Moving again!

Sorry for the faff – but I never really liked the name “Total Immersion” and I thought I’d take this opportunity (while I’ve not been posting much) to relocate. Normal service resumed at:

http://viewsfromthebridge.wordpress.com

Crossing the Agile Development experts

Youch! Just before Christmas I posted an article on Agile Development on CIO Online. There’s nothing like constructive feedback, they say, and this was indeed nothing like constructive feedback… so anyway. I collated a set of responses and found I had written too much for the CIO Online comments field, so I have posted my responses here.

Here we go.

My goal in this article was to distil the content of a research report in a way that would be usable at CIO level. For your information, I was trained in DSDM and worked as a software development consultant for a number of years before becoming an analyst. Indeed, given the amount of time I have spent trying to convince more traditional developers of the merits of non-structured approaches, I am very interested to experience what happens when one dares to suggest that Agile might not be the ultimate answer. I hope that helps set the context.

Thank you for your comments – let’s work through them. As a first point however, I hope nobody has an issue with the main thrust of the article, as stated in the conclusion: that while there is a place for Agile approaches, they should not be attempted without due care. To try to suggest to CIOs (or anyone else) that things are otherwise would be irresponsible in the extreme. Do feel free to try to catch me out on the rhetoric, but please do not lets obscure this, most important point.

@Mike – I am delighted for you. There is no doubt that Agile can add a great deal of value if things are done right. I would be interested to know what level of consulting, mentoring etc was required, and how the 11 years panned out  – was it forming, storming, norming, performing for you? Apologies for the sprints/scrums slip of the pen. But I don’t “fail to see” anything – rather, we have been advised by people who have had difficulties on Agile projects, that the shorter timescales can make things harder, as documented in the report.

@Agile Dude – I’m using Agile as a word for the same reason this does.  I have spent many years watching in-fighting between methodologists, indeed, I would think it would be fair to say that the U in UML, once derived, meant that people needed something new to fight about. I mention some experience above which, while not as comprehensive as many people I know, and plenty I don’t, puts me in a better position than many of my analyst peers. Your mileage may differ but I suggest that you talk to me first before drawing any conclusions about competence or otherwise from a single article.

Finally, and sadly to your point, we don’t offer any services in this space. I’m not worried about a backlash as much as I am worried about “experts” trying to suggest that Agile is an easy ride.

@Ilja Preuss – good point. But it requires strong managers, and not the types who think rebaselining is a project management technique . As stated in the article, the key factor is to impose a suitable level of structure – whether agile or otherwise, this will win over (let’s call them) anarchic approaches. With regard to communications, indeed, this will be a factor but the continuous development/integration involved in Agile requires this communication more actively than does the gating/reviewing involved in (say) waterfall. It’s not me saying this but the audience we researched.

@Dave Rooney – It’s a fair cop isn’t it! Indeed, when I was running the software development environment for an out-of-control software project (which led me to write the article Craft or Science? Software Engineering Evolution back in 1994) I was led think that if only I could have taken a dozen of the bright sparks involved in the project and locked them in a side room somewhere, they might have been able to deliver something faster than the hundreds involved in the ‘main’ project. You point is “divide and conquer” which I think is totally valid.

Less valid is the remark “you would have done your research” unfortunately. I could answer, “If you had done yours you would have discovered bla bla bla…” but I will resist the cheap shot Seriously, I’m very happy that there are good experiences of Agile out there. I don’t say Agile isn’t suitable for large projects, the people we researched did say it gets harder to get right for larger projects. This might be obvious to you, but that’s another way of saying it’s fundamental, and this won’t be obvious to everyone.

@Mark Levison – did you read the report itself, or take a look at the materials from which it was derived? If so I’m not sure I understand your use of the term “back yard”.

@Alistair Cockburn – shame on you for suggesting I twisted the results of my own research report, particularly given that the citations you draw from the report are indeed summarised in the article. I suggest you re-read the article and the report, and tell the CIO Online audience where exactly the article denies that Agile approaches are beneficial, and where exactly the research report disagrees that Agile should be treated with due care. I am embarrassed by your myopia, but equally, I do understand that it can be difficult to see beyond something you have been espousing so long, and generally so well. Frankly, if you had spoken directly to me we could have had a quiet discussion and most likely avoided this faux pas.

@Anil Oberai – Thanks for your considered response. I think key to what you are saying is that it is important to choose project stages and documents which will work best for your organisation.  I have no problem with hybrid approaches, nor with the recognition that wholesale adoption is not always the wisest approach off the bat.

@George Dinwiddie – yeah, I’ll cop that one but all the same, in my experience this one bears out – that people want to stick with the monolithic, or reach out towards a ‘brave new world’. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground – but I believe there should be!

@Agile/XP Coach – God forbid I should ever take advice from you. No wonder you keep anonymous.

@Grant (PG) Rule – There was some good information garnered in the research about what metrics are seen as appropriate – and you are absolutely right that few saw resource consumption as a valid metric. I’m a bit wary of metrics for a number of reasons – not least that very few places I have seen have tended to implement them in a way that would satisfy their advocates. Which leads me with two questions – are such metrics a valid pre-requisite to project success, and if so, what is the relationship between having the right metrics implemented, and the delivery of project value? When I was a real developer, the metrics that seemed to make the most sense were those that were outcome-based, for example the number of problems fixed; however, artefact-based metrics (number of use cases, test scripts etc) have not always been quite so successful. This is not an area we have researched significantly, so I would be very interested in any steers you might have.

Changing roles

I hope this explains somewhat why my blogging has been a little restricted recently…

http://freeformcomment.blogspot.com/2008/12/taking-reins-at-freeform-dynamics.html

Onward and upward!

On Jacuzzis and Peer Programming

“Wow, when I was a kid we had to fart in the bath,” said Eddie Murphy’s character Billy Ray Valentine, when told he would have the use of a jacuzzi. They don’t make films like that anymore, do they? Well, actually they do but a little nostalgia never hurt anyone.

So it might be with rose tinted spectacles that I remember my first programming job. Straight off the best green screens and teletypes that University could offer, I was presented with all the complexity and delight of programming on an Apollo workstation, running a weird hybrid of UNIX and Apollo Aegis. Or at least, we were – given the expense of such devices, I had to share the workstation with another rookie, Mike.

Mike and I used to work together on various things – we were trained together, set tasks together, solved problems together, wrote and debugged code together. One slight issue was that Mike and I were just a little competitive. We played off each other, pushing ourselves just a little in the process. I would say we knew we were doing it but we didn’t – after all, we’d never had any other work experience than this.

It was only after a couple of months that we started to get what we were doing. I don’t want to over-blow this, we were no supermen but we certainly picked up a reputation of getting stuff done. I couldn’t even say that we were better than anyone – it just so happened that we were working in the kind of place that Tom De Marco might cite as an ideal working environment for developers. So we certainly didn’t stand out from the crowd; on the contrary we fitted right in.

Which brings me, in a rather round about way, to the shared experience of jacuzzis and Billy Ray’s nostalgia. These days we refer to peer programming as a somewhat new phenomenon – at least to the uninitiated. There are two comments I can make: first that it is not a new phenomenon, and second that speaking from experience, it works.

There’s a lot of thread to tie up here. One, as already mentioned, is the danger of being over-nostalgic. But like many agile practices, peer programming is founded on common sense. While it will not be appropriate for every situation, either should it be rejected just because it is being pimped as something new.

Today, I shall mostly be…

… At Zycko’s partner event, (In)Spire. It’s an interesting conference for an analyst to be at, because it represents where the rubber hits the road for many technologies – in the channel. Bottom line: its al very well to have a great product or a world-beating position, but often, its down to a wide variety of other companies to deliver on the promise. I’m currently sitting in a session from Neil M’s old company Zeus, with an audience made up of value-added resellers working with organisations of various sizes.

Bottom line: its important to give people something they can really work with, and not just a good story. Sounds obvious but often forgotten.

And don’t ask me why the (In) is (in) brackets.

A bit of a re-org

I’ve reorganised my blogs, and this will be the last post you see on this blog.  For day-job analysis I shall be posting on Freeform Comment. Meanwhile, you will find background reference to all things tech and the skinny on things analytic at IT Industry Outsider – I’ve migrated all posts and comments from here to there. Over at joncollins.net will be my non-technical alter-ego.

Hope that makes sense!

That’s that done, then

I’ve reorganised my blogs. Here you will find background reference to all things tech and the skinny on things analytic. For day-job analysis I shall be posting on Freeform Comment. Over at joncollins.net will be my non-technical alter-ego. Hope that makes sense!

Psst… date issues – not

I’m moving a number of early posts (2003) at the moment from joncollins.net to here. As I’ll be keeping the timestamp, they will look a bit funny if you’re on RSS – which I’m hoping nobody is just yet!

Social existentialism, and the Yourdon-Fry effect

“I’m no stranger to celebrity myself,” said the man. And in a way it was true – he had spent many years working closely with such types. Who was he? It doesn’t really matter – he could have been a journalist, a PR guy, a lawyer, a waiter, a taxi driver or indeed, even a biographer. Each role provides no more than a context within which people can relate.

And then, something like social networking comes along and throws any such context out of the window. I confess – and now it’s my turn – that while I am (indeed) “no stranger to celebrity”, I still did get a certain buzz when I saw that Ed Yourdon was following me on the microblogging tool, Twitter. This guy is as close to a celebrity as a software developer can get – back in the Seventies he was among the luminaries of the time, talking about modularity, cohesion and coupling alongside Barry Boehm and Fred Moore, Tom De Marco and Larry Constantine. These fellows were way before my time – when I arrived on the scene in 1987 they had already entered into the collective consciousness, for all I knew having left the empty husks of their physical being behind them.

Which begged the question: when I ‘followed’ him, in Twitter parlance, was I up to something a little less salubrious than just wanting to ‘join the conversation’? I’m now sufficiently advanced in years to have moved up the stack a little, and I have on extremely rare occasions seen signs of what it might be like to have a following. But – when engaging with the great Mr Ed, was I incorrect to have felt a little rush that maybe such a great man (still great, I should add, despite having been wrong on Y2K) might have noticed me touching the hem of his virtual coat?

From my own music experiences and others’, I’m pretty comfortable with the general idea of being a ‘fan’. Despite it admittedly being short for ‘fanatic’, some of the best artists and producers in the world have confessed (if that’s the right word) to holding certain of their peers in awe – Alex Lifeson of Rush, for example, remarked he found it difficult to know what to say when he actually met his guitar hero, Jimmy Page. A little aspiration goes a long way in this short life we all have, and no doubt many a little league sportsman only got to the international stage through wanting to be like their idol. It’s a human trait, which we all deal with admirably, for the most part.

The downside is two-fold. Before pondering too carefully the grammatical accuracy of the last sentence (not to mention this one), let me spell it out: first, the nature of modern celebrity can create idolatry where none should exist, through a complete absence of merit. Rare is the human who is immune to participating in such a thing: we watch Jade Goody as she succeeds and fails, all the while commenting how she shouldn’t have been filmed in the first place. What hypocrites we are. Like watching a poorly concocted film which is designed to pull on the heartstrings but which still makes you cry, we are all victims of our own humanity, as malleable and ductile as a rare metal when it comes to being influenced by the press.

The second difficulty is caused by our penchant for hierarchy. “Why can’t we all just get along,” says the pacifist – but even if we could on the surface, the very nature of our aspirationally conditioned being lies just below. We could blame evolutionary drive and the survival of the fittest; or the hang-overs of feudal society; or indeed the dark side of our meritocratic society. The best rise to the top, that’s the theory, and we all aspire to be there as well. Sometimes people even do reach such heady heights through their financial acumen, their innate skill and artistry, or their abilities as an orator. Other times, they get there through sheer determination and hard work, while others get lucky, or simply know where to stick the knife in. It was ever thus.

Which all makes the world-is-flat, peer-to-peer nature of social networking somewhat confusing. Strip back the layers of course, and for many it is not in the least about being social: that loose category of “famous people” are not, in general, trying to join conversations or make new friends with the masses. No – online tools are a marketing tool, and a very good one to boot. Communities can indeed be built, and harnessed to great effect – as proven by a number of artists (including Marillion, which is well known to be at the vanguard).

What’s perhaps very interesting about it all is that, while there is an obvious imbalance between those forming communities and those participating in them, each side does have to give a bit more of themselves. For an artist, a broadcaster or an industry guru wanting to engage with a community for reasons altruistic or otherwise, this does require a certain level of two-way interaction. For some, this comes easier than others – without knowing the chap directly, I suspect from his previous form that this is the case for Ed Yourdon, who does appear to be engaging because he really wants to.

As too does one Stephen Fry – our very own, quintessential conundrum of an Englishman, himself checking all the boxes of what it means to work as a polymathic, and no doubt workaholic artist within this meritocracy. He’s also (if a polymath can be ‘also’ anything) a dyed-in-the-wool technofreak, which means he has adopted such social networking technologies as blogging, podcasting and Twitter with gusto. But where does this leave the assembled masses, who in the past may have been sated by a quick dose of Fry on a Tuesday evening? It’s a tough one – today, anyone that has heard of the man can not only link to him in some virtual way, but also send him a direct message in the knowledge that it may, not many instants later, turn up on his ever-present iPhone (and indeed, his Web page).

It’s sorely tempting to see this ‘opportunity to interact’ as a real opportunity to interact, and I confess to have succumbed on a couple of occasions. There’s the rub: I’m probably as human as the next guy, and indeed, perhaps more so. Even as I write this, I feel just a little of the uncertainty a certain, hypothetical cat may have felt, sitting in a certain, sealed box next to a certain, ill-placed vial of prussic acid. Thus spake Schroedinger: even the act of measuring, or in this case commenting, can have an impact on the situation itself. I rightly question my motives – am I just writing this very piece in the hope Messrs. Yourdon and Fry might read it, decide I’m an all-round good chap and immediately engage in correspondence? Do I think I might be raising my standing among those who agree with me, or am I indeed looking to chide those who are a little too blatant in their social activity? Is this really just a resentful backlash against those who have surfed the social waves to become famous in their own right, or am I deviously looking to achieve the same for myself?

Here’s the truth of the matter: if this ramble is to illustrate anything, it is of the inherent imbalances that must exist in this new set of contexts, in which most of us will only ever be a bit player. As it is, the imbalances are legion. There’s not just the fact that those standing on top of their own meritocratic mountains will find it difficult to take in all the many messages they receive from those further down, or indeed elsewhere in the range. For some it has proved impossible to respond to everything – as both Ringo Starr and Neil Stephenson have pointed out. As second point however (also made by Mr Stephenson) is that some people are generally far too busy actually doing the things that make one popular, to reap all the rewards of said popularity. Success is perhaps most of all a combination of both talent and hard work: however much one has of the former, all can fail if there is an absence of the latter.

Perhaps in a few decades time, we shall look back in hindsight and make sense of all that is happening now. Realistically, what we are experiencing is only the tip of the iceberg – while some of us are already videoing and posting their every move, all but a few points of the world’s population is still going about their business without recourse to any such tools. Warhollian fame still requires TV – but the highly integrated, digital age looks set to supersede such old-fashioned concepts, as the our Bebo-centred youth culture is already illustrating. We are likely to see the online world in the same way our forebears saw metalled road surfaces – the elder generations may have used them to their advantage, but the youth have never known any different. In the short term, we can all be thoroughly indulgent, testing the waters and pushing the boundaries of social networking; no doubt as things evolve, so will a number of new contexts, within which we will all learn once again to relate.

Testing out the podcast thang

Here’s a podcast to go with this article. Its a bit quiet. Spot the infinite loop.