Software Artist

It’s always amazing to see how people find it hard to compromise, to nuance their opinions about things. And I’m probably the first one finding it hard. But when it comes to software practices, boy it’s annoying.

I was talking to a colleague of mine the other day, we were talking about unit testing and other best practices, and I boldly and shamelessly said to him: “I haven’t written any unit test on this project.” He stared at me with a bit of surprise, then with a bit of disappointment and finally with a bit of something like… disgust!

“What!? No tests, but why? How can you pretend to be a software architect if you don’t practice systematic unit testing?! Oh my god!…”

My first reaction was a furious urge to hit him in the face. But then I remembered myself a few years back, and I did nothing but leave him in his panic state and disappointment.

When I started working as a consultant, I had already written a few applications in engineering school, but strangely enough they didn’t really talked to us about software quality, agile methodologies and other modern best practices. We did formal programming, Prolog, we reprogrammed a memory management unit and wrote a compiler for a subset of the Java language, but nothing useful ;o).So when I discovered that some people were actually doing things in a rational way, to write better software, I was at the same time impressed and overwhelmed by all of that. Design patterns, continuous integration, test-driven development… I had never seen those in the real world, but I read a lot of books and websites and it seemed so nice that I came to think that it was the only way. And of course I was wrong.Fortunately, I started working on real-world projects, dealing with all sorts of external constraints. And no matter how hard I tried to impose “my” great software best practices, everybody looked at me like an alien because they just didn’t understand why I was talking about all this stuff. So when I was fed up with complaining about no one understanding what should be done, I realized that they were at least right to wonder. Why are things like TDD, CI or Design Patterns so important?

When you read so many articles explaining to you how to write unit tests, they all seem to assume that unit-testing is good in itself, as if it was some kind of axiom. But the truth is that no matter how good they are, writing them and maintaining them is a real pain, right? Lesson learned: when something is painful but good for you, there’s gotta be a better way. But a better way to what?

Because for me that’s the real problem: losing sight of the objective. Unit-testing and TDD are not good in themselves, they are just one best practice which allows you to improve the overall quality and robustness of your code. Why so? Because when you write your tests before the corresponding functional code, you considerably reduce the probability of a bug in the functional code. And robustness comes from the fact that whenever the implementation of a given functionality is modified over time, unit tests are there to ensure that the overall result will remain the same. Fine! But how about a better way?

First, let’s talk about reducing the probability of bugs. The main problem with code is that it’s written by us, human beings. And like it or not, we are faillible, we make mistakes, and the more we think we don’t, the more we actually do. Now rather than testing everything that we write, isn’t there a way to reduce the amount of code that we have to write? I can tell you that: there is a way!

I already see my colleague smiling if he reads this, because I’m so obsessive about this “way” that it becomes ridiculous. Take care, here comes the dirty words: code generation. Of course I’m not talking about the kind of code generation that just displaces the problem elsewhere, that is in diagrams that are the ont-to-one mapping of your code. I’m talking of a higher level of code generation, I’m talking of Model-Driven Architecture.

I know that many programmers don’t like it, have read many articles about and introductions to MDA without ever going further, mostly because programmers like to… program, not draw. And I can understand that. And if you’re in that situation, then you’re stuck with test-driven development… or any other “way” you can find. But if you like to have a better view of the big picture, if you want to accelerate your development and increase the robustness and quality of your code, then have a look at this (my favourite), this and this. You might be surprised.

Will it completely replace unit tests? I don’t think so, but it can create a situation in which you have so dramatically reduced the amount of code to test, that it can be interesting to wonder whether it’s still worth the effort.

My main point is, software best practices are nothing without the goal they allow you to reach, and forgetting that is the best way to stop looking for better ways, to stop innovation and progress.

When I was in college, we had a very talented physics professor coming directly from Scotland. And as I was in a French engineering school, I was more used to the French way of teaching science, with a lot of theories, demonstrations and proofs. So when I first saw this guy with all his experiments and observations, I thought the man was crazy but in the end, a fact was a fact, and I didn’t really care about why a specific equation applied. I just needed to be convinced it was true… until someone proves us wrong. That’s what science is all about.

Yet, some French scientists tend to be distrustful with the whole empirical stuff, probably because they can’t help thinking that it’s not because you observe something a 999 times that it’s going to repeat itself  a thousandth. So the best alternative we have is to prove it by theory, using mathematics and a lot of tools like theorems, matrices, integrals, etc., even though it’s far more difficult. And once it’s proven with theory, we can more or less take it for granted (provided our reasoning is valid).

Now what if I want to assert something about a piece of software? I can either create an experiment to show that it repeats itself: that’s a unit test! Or we can prove it theoretically using mathematics… Yes, there are formal languages that allow you to prove your programs. They’re very complex to use but hey, reliability has a price!

Fortunately for us, the metaphor stops where the specificity of our case begins, because with software, we have a third option. I won’t say the dirty word right now because I know you’ll run away. Let’s just consider that there are basically three types of testable code:

• code that is very simple to write but you’re testing it because you want to make sure that no one can break it with a wrong copy-paste or something like that
• business code which is a bit more complex, for which you have to write equally complex test code, with the risk of having correct code tested by wrong test
• all the rest, which in my experience is not as much as we think usually.

Based on my experience, I would tend to do the following:

• I write regular unit tests for ALL the rest.
• I don’t test complex business code, I do code review on it.
• For simple code, I shouldn’t even have to write it in the first place. If it’s so simple, then it can certainly be generated automatically by a generator I trust (that’s it! I said it!)

What’s your position really? Set aside the “testing-is-good vs. not-testing-is-bad” dichotomy, what would be your testing strategy? Do you use code generators to avoid testing boilerplate code?

Following my article about customer satisfaction as a third commitment, I read many articles and thought a little bit about this fixed-price thing. Actually it’s quite funny because the software development industry is about 30 years old at least, and it seems we are just starting to wonder why fixed-price projects don’t work with software the way it works in other industries. And I really think it all started with the Agile Methodology hype because now we’re trying to be pragmatic, we’re trying to embrace the constraints of software development instead of hiding them under the carpet. And one of those constraints is this damn iron triangle.

It’s funny to see how people hold on to it, including both customers and salespersons. It’s like they don’t dare to change it. It’s like they are afraid of changing this model. The problem is that each commitment in this triangle involves a substancial risk that no one is willing to take. But what I realized a few minutes ago after reading this very interesting article is that the reason why it’s really not working is because we’re definitely trying to force a cube into a triangle hole! There’s a commitment we’re constantly forgetting: quality! Whether you like it or not, quality is not something implicit, it’s not even related to the developers on the project. Every experienced developer knows that you can’t code with quality, you have to test it.

My father has been working in a car gearbox factory for over thirty years and I’ve worked there during a month as a summer job when I was a student. And my father is a gearbox tester: a box comes in, it’s set up on the bench, my father goes through first, second, third, fourth, fifth and back down, he listens to the noise that the gearbox is making, and if there’s a problem, it goes back to repair. He does that when the box is finished and the proportion of bad boxes is pretty low, because quality is enforced all through the production line by very careful processes that involve as less intelligence as possible. That’s one or the reasons why robots replace human beings in those factories. Because robots don’t think of their kids or dream of their wife. They just do what they were told to.

Do you really think that this kind of quality can be enforced on a software development project? Of course not! It’s far too intellectual and creative to allow such low-level considerations. And yet I’ve heard tens of times this stupid expression: “software process industrialization”. Come on!

The truth is that the only way to enforce quality on a software project is to test it permanently. To test it automatically, functionnally. To test robustness, scalability, reliability, security, performance. And of course you have to review a lot to ensure that the code remains readable, maintainable and flexible. Software quality can be all of that, and enforcing all those aspects is very time-consuming. It takes some time and some special resources as well. You can’t just forget about that.

So we’re left with four risks: scope, budget, resources… and quality, leading us to four commitments to force into our contracts, right? Wrong! Because there’s something that we’re forgetting: those 4 constraints are changing over time. So here we are, trying to force a irregular and mutating cube into a predetermined and unmodifiable triangle hole. And customers still wonder why it doesn’t work?

…and then you’ve got Management. That’s the main idea I remember from the excellent university presentation I attended this morning at Javapolis: the Zen of Agile Management, by David J. Anderson.

When the guy introduced himself and told us that he was working for Corbis, privately held by Bill Gates, a great deal of worry went through my mind because since the management fiasco with Vista, I don’t really see Microsoft as a reference in terms of agile project management. But then I remembered that Ken Schwaber has worked for Microsoft too. And it took Mr David only a few minutes to remind me that you can’t judge such a big company by only one of its mistakes, even such a big one.

First of all, it’s the first interactive presentation I’ve attended at Javapolis. Sometimes people can get a little disturbed when you ask them to bring their own content into the presentation. But at Axen, that’s something we are really promoting in our trainings, so we find it far worse when we do nothing. Here, there were 4 or 5 exercises that the audience were asked to do collaboratively. We gathered in groups, and discussed given topics and after 5 minutes, he came back to us with a microphone and we talked about what we had come up with. Interesting idea, especially for such a 3-hour presentation with such a big audience.

That was for the “layout”, now for the content.

There were really two parts in this presentation: first you’ve got Agile… and that was the main point of interest for me. First of all, he insisted on the importance of trust with knowledge workers, defining knowledge workers as people who know how to do their job better than their bosses do. And I love that definition. The thing is that sometimes it’s difficult to forget about the traditional role of a project manager, to remember that there are better ways to have visibility and control over the project than micro-management. And it’s even more difficult to limit yourself to just being a facilitator rather than a leader, to get out of the way when the team doesn’t need you and be there only when they do. That’s what a Scrum master is all about. And trust is obviously the basis for it to work.

I also saw a couple of very interesting usages of cumulative flow diagrams, reporting artifacts that I have never used before, but which give some interesting information. The main point there was that the best way to optimize your interventions as a Agile project facilitator is to consider a few metrics, but only the good ones, the best one according to him being the Lead Time, in other words the time it takes for a feature/task/use-case/whatever to go through your workflow from start to end. The thing is that if you implement things faster, you see bugs earlier so there are less of them, so you lose less time fixing bugs and you do things faster, and the virtuous circle goes. And how do you implement things faster? Simple! Do less in parallel. That’s what of the main things that I loved about this presentation: David destroyed many common beliefs, and at that moment, the way he explains this, it seems obvious. And it’s only when you think about it for a minute that you realize how most project managers do things the wrong way.

The second part of the presentation was more about making decisions at a higher level, analyzing metrics, identifying bottlenecks and reacting properly with surgical interventions. Sometimes I was a bit lost with all those numbers but it made it obvious to me that there should be more project managers at conferences like this. One of the exercises was about identifying the bottleneck in the project we’re currently working on, and what we would do about it now that we have some leads. I know exactly where the bottleneck is on my project, but what am I gonna do about it? That’s another question.

Let’s say you’re an Agile guy. You are pragmatic, and you perfectly understand the importance of added-value-driven development. You hate Big Design Up Front even more than his big brother “Big Requirements Up Front”. Why? Because it assumes that your customer knows exactly what he wants, and will never change his mind. And you know that it is ALWAYS wrong to assume that.

But let’s say you’re a contractor too, and at some point, before even starting to work, you need a contract. And where there is a contract, there are commitments.

Usually, the first one that comes into play is budget. That’s the big thing in the business world: customers want to have full control over their costs, and as long as your product is not online, your project is nothing but cost to them. Then of course, you can’t commit on budget when you don’t know what you will be asked to do for that budget. Or your customer has a strong time constraint, and tells you that your product has to be ready for such date. And that’s when excellent commercial skills start to become handy: budget, time and scope, those are three very difficult commitments to combine… and negotiate.

The problem is that if you’re just a good commercial guy, you end up committing on all of them because the customer is king, right? WRONG! Because you’re an Agile guy!

Imagine your contract as a bucket, and each commitment is some amount of water. If you start pouring budget and time in your bucket, then unless you’re very good at estimating technical constraints for a given functional scope, your bucket is very likely to overflow with scope water. And even though you know exactly what amount of functionality you can still pour into that bucket, it’s very likely that you will lose the market because other contractors won’t be as “good” as you are. And it’s the same with budget and scope first. Even if you’re good enough to estimate exactly how much time it will take, your customer is likely to be disappointed and to choose another contractor, who promises to do it in less time (even if he’s less realistic than you are). And it’s even more difficult when time and budget are strongly dependent on one another.

I heard someone in the back of the room: “And what about scope and time first?” Come on! Do you know many customers who can tell you “OK, we want to achieve that goal during that time, and we don’t yet about budget.” Well, there are such customers, there are such situations, but that’s more typical of a non-fixed price project. OK, so let’s say that you want to do fixed-price.

I guess the problem at that point is that there is always too much water for this small bucket, because of competition and because the customer doesn’t understand a thing about what you’re doing.

So, what’s the solution then? What’s the Agile Solution? Let’s quote the Great Martin Fowler, in his famous article about Agile Methodologies:

This doesn’t mean that you can’t fix a budget for software up-front. What it does mean is that you cannot fix time, price and scope. The usual agile approach is to fix time and price, and to allow the scope to vary in a controlled manner.

What does “controlled manner” mean? In other words, what third commitment can you use to just fill the bucket without losing the market?

Well, I would say it depends on your customer but I see at least two leads…

Continue reading »