Doing Agile in Italy

During the latest JAOO conference, Alistair Cockburn deliberately provoked the audience stating that "we can't do agile in Europe" and this was due to EU regulations for contracts, which have to be filled with the requirements of the software to be developed by a contractor. This was a serious issue also, because in this case the law (unconsciously, I suppose, unless there is a powerful waterfall lobby in Brussels) poses a serious constraint on the development process. A contractor has to face the fact that requirement discovery in an agile fashion might drive the development team out of the officially signed project goal, some might go for a more ambiguous contract (but the customer has to agree on that, and this is not a piece of cake, especially with new customers), some others might require more paper to change the project scope (but this doesn't agile), the latest option is to take the risk and be "paperless" for a while.

Setting up an Italian development team

In Italy we have also some peculiarities related to the job market, which have some interesting effects on the way software is developed. I remember an old yet interesting article by Steve McConnell, dwelling on the notion of "problem programmers" meaning programmers with a negative impact on productivity. In other words programmers which are normally unable to finish assigned tasks, who need external help to finish the tasks, whose tasks needs extra cleanup work afterwards or which are sucking time an productivity to other members of the team. Put in this way this sounds somewhat scary, but it's not infrequent to meet such a beast. McConnell has only one solution to the problem: get rid of the problem programmer as soon as you can, which goes to a small set of options:

1. Resolve the causes for him/her being problematic
   
2. Move him/her to another team (hoping that this is a variation on option 1)
   
3. Fire him/her before the damage is too big
   

In Italy we can't fire. Job market regulations make firing an employee a very long nasty and complicated process, and 99% of the cases a non-viable option. I mean, in some places, you can't fire somebody even if you found him stealing (which puts the problem programmer in a much better light). The average Italian solution to the problem (there is always an Italian solution) is to go for temporary recruitment, hiring programmers from body rental companies, the third millennium version of mercenaries. Unfortunately this option has some drawbacks.

1. In many cases you have less control on who you are hiring. Even if I've seen pretty bad recruitment strategies in many places, being the one to choose who you are going to work with it's still a recommendable option.
   
2. You'll have less control on turnover issues: people might leave the company which hired them (and your project) for reasons which have nothing to do with you.
   
3. You have less control on motivation, you can't do much to improve it (at least on the salary side, you can do a lot, and probably more effectively on other aspects), you can do a lot to destroy it (with bureaucracy, holidays management, etc.).
   
4. Being hired by a third party is often a treat to motivation per se. One might ask "why doesn't this company want to actually hire me?" and feel they are just a replaceable part of the process, which helps them feel less guilty the day they'll decide to leave.
5. Last, but not least, the control chain sucks money. So the sub-employee is also usually sub-paid compared to the official counterparts.
   

So you generally end up with external teams with potentially lower motivation, or internal teams with people which tend to "seat" on a safe job, without being challenged for a while, and that need "something to do". I don't really want to end up arguing on the ongoing political debate which is going on in Italy these days on the topic, and please don't derive conclusions on my political orientation from this article. If you have to achieve high productivity from a software development team the best way is hire the best people, and get rid of the problematic ones. In Italy is hard to do both, so the net result is that you have to squeeze the best out of the existing team, which is sometimes …challenging.

Tags: agile, software development, Italy

IDE refactoring capabilities

I had to spend some time recatoring some classes, working with Eclipse, a couple of days ago. I selected some code inside a long method, and went for an "extract method" refactoring. Good surprise! The IDE (I was using Eclipse, but I bet that IntelliJ IDEA has the leading edge here) also checked out the entire file looking for occurrences of the code portion that was cutted and pasted all over the place, and replaced all of the occurrences with the new method (whic was the part I was planning to do afterwards...) the net result was that a 20 minutes operation became a 10 seconds operation.

On al larger scale this has some interesting consequences: if you know what to do (if you have read and understood the first 70 pages of Martin Fowler's Refactoring), refactoring a large amount of crappy code is a lot easier that you might think, so its worth doing it in many more situations. To be effective you must anyway be confident on your team OOP capabilities, and on their IDE power user skills, being the former much more important - and harder to achieve - than the latter.

Tags: OOP, Refactoring

Things they wouldn't teach you of in college - Part 2

In my previous post, I focused on some of the scope differences between software project assignment in the university, and real world projects, Pointing out that there is no maintenance phase. Well, it ca be if you fail the exam and have to evolve your personal assignment, ....but don't take it as an advice.

You are not alone
Well, time is not the greatest scope limitation you have to cross: being in a team can be far more challenging. One of the first thing you'll have to learn is sharing your code with your team, a practice which involves knowledge of SCM tools mechanics (first encounter with a CVS, Subversion or VSS is often a sort of initiation ceremony) and of the group mechanics as well. Something like "who breaks the build takes the blame" or "the last one to commit gets the conflict", but it's just the fact that the team as a whole carrying on the burden of the whole development. So you need coordination, and you need to agree with your teammates on the borders of your own activity.

Sharing the code also shows the symptoms of the "it works here!" syndrome, making it clear that you can't rely on your IDE (or on your memory) anymore, but you need more specific tools such as Ant or Maven to carry on the build process. The notion of repeatability, platform independence, environments and so on (have you ever heard the term "production environment" while at the university? I didn't).

A more subtle question is related to the notion of good code. Writing code just for yourself is close being an onanistic practice: good code is something somebody else finds useful. Which means that:

1. it works
2. easily
3. understandably

Code must work. This might sound trivial, but the point is that code should do what is expected to do. Expectations, unfortunately, could be quite non deterministic if left alone. So you gotta get a grip on what people expects your software to do, and to the average developer's expectation, which leads basically to one word (and one adjective): good documentation.

Documentation can make a lot on ease of use, but doesn't address point 2 completely. Software must be easy to use: doesn't matter if steps from 1 to 17 are thoroughly documented in MyFabulousPieceOfSoftware.howto, if you can achieve the same result in 3 steps, or one. The two things come together: as Vincent Massol points out in an old post about documentation driven development, documentation could be a good test for code and an inspiration for refactoring. If documenting takes too much it's probably because interfaces are far too complicated, or are not placed at the right level of abstraction. It's too easy to mess with interfaces and method signatures when we design both the client and the server class, for example 'cause we are stuck in the mud doing it, but we forget that we don't want classes that call our methods to be stuck in the same complexity that we are.

Understandability of the code refers to the internal mechanics of our systems. And to the beauty of the design. This is a tough lesson: a clean model is potentially useless if nobody else can understand it. It will lead to a cathedral in the desert, or - worse - to the code equivalent of a ghost town. Even if you are the best OO designer around, you can't write code that nobody else can maintain. Elegance in software can have dreadful effects, if nobody but you can appreciate it. Don't get me wrong, clean elegant software it's most of the time better than spaghetti code, but in a team, design elegance must stabilize on a level that can be reachable by a large enough number of teammates. To achieve this you can lower down your expectations, or raise team modeling skills. I tend to favor the second option as much as I can.

Tags: OOP, Software development, Coaching