better at developing software. And this is the first go at that.

I have always been playing a lot of games – both board games and computer games – partly because it is fun and partly because you can learn a lot from most games. For the last couple of years, I have primarily been playing a game called EVE Online. And it was when reading one of their blogs on how they plan to develop the game, that a particular part struck me as more universally appliable than just for having fun in a game.

The blog post is part of their design effort for how to improve the game and when I read this quote I immediately thought it had wider appeal than just in a game:

Maximize "can", minimize "must"

• Nullsec features should always maximize the amount of valuable options available to the player, and minimize the number of mandatory tasks they must complete
• Nullsec features should always encourage players to solve their own problems rather than using mechanics to regulate things

EVE Online is what they call a sandbox game where everything (almost) is player built or player interactable and Nullsec is the most deregulated part of the game and hence both the most dangerous but to many also the most fun part of the game.

However what struck me was that changing a few words in that statement will change it from speaking of how to enjoy a game to speak of a way that we can organize work that must strike most people in software development – especially if you are using lean or agile methods – as something to strive for:

• The way work is organised should always maximize the amount of valuable options available to the employee and the business, and minimize the number of mandatory tasks they must complete
• The way work is organised should always encourage employees to solve their own problems rather than using rules to regulate things

I think that Maximize "can", minimize "must" is a good meme - It is certainly one that I will use in the future, because I think it is a good way to quickly expess the gist of these priciples from the agile manifesto:

Build projects around motivated individuals.  Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

So one of the lessons I think we can draw from playing games, is that work get more fun and rewarding if we can maximise ”can” and minimise ”must”. This might not work in all companies but I feel that in software development where creativity and innovation is essential to make a good product this is the vision I would like managers to have in a company I work in. And I do not think I am the only one that work harder, longer and get better results if I find the work to be fun and rewarding in itself (read my earlier blog post on motivation here and here).