David Hussman’s Keynote at Agile Bengaluru 2010 Conference titled: “Discovery and Delivery – Redesigning Agility”

David starts off saying “Agile communities know that the sooner they deliver a working product the sooner they can determine the value it provides. Yet while the ability to deliver frequently is valuable, if you don’t know where you are going, it is easy to iteratively not get there.”

In this talk David RI-examines the balance of discovery and delivery techniques in use by agile communities today. He specifically, discusses how can design thinking help agile communities discover deeper product value before iterative delivery begins. Also, after the first iteration, how can agile communities use design tools to keep the users alive and well and part of every story, acceptance tests, and iteration of development and delivery.

This post is moved to Industrial Logic’s Blogic.

The First Simple Design and Testing Conference in India is only 2 weeks away. There is lot of excitement, but we’ve not seen many position papers come in, so far. If you plan to attend, please submit your position paper on the conference wiki before 21st June.

When I start and finish my 3 Day TDD Workshop, I make it clear to the participants that they will have to deliberately practice, on small pet projects or toy code, in a safe-environment ( in-the-nets, if you will), every single day, for a few months (if not years), to get really good at TDD. Deliberately practice on their design, testing, breaking-user-needs-down, pairing, and many other skills using TDD before they can use TDD for prime time.

However, post the workshop, the participants are very excited and they ignore my humble advice. Next day they go back to work and start applying TDD on their production code. While this might look like a good thing (also making managers super happy too.) Over the years, I’ve realized that this pattern is actually destructive. Without the required amount of practice, the excitement soon dies out. And developers start falling back to old habits. Many times leaving a total mess behind.

I was surprised to see very few companies or teams continue and build on these practices, while 80% of them would only use parts of it and fall back. Every time I went back to a company and saw this, I would be very depressed. So I studied what the 20% did, which the 80% did not.

• Were the 20% way smatter or talented than the 80%?
• Did the 20% have better management support, less delivery pressure compared to the 80%?
• Or the 20% worked on simpler projects with no legacy code and so on?

What I found was the 20% quickly realized that they did not have enough skill to apply TDD on their projects. So they:

1. Watched Screen-casts: Watched experts do TDD on real projects. Good starting point: Let’s play TDD by James Shores or this stackoverflow answers

2. Open Source Projects: Studied and gradually started contributing small patches to open source projects, which used TDD. JUnit, Cucumber, JBehave, Fit, FitNesse, etc. are all great examples.

3. Small Pet Projects: Started TDDing small pet projects. Gradually practiced in a safer environment and once they acquired enough skill and confidence, then they start applying TDD on their production projects.

In addition to practicing on their pet projects, on their own, they also took 2 hrs every week (on a fixed day of the week), as a whole team, to practice Test-Driving (TDDing) the same problem. During these social-learning sessions, they practiced Pair programming too.

Logistics: Before the meeting, one of the team member sent out the problem to everyone. On practice day, the whole team gathered in a conference room/team area, picked their pairs, set aside 90 mins to TDD the problem. After 90 mins, few pairs did a quick code walk-thru and explain their solution with important decisions they made during the session. Followed by an open discussion. [I also recommend everyone checks-in their code in some common repository, so it can be used for reference by others.]

Sample Problems: Next big question is, what problems do we use for Test Driving?

Usually I recommend starting with simple programs like:

• Games – Tic-Tac-Toe, Snakes and Ladders, or any other board game.
• Utility Programs – Convert Roman Numerals to Decimals, Diff 2 files, IP to Country Mapping, etc

Once they practiced enough with simple programs, then they would take some large design problems from DesignFest and try to TDD them. The beauty of these problems is, they are quite big, can take up-to a week to finish it completely. Now we are talking something semi-real world, where

• We have limited time to solve/program a complex problem, which needs to be simplified.
• Try to find a relevant System Metaphor that can help you visualize the design
• Do a quick and dirty, low-fi Interaction Design to understand how the user will use this
• Identify and prioritize the crux/essence of the problem, figure out what is the most important, what will give us fastest feedback
• Further thin-slice the identified piece of functionality and
• Then try TDDing it.

This truly helped them get better at:

• Evolutionary Design
• System Metaphor
• Low Fidelity Interaction Design
• Thin Slicing
• Prioritization
• Exploratory Testing
• Divide and Conquer – Simplify large problems by breaking them down
• Eliminating Accidental and (to some extent) Essential complexity (Embrace Simplicity)

4. Code Smells Poster: Created a big poster with all the code smells listed on it. Paste the poster in their team area. Every time anyone from the team found a code smell in their project, that person gets up and adds a dot next to the code smell. This makes everyone more sensitive to these smells and increases awareness by making things visible. (Simple game mechanics.)

5. Refactoring Fest: Picked one of the pungent code smell from their code, and organized a RefactoringFest. Meet as a group (once a month.) Developers pair with each other and everyone tries to refactor the same code on their project to eliminate the specific code smell. [Make it clear that the code will not be checked-in after refactoring. Its a learning exercise and we need a safe environment where people don’t fear touching code. Also if you need some real world code snippets to try refactoring, check out my refactoring teasers.]

6. Blog/Diary: Started writing a blog/diary to capture their learnings and list of issue that got in their way of applying TDD on their project. Writing things down really helped them internalize their learning. [Many times when I’m stuck with a problem, I start writing things down, and the answer becomes obvious to me.]

7. Form a Book Club: As a group, they picked any TDD related book of their choice. Then they decided on a chapter and met over lunch once every week. Everyone came to the meeting after having read that chapter. They used the meeting time to highlight the key-takeaways, debate on the subject and if possible demonstrate it via code.

8. Hands-on Geek-Conference: They participated in a geek conference like Code Retreat, CITCon or Simple Design and Test Conference where they got to meet other practitioners and experts. Got an opportunity to pair with them and learn from their experience plus share your own experience. [Stop wasting your time on stupid marketing conferences.]

9. Teach: They taught a course on Unit Testing or Design Principles at an induction program for new employees or at a local user group. [Teaching is the best way of learning.]

Deliberately practicing this way for a few years to really appreciate the depth and benefit of TDD.

I’m planning the Simple Design and Testing Conference (SDTConf) for the first time in India around end of June.

SDTConf is:

• All Practitioner conference (No Jokers giving lectures)
• All Open Space (discussions and lots of hands-on workshops)
• Invitation Only Conference
• I’ve organized this conference in the US for the last 4 years.

I run into a lot of developers who say:

Our biggest problem today is that we don’t get stable, well-defined requirements.

Sure, as a developer even I would like stable, well-defined requirements. But what do these developers mean by requirements?

Detailed Use-cases with Class diagrams and Sequence diagrams. Actual UI Mock-ups and detailed Workflows. Clearly explained Architecture with Sample Code. Set of Test-Cases with Sample Data. Basically a pile of extremely well crafted, up-to-date documents.

When I hear stuff like this, I can’t control myself but ask:

Then, what would you do? Yeah, I mean, what will YOU DO? Can’t I replace you with a program?

Its high time you grow up Kid! Take the freaking ownership. Figure out what is a real user’s/business’ need, build the simplest possible thing that not only works but is also sustainable (maintainable). Of course, its unrealistic to expect one developer to know everything (let it be technology or business or soft skills). That’s exactly why we work in teams. Pull help when you need rather than expecting everything to be served hot to you.

Want Freedom and Growth? It comes with Ownership and Responsibility. Don’t forget to have Fun and Learn new stuff along the way.

Am I not clear yet? Read Who is a Developer?

At the Agile Coach Camp Goa 2010, we had a small side discussion about the difference between Use Case and User Stories. More importantly, if an Use Case contains many User stories or whether an User Story contains many Use Cases.

According to Mike Cohn, User Stories are smaller in scope compared to Use Cases.

Even Martin Fowler has the same understanding.

IMHO it does not matter. But it’s important to note that when some people refer to User Stories, they really mean the final stage of the User Story. Hence they always say, an Use Case contains many User Stories. In real world, I see User Stories have a life-cycle. They start out big & vague and gradually are thin sliced to executable User Stories. Mike Cohn referes to them as Theme > Epic > Story > Task.

I’m particularly influenced by Jeff Patton’s Work on this topic. Jeff highlights that User Stories really need to be at an User Goal level rather than an implementation level (at least when you start out). Else it would lead to big-upfront-design. Also most users won’t be able to relate to really granular stories. Highly recommend reading his blog on The Mystery of Shrinking Stories.

To understand the overall approach check out his User Story Mapping Slides.

Based on an open space discussion at GOOSgaggle, Rachel Davies wrote this interest post on Is Working Outside-In Always Better? (in the context of TDD)

This is one of my favorite topic. So I’ll freely express my thoughts here:

When I was doing my little “Avatars of TDD” experiment, I found TDD practitioners could take the same problem and approach it using either the Outside-In or the Inside-Out approach quite nicely. Obviously each person had their preferences. Also the tool used, the choice of programming language and paradigm influenced their technique quite a bit. I could see trade-offs in both scenarios. So I don’t believe in ONE best way.

Personally I don’t choose just one style. Depending on various criteria (listed below) I choose which approach I’m going to start with. I & most programmers I know go back and forth between Outside-In and Inside-out.

I tend to make the decision based on the following criteria (just a list of things that comes to my mind right now, I’m sure there are many more criteria):

• Familiarity with the problem – How clear the problem & its solution is.
• Stage of the feature/Project
• Prior Knowledge/Experience with the technology stack and implementation details
  • If its completely unknown, one might spike it out or build a throw-away prototype. Having the prototype in front of you, can influence which way you start.
• Whether your goal is to go breath first or depth first.
• Whether your goal is to get low hanging fruits first (easy first) or core first (highest risky items first)
• Whether you are driving the design or validating the design (test driven or test first).

Inside-Out and Outside-In also applies at a product level. Which massively influences our development style. For Ex: if the original idea about a feature/product is about a core feature that needs to be built. We could start building just the core idea, getting feedback and then slowly flush out the rest of the system as we build inside out.

It appears to me that, this topics needs a lot of context. Any discussion outside that context might dumb down the importance of this topic.

A lot of people think, if they can write some code, they qualify as a software developer.

IMHO don’t call yourself a developer if you don’t take ownership and responsibility for solving the overall, real business/user problem.

A good developer

• understands the overall problem and its context.
• has good problem solving skills (we are in the business of creative problem solving)
• has empathy for the users and is a user and business advocate.
• takes ownership by being a part-of the team and having a sense of belonging.
• makes investment into continuous learning & improvement

[Agile and Software Craftsmanship movements has made great strives in this direction. However some Agile folks don’t get it. We can’t draw a line and say this side is business and that side is development. Its ONE team working towards a common goal. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of teams who end up creating artificial boundaries between people wanting the software and people building it.]

Anyway, having the ability to just writing some code does not qualify you to be a developer.

Almost a year ago, I wrote something more insightful: Programming in the 21st Century

Also if you see their URL: http://www.mailchimp.com/maintenance_in_progress/we_are_down.phtml

Very intent revealing. Great thinking has gone behind this. Now this is what I call craftsmanship.