We can do better than this... Reloaded

In the last Italian Agile Day I delivered an open presentation called "Possiamo fare di meglio" (this post's title is just the translation), where I raised some questions about the way we develop software. I then tried to summarize some of the things that emerged in the discussion here, but there are still many things that are bouncing in my head...

One thing that really disappoints me is the low quality of many software applications I have to deal with in my everyday life. Some days I really feel like I am surrounded by crap. Just to make it clear what I am talking about: here is an excerpt of what a home banking service is asking me every single operation I do.

Choose the desired account:

My Company Account (all the accounts)

And every time I think: "It's one account, it's just one account, it's always been just one account, so why on Earth you keep asking me this question every time! Couldn't you just take me straight to the account...".

Some days I just feel like surrender, some other I see how some application are doing a fantastic job, on platforms like iPhone or on the web, and I feel like there's still some hope for us.

There is still a lot to do

Despite all of our efforts, to introduce TDD and continuous integration, velocity based estimations and the like. There's a lot to do in other fields as well. Let me say it in another way: many companies are looking towards agile methodologies as a way to improve their development processes, in order to deliver software on time and on budget.

Doesn't sound that bad isn't it?

It does. It doesn't mention the quality of the product. ...Oh, yes, we forgot, we need also tests to reduce our defect ratio. Tests are good, software quality is good, but still doesn't address the whole point. We should deliver better products. Emphasis on the process itself would satisfy the managers' ancient need for schedules and predictable outcome, allowing teams to produce crap more efficiently, but would not produce better products unless some key points are specifically addressed.

The most neglected areas at the moment - at least from my point of observation - are:

1. user's involvment,
2. understanding the domain complexity,
3. lack of an overall perspective,
4. inefficient learning during the product development lifecycle.

The items are not completely separated, in fact they're slightly overlapping, but I think these are the areas where as software developers we can (and must) improve a lot.

In the next posts I'll dig deeper in these topics.

New DDD training events in Bologna

The first dates for Domain Driven Design classes in Bologna are finally published!

• 1 introduction day, targeted to who want's to know what DDD is, on February 8th (info & registration)
• 4 days of workshop from February 9th to 12th for practitioners that want to dig deeper and discuss (info & registration)

The events will take place in Savoia Regency Hotel (well known to participants of last Italian Agile Day). Early bird till January 15th, and special discounts for Bologna XPUG menbers.

Video of my "Possiamo fare di meglio" speech is out.

Big thanks to Yuri Valentini and all the friends from the Bologna XP User Group, for editing and posting the video. Here's the link.

A crowdsourcing experiment

Like one year ago, I decided to give my talk at Italian Agile Day as an open session with roughly the same schema: 15-20 minutes of impact talk, and 30 minutes of open discussion. I like this type of sessions because it’s not a “I know the truth” approach (I don't), but rather a way to make a small portion of a possible truth emerge from anyone in the room. So, even if I had some answers in mind, I preferred to focus on the questions, leaving the answers eventually open. I’ve seen some open sessions, but it’s not the kind of things that you practice every week (unless you’re leading a talk show), so please forgive me if it anything went wrong. Personally, I think it went a lot better than the year before: the discussion flew naturally and touched many of the topics I wanted to touch.

See it in another way
Ok, now think of me like Dr.Evil, with a “masterplan”: I’ve managed to hire about 200 among the best IT professionals I know as consultants for one hour. Basically for free. That’s my crowdsourcing experiment. And I had the feeling of so many little things emerged. Maybe not so clearly, maybe not so well formed or well expressed, but enough to make me think a lot in the following days.

On the way home, and later in the weekend some thoughts were a little clearer. I guess my personal follow up is worth sharing: at least ...I owe it to the participants. :-)

We’re making products, not software
Software is what we know, what we like to write, what we learned to produce. Some of us are really good in writing software, or in making their team write good software. That’s only half of the story: from the user perspective we see a product, not code. In the discussion, many mentioned user interface or the user experience. Which is right. But it’s still trees, not the forest. If we start thinking about the overall product we might realize that we need to see the whole a lot better than we usually do. Scrum has a good shoot on this by emphasizing the role of the Product Owner, meaning that we have a single responsible person (which is a gift from the gods in many organizations) for the whole product. There’s a problem up there, because so many times the whole idea of product is flawed, and we’re just writing software. Guess what... with a high probability of being completely useless.

I’ve seen so many projects missing their goals or their potential, just because the responsible organization didn’t have a clear idea of the whole product not to see a pattern here.

Non technical integration is not so easy
Ok, so we should try to have an all-round view to our product. Including also non developers roles within our project scope. Interesting but tricky. Especially if the team boundaries do not match with the company boundaries, which might happen quite often in a cross-functional team. But software-only teams can control continuous integration to a very high degree of efficiency using TDD, Continuous Integration and SCM tools. But this is only a portion of the product. Other professional might follow a different approach, that has nothing to do with TDD (or maybe it has... only on a different time scale), and the perfection we strived to achieve becomes frustratingly fragile. I guess there’s no easy recipe here, we’ve got to fall back on mantras like “inspect and adapt”: solutions might be a lot different from team to team. After all we’re humans. But it’s funny to realize that we sometimes we want to “integrate early and often” but “only software artifacts, please”. Postponing integration with non-software components of your project is even riskier.

This is definitely a hot topic, especially if you approach it from an enterprise management perspective: enterprise 2.0 folks are talking about more flexible approaches to collaboration, and this might be at odds with the benefit of a jelled team.

Reading suggestions after IAD2009

I’ve found myself talking about many different books with many different persons during IAD2009, here’s a summary of the books I more or less explicitly suggested:

• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - Andy Hunt: some things happen by chance, some don’t some others you could make it happen.
• Agile Software Development, the cooperative game - Alistair Cockburn: an eye-opener on what’s around the code.
• Agile Retrospectives - Esther Derby, Diana Larsen: so little small details can make the difference between a good retrospective and a useless bloodbath.
• Collaboration Explained - Jean Tabaka: sometimes there’s so much about the people that we don’t really know.
• Agile Project Management with Scrum - Ken Schwaber: it’s not software development, it’s product development.
• Don’t Make Me Think - Steve Krug: how many times are we willing to transform a service into a pain?
• The design of everyday things - Donald A. Norman: guys, I hate bad design.
• Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans: there’s much more to this book than it looks (and looks like there’s plenty of stuff already).
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler: the reference book for current architectural patterns.
  
• Agile Project Management - Jim Highsmith: it’s not all about the software,but it works.
• Slack - Tom de Marco: oops seems like so many things your organization is doing are wrong.
• Peopleware - Tom de Marco, Timothy Lister: still incredibly useful, if you haven’t read it you’re just pretending to manage software projects.
• Getting Things Done - David Allen: everybody’s talking about GTD, maybe because there’s something true in that.
• Clean Code - Robert C.Martin: you won’t go anywhere if you don’t agree on this.

Hope these might be useful to some.

Back from the Italian Agile Day 2009

I’ve seen skilled and curious colleagues. I’ve seen nice ideas emerge from different perspectives (more on this soon). I’ve met old friends and nice persons which I didn’t know and that I am now honored to know.

All this doesn’t happen everyday and everywhere.

Thanks to Marco Abis that every year make this magic happen. Thanks to everybody in the staff and to all friends from the Bologna XP Users Group, once more fantastic. Thanks to all the speakers, able to tell real stories without hype or fluff. Thanks to all the participants to my “talk show” sharing interesting ideas and thoughts. Thanks to the heroes that risked asphyxia to follow my Domain Driven Design mini-workshop.

Thanks also to Roberto Bettazzoni that reminded me what it means to be “Romagnolo”.

It has been a great day.

Thanks to everybody made it possible.

Scrum Introduction with Peter Stevens

As a satellite event to the 2009 Italian Agile Day in Bologna, I'll be helping Peter Stevens in the one day Introduction to Scrum that'll take place in Bologna on November 19th, right before the IAD.

Peter is a seasoned Scrum trainer based in Switzerland, and helping companies in different countries. More info could be found on his blog Scrum Breakfast.

Peter speaks quite a good Italian, we thought that the best combination would be to keep the teaching part in English, and question time in Italian. But ...I guess this would be an emerging behaviour as well.

By the way, Agile Day participants will get a 20% discount on the full price.

JAX Italia 2009

Event agenda is getting crowded: in November I'll also be speaking at the first edition of the Italian JAX Conference, I'll be giving a talk about Domain Driven Design, and a full-day DDD seminar on Saturday 14th.

Some more detailed info here.

Italian Agile Day 2009

Registrations are open for the Italian Agile Day 2009, still in Bologna on November 20th.

I'll be giving a talk "Possiamo fare di meglio" (We can do better than this) and maybe a short workshop. Everybody interested in agile software development is warmly welcome. Hurry up!

Back from the London DDD-Exchange

I just came back from London where Gojko Adzic and I led a 4-day full immersion Domain Driven Design class in Skills Matter HQ. Wasn’t it enough, on friday we had the first edition of DDD-Exchange, in the Crypt with quite a few interested participants.

First of all, I’ve got to thank everybody in Skills Matter for the fantastic job. Organization was incredibly efficient with wi-fi, food and beverages, real-time twitter coverage and quick publishing of the talks on the company website (mine is here). Despite a long line of sleepless nights working on the presentation and my terrible accent, looks like everything went fine. We had quite a few interesting talks, and I also participated to my first park bench panel, which turned out being quite interesting and open ended. Also, beers with some of the folks that came to attend the DDD-Exchange were even more open ended.

So, despite being incredibly tired, at the end I felt like I did something good, many people actually liked my presentation and we had many interesting discussions during the breaks.

By the way I uploaded my presentation on Slideshare, after making some small corrections and adding some notes to prevent possible misunderstandings.

Tags: DDD, Software Development, Agile, Project Management

Preparing the Friday DDD Event

Ok, this is probably more a twitter than a blog stuff, but despite the Domain Driven Design class that I am teaching together with Gojko Adzic, I am still up at night trying to refine my presentation for the DDD Exchange this friday in London.

It's growing in size, but time is fixed... hmm (sounds like some kind of deja-vu). We'll see...

Java IDE Day

Just a quick info post to inform about the Java IDE Day, which will be free, in Genova - March 10th 2008 and Rome - March 12th 2008 jointly organized by Genova Java Users Group and Rome Java Users Group. For more information, please follow this link. I can't say if I'll join or not, yet, but the panel seems pretty interesting anyway.

Tags: events, Java, Italy

Back from the Rome Java Day 2007

… So I am back also from the Java Day, in Rome. It was my first time ever, there. And I was also a speaker (and obviously I was late with my slides…) so I feel like I missed quite a big part of it.

I followed Luca Garulli's presentation about the Roma Framework, which in some ways is a competitor of Grails (the subject of my speech) . Roma has some interesting features, like the built-in user profiling module, and a fancy Echo2 based web interface.

Even if I was dead hungry when I had my speech, I manage not to think about the food and to keep the speech reasonably enjoyable. Anyway, Grails is such an effective tool and full of good ideas that, even in a 10 minutes demo, the audience caught the tools potential, and getting to the end was a piece of cake.

This was one of the closing event, after that we went eating out with all the staff end the speakers in a typical restaurant nearby, and had some good time together. This made the perfect ending for a nice day: despite being a free event and basically based on volunteers the result was absolutely good (thanks to Mara and all the staff that made a hell of a job), with more than 1000 attendees this year.

By the way, presentations slides are already online, and mine can be downloaded here

Tags: Grails, Events, Java

Back from the Agile Day 2007

Quite a busy decade, I just came back from the Italian Agile Day in Bologna, and I started preparing myself for the following Java Day, so I didn't have so much time left for blogging.

I was pretty satisfied with the Agile Day overall. The idea of "open" conference, with free subscriptions or Paypal donations, but no official sponsors gave the whole conference, a cozy feeling. Paying for lunch allowed for the best buffet ever seen in a techie meeting (and this is heavily related to the conference location).

I attended Tim McKinnon speech, and I liked the idea of the Star tasks. Too many times good ideas from the team are dropped or censored because "we've got to finish the job", ignoring possibilities to just finish earlier. Antonio Terreno presented eventually another type of "Star Ideas", like the definition of a meta-engine to handle all the workflow in the application Antonio's team was working on, but in this case it was one of Martin Fowler's on a ThoughtWorks project, so censorship it's a little bit difficult to apply. But basically the underlying problem it's the same: the balance between doing one thing over and over, or finding a way to do the same thing fast is often too biased towards simply doing. Making job not only tedious and frustrating, but also less productive.

I then was in a small Open Space lead by Luca Minudel, about self organizing teams, where he dropped some hints about where to learn more. Marines are an example of a self organizing team (you can't wait for orders when you are behind enemy lines), and surprisingly Luca showed a book I had at home about how to raise kids by saying "no". Actually, my wife is reading it. I'll be next shortly…

Francesco Cirillo from XPLabs pointed out that many teams are focusing too much on Agile practices, ignoring that fundamental skills are needed. He challenged the audience with his no-if campaign, backed up by T-shirts. I couldn't agree more. A vast majority of companies focuses on training only on the language side, asking for "Java Programming" or "Java Web Programming" and completely ignoring the OOP side. Unfortunately, agile practices, such as refactoring, require strong OO skills that neither university or a Java class will ever provide. As an architect, I suspect that Object Orientation is a complicated stuff, so we've got to acknowledge that we can't have complex systems completely OOP, but some procedural part will always be there. As an "agilist", I do agree that a heavy OOP shakedown is sometimes probably better that playing with the process.

Probably the most intriguing happening was the "Futurespective" held by Marco Abis, which was demonstrating a twisted way to handle project retrospectives by shifting them in the future. This creates a shared metaphor that reduces team and self-censorships allowing for more ideas and suggestions to emerge which was pretty effective. All was held with post-it with an Agile/"lo-fi" feeling, that actually eased spontaneous comments. "Paper Agile" was also one of the topics of Tim McKinnon's speech. This boosted some ideas in my mind, more about that in the next posts.

Apart from being in Bologna, and being cheap. It was absolutely a valuable experience. Given that half of my job is teaching, I have to look for all the possible chances to learn new things and this was definitely worthwhile. Thanks to all.

Tags: Agile, Events

Upcoming Events: Java Day 2007 in Rome

Java Day is approaching, the official site is up, and so is the program.
I'll be one of the speakers, talking about Grails

I've checked the official program of the day. And I'll be speaking around lunchtime. This is bad, because at that time I'll be incredibly hungry, and being hungry is the only thing that gets me angrier than bad code... At the last java conference in Milan I remember finishing late the morning session, and being the first afternoon session. So I had to skip lunch, really wanted my speech to and as soon as possible, just to have a pizza, a sandwich, or ... whatever. I'll be prepared this time.

Tags: events, Grails, Java

Agile day in Bologna

Tags: Agile, events