Thank you, 2011

It’s December. That means it’s time to write a long, rambling post looking back on the year. It’s been a very exciting and eventful year for me, so I’m actually appreciating having the time to do this.

Last new year's eve I tweeted the following. And I wasn't wrong.

2011 is gonna be amazing, you just watch!

I’ve changed jobs, moved from Düsseldorf to Hamburg, took part in a lot of conferences and events, organised a few things myself and in all of that met a huge amount of amazing people that truly inspired me. Thank you, everyone! It was an amazing year.

xtc Berlin

Late Tuesday evening, the night before the ALE conference started, I sat in the hotel bar of the venue talking to people who had arrived early. Looking around, I thought, "cool, it's like an extreme tuesday club in Berlin". Since then I've been thinking about what it would take to actually create something like this in Germany.

So what is the extreme tuesday club?

A regular London meeting (weekly) for Agile/XP/Kanban/Scrum newbies, practitioners, and experts. (*)

That's not very elaborate but I like that it casts a fairly wide net in terms of target audience.

There are already a lot of different software and agile related user groups in Berlin and I like what I've seen of them so far. But each of these only cater to a specific topic or technolgy.

I'm looking for something less formal. Have a beer, talk to people about what they're working on, share war stories, cross-pollinate new ideas, ask for help or give help, if wanted. I would hope it would be as inclusive as possible. So, newbie or expert, programmers, PM/POs, design people, start-uppers, whatever - as long as you care about what you're doing and want to talk with people about it, it should be fine.

I did a little open space session at ALE on this and there seemed some general interest and I said I would just try and get this rolling and just see what happens.

Someone suggested the Cafe 100 Wasser as a pub to go to. And that's where I'll be, this Tuesday from around 8pm onwards. I'd be happy for you to join me. If you do plan to come, please let people know on Twitter.
[we've since changed pubs around quite a bit. Twitter is probably the safest bet to find out where people are. We're now usually at the Prater Garten in Prenzlauer Berg]

Ignoring long-term planning and estimating

I got on the agile bandwagon fairly late considering people are now celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the agile manifesto. But it's been a good 2 years now and I feel like it's a good time to sum up some of my experiences. And I'll start by writing something about estimating that's recently been on my mind a lot.

I get the impression that a large part of what people use to sell Scrum to managers is the ability to get better estimates and more reliable long-term planning. That tracking velocity and assigning storypoints to your features somehow enables you to determine what exactly you can release half a year from now. I don't think that's entirely honest. You still have no way to reliably predict accidental complexity; and team fluctuation, shifting priorities and delays in external processes that you depend on will still leave you guessing when you'll have that big new release ready.

The constant feedback obviously helps to at least be able to react to some of these obstacles. A looming deadline works wonders to get stakeholders to prioritize the features they want implemented. But I think all of this is looking at agile development from an old-fashioned angle, that is likely to be more frustrating than necessary.

Those big releases and big new major versions of your products just don't make all that much sense if you're not actually burning your software to disks to be put onto shelves. If you have a new little feature that will help your customers have a better experience using your product why wait to release it? If that feature actually doesn't help your customers, why wait to find out about it?

If you're a long-term agilante (agilista? agilero?), that is probably pretty obvious. But personally, I don't think I really grasped the power of that until recently. Really taking the idea of short iterations with incremental changes to its conclusion is not something I've seen much of in the time I've been developing software. You may read about some of the big poster-child internet companies working that way and increasingly, little start-ups seem to have a lot of success with it. But once companies get to a certain size they seem surprisingly eager to hold back on actually releasing their software.


And, with that said, I have decided that I do not care about estimating any more. I do care about the people on the team, I care about splitting items up into fine-grained tasks [edit: 'features' is probably the better word]. I might even care about tracking time spent on tasks to get feedback on whether we've become stuck on something. I care and take pride in the quality of the code we deliver. I care about people using that software and the feedback they can give. I don't care about dates in the future that may as well be arbitrary.

I conveniently ignore any kind of marketing needs or grand c0mpany strategy. Because, really, why shouldn't I? If we can consistently release new features in a short timeframe and the quality is good, why shouldn't the company strategy adapt to this rather than the other way around?

This idea is fairly fresh in my mind and I'm really looking forward to seeing what it develops into. I'm pretty sure I've missed a few things. And I'm curious what other people think about this...

Edit:
And to aptly prove the motto of this blog, Naresh Jain wrote about this two ears ago. Well worth reading.

Code Retreat - was ist das?

Edit: es hat sich viel getan. Code Retreats finden mittlerweile ziemlich häufig statt. Auf der Seite der Softwerkskammer findet man mehr dazu. Die Veranstaltungen sind immer kostenlos und es lohnt sich auf jeden Fall, mal teil zu nehmen.


Vor kurzem habe ich an einem Code Retreat teilgenommen (Leo gibt für "retreat" u.a. Klausurtagung, was das ganze einigermaßen trifft) und war davon sehr angetan. Ich plane gerade, selbst einen solchen Event zu organisieren und im Zuge dessen lohnt es sich einmal ein paar erklärende Worte auf deutsch zu schreiben.

Ich bediene mich dabei sehr ausgiebig bei dem was Corey Haines und andere schon zu diesem Thema geschrieben haben. Am Ende dieses Artikels verweise ich auch noch auf einige weiterführende englische Seiten.

Was ist das Problem?

Im normalen Arbeitsalltag wird kaum Zeit darauf verwendet, seine Fähigkeiten zu verbessern. Man nimmt vielleicht hier und da an Schulungen teil oder arbeitet sich gegebenenfalls in neue Frameworks ein. Aber wir arbeiten nicht gezielt daran unsere Arbeitsweisen zu verbessern oder unser bestehendes Know-How zu vertiefen.

Und wenn wir dann unter Zeitdruck stehen, fallen wir zurück auf die Techniken, die wir beherrschen, auch wenn wir wissen, dass es bessere Möglichkeiten gibt. Das klassische Beispiel hier sind Software-Tests. Es ist nahe liegend, dass ein Projekt mit hoher Testabdeckung mehr Sicherheit beim hinzufügen von Änderungen bringt. Damit aber sowohl die eigentliche Testabdeckung, als auch das Durchführen von Änderungen mit einem vertretbaren Aufwand erreicht werden können, braucht es einiges an Erfahrung und Übung. Und wenn man diese Erfahrung nicht hat und der nächste wichtige Termin naht, ist es dann doch einfacher, die Tests zu ignorieren und direkt drauf los zu programmieren.

Einige Leute bringen an dieser Stelle auch gerne den Vergleich zu Musikern. Genau wie diese ihre Fingerübungen machen, kann man auch als Entwickler sein Können trainieren. Statt dessen geben wir aber jeden Tag ein Konzert. Das hat natürlich auch seinen Wert und man wird auch nicht vermeiden können sich hier und da zu verbessern. Man kann sich wahrscheinlich auch eine ganze Weile diesem Trott hingeben. Aber irgendwann nimmt einem die Eintönigkeit dann doch die Freude an der Arbeit.

An dieser Stelle kann man auch gleich einen Strich ziehen. Wer mit seinem Können zufrieden ist und sich damit wohlfühlt, sollte wohl nicht weiter lesen. Zufriedenheit ist schwer genug zu erreichen. Lernen sollte freiwillig und aus eigenem Interesse passieren.

Was kann man tun?

Wenn man sich bewusst die Zeit nimmt, gibt es eine Menge Dinge die man tun kann. Eine gute Möglichkeit, die vor kurzem in der GOOS-Mailingliste erwähnt wurde ist, sich gelegentlich einfach mal eine halbe Stunde Zeit zu nehmen, bestehenden Code zu verbessern. Dies sollten wirklich nur kleine Änderungen sein und man sollte sich an seine Zeitvorgabe halten. Ist man nach dieser Zeit nicht mit dem Ergebnis zufrieden, verwirft man seine Änderungen. Da dies ja primär als Weiterbildung zu sehen ist, sollte man gar nicht davon ausgehen wirklich Code zu committen. Und wenn dann doch eine Verbesserung dabei heraus kommt, umso besser!

Mehr und mehr finden sich auch Code Katas im Netz. Hier werden überschaubare Aufgabenstellungen wieder und wieder gelöst, um in ähnlichen Alltagssituationen praktisch reflexartig darauf reagieren zu können. Diese sind sowohl ein guter Weg selber zu üben, als auch interessant anzuschauen. Es gibt eine ganze Reihe von Leuten, die freundlicherweise ihre Lösungen im Netz bereit stellen, zum Teil auch als Screencasts. (http://codingkata.org/ http://www.katacasts.com/ http://codersdojo.org [Link aus dem Kommentar hinzugefügt]) Gerade für Einblicke in neue Programmiersprachen sind konkrete, bekannte Beispiele sehr hilfreich.

Überhaupt ist natürlich die Zusammenarbeit mit anderen wahrscheinlich die beste Möglichkeit, neue Dinge zu lernen.

Darüber hinaus gibt es natürlich auch noch andere Dinge. Unter anderem halt Code Retreats, sonst würde ich ja nicht diesen Artikel schreiben.

Was sind jetzt also Code Retreats?

Code Retreats folgen einigen relativ einfachen Regeln:

• Aufgabenstellung ist Conways Spiel des Lebens
• Mittels pair-programming und, nach Möglichkeit, test-getrieben, versucht man das Spiel zu implementieren
• Das macht man für 45 Minuten. Danach wirft man den geschriebenen Code weg. Keine Backups, kein committen in ein Repository. Einfach nur löschen
• Man nimmt sich ein paar Minuten Zeit, um in der Gruppe darüber zu reden, was man gelernt hat
• Man fängt wieder von vorne an (6-7 mal)

Da es eigentlich nicht möglich ist, innerhalb von 45 Minuten fertig zu werden, braucht man gar nicht erst zu versuchen, Abkürzungen zu nehmen und kann sich nur darauf konzentrieren, "perfekten" Code zu schreiben. Es macht auch nichts, für einen Durchlauf eine komplett neue Herangehensweise auszuprobieren (z.B. keine else-Blöcke, keine primitives, nur Funktionen/keine Objekte, keine Methoden mit mehr als zwei Zeilen, ...). Egal was man probiert, man riskiert im Durchschnitt nur 22,5 Minuten.

Es geht ganz klar nicht darum, die Aufgabenstellung zu lösen, sondern auszuprobieren, wie man anders an die Aufgabenstellung heran gehen kann. Insbesondere eignet sich das Format auch gerade dazu test-getriebenes Entwickeln zu üben.

Für mich war außerdem auch sehr interessant zu sehen, dass der entstandene Code nur einen Teil des Produkts der 45 Minuten ausmachte. Das entstandene Wissen über die konkrete Problemstellung brachte jeden neuen Durchgang deutlich näher an das Ziel als den Vorherigen.

Weiterführendes

• http://coderetreat.com/how-it-works.html Eine kurze Beschreibung des Ablaufs eines Code Retreats
• http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/2011/01/on-goals-of-coderetreat.html Ein etwas weiterführender Beitrag zu den Zielen. Enthält auch ein Video mit der Einleitung, die Corey Haines zu Beginn eines Code Retreats vorträgt
• http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Software-Craftsmanship-Beyond-The-Hype Die Präsentation von der QCon 2010, durch die ich auf das Thema gekommen bin
• http://vanryswyckjan.blogspot.com/2010/11/code-retreat-ghent.html ein Erfahrungsbericht
• http://financialagile.com/reflections/8-software/38-coreys-code-retreat und noch einer

Remember back then?

...back in 2010? That was a nice year. I have to say I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There were some setbacks, first and foremost the departure of two colleagues whose knowledge and support I valued very highly, who left for new cities and new challenges. But such is life. But I learned a lot this year and got to make a lot of interesting experiences and meet a lot of interesting people.

It was a long year and this will be a long post. It will be self-indulgent and most likely only for my own benefit. So there.

First off, I finally took the time to finish reading Domain Driven Design, or "the great blue book in the sky" as I heard someone (probably Neil Robbins) call it. It was very timely as we were just in the process of redoing a fairly large part of our application. It gave me the confidence to split up the refactoring along the life cycle of our main entity, transforming it along the way. That way we were able to concentrate on the first step in the life cycle without having to change everything down the line, too.

Said refactoring was also the first time I remember of deliberately doing "refactoring toward deeper insight". The experience of taking what we had learned about the domain in the previous year and applying that to our domain model was surprisingly rewarding. The end result was a lot simpler and closer to how people actually worked. It gave us the opportunity to introduce new functionality that would otherwise have been extremely cumbersome to implement.

The whole process was not without its flaws though. We underestimated the amount of code we had to change, even with the reduced scope. Especially the front-end proved that good UI design is very hard and time-consuming. In hindsight we probably should have spent more time on considering how the changes might have been divided further into smaller, releasable pieces. In the end we were left with a long time between deployments and suffered all the communication issues that missing regular feedback loops can give you. It was still a good learning experience and it showed me how much I appreciated our previous, shorter deployment iterations.

In march I went to QCon, which I wrote about before. The inspiration I got turned out to have a fairly lasting effect. To get back to the kind of enthusiasm I had when I started out and to be able to really consciously enjoy coding again is something I am extremely grateful for. This wasn't necessarily all due to QCon but it encouraged me to be more introspective about how I work. In particular it had me putting more effort into getting better at TDD. At some point the whole "using tests to drive out the design" bit finally clicked and it made me a happier person.

There is still a lot left to improve though. Most of our bug-fixing work is now purely front-end stuff, ironing out layouting issues and Javascript behaviour across different browsers. But we're getting there. Writing jasmine tests is something I'll hopefully get better at and which integrates well enough into our builds. My colleague Benjamin put an amazing amount of work into getting a useful Selenium tool-set and tests for us. The environment for these is sadly still somewhat brittle but hopefully that will get better with Selenium 2.

We've made a lot of progress in automation anyway. Our test-environment gets automatically redeployed by Teamcity now. These are still very tiny baby-steps towards continuous delivery that conveniently ignore some of the larger issues like schema evolution and the need to switch to a DVCS but at least I think it's stumbling in the right direction.

I was also happy I got to help in making collaboration with our designers on different teams a little easier. Working on a bunch of projects in parallel while trying to consolidate on a consistent look & feel is something that has taken even more effort than I expected. And since look & feel is usually the most immediately apparent contact point for stakeholders, it is always under scrutiny. I underestimated that, too, even though I really should know better. All the more reason to push for further front-end test automation.

Later in the year our team worked on a new project and decided to base it on JSF 2, mostly so we could get the know-how. The other teams were already using it and it seemed reasonable to look for common ground there. I did learn a lot, but I didn't get much done. Having no one on the team with any prior experience meant we had to go through all the little beginners mistakes you get when you stumble into some new technology. Some of those early issues just rubbed me the wrong way which made me get increasingly frustrated. And I'm afraid my growing resentment probably didn't help the mood of the team.

This did bring up a few interesting questions about the effectiveness of aiming for a heterogeneous development environment. Questions which I don't really have answers for but still could ramble on about for hours. So I should probably put that in another post some day.

In November I was lucky enough to take part in a Code Retreat. Having been intrigued by that ever since I saw Corey Haines talk about it at QCon, I jumped at the chance to try it out. This, too, is worthy of its own post and so I won't go into details here. Suffice it to say that I liked it a lot and plan to organize a code retreat in Düsseldorf, to show it to more people.

(As an aside, I just stumbled over a google result for a code retreat in Wroclaw which brought a smile to my face. I always enjoyed my time there, when I visited there for another company, back in another time. And I always had a very high opinion of the people and their programming skills there. So, I guess this fits quite well.)

After Code Retreat Ghent came Google Developer Day Munich. It was nice to meet my now ex-colleague Sebastian again. And same as in Ghent, I was glad for the opportunity to chit-chat with other people in our profession. It never hurts putting things in perspective and hearing what others are passionate about. And of course, rambling about things I'm passionate about. (Something I find myself doing more of these days, I think. But maybe it was just the free beer provided by Google.)

The effort Google puts into these events was impressive and I really liked how non-partisan the speakers were. They openly acknowledged the existence of competitors (foremost Apple) without looking to discredit or awkwardly ignore their work.

I wasn't looking for anything in particular since my work currently targets neither HTML 5-capable browsers nor mobile phones, but at the end of the day I felt more sad about that fact. I wasn't aware how exciting some of the HTML 5 stuff is and I'm really looking forward to that becoming the norm and what people will be able to do with it.

Well, that about does it for two-oh-one-oh. Remaining, then, is the goals I've set myself for 2011 (I'm not yet convinced of spelling it 20!!).

• Organize a code retreat, possibly making it a recurring event
• Look for more of these opportunities to learn from others
• Subversion is a nightmare to merge stuff with and I'm eager to switch to git but it would mean having to get used to a different workflow for everyone in the team. Maybe I'll start with a git kata.
• Follow through on all the "I should really write a blog post about that"
• Write more posts in german. 
• Read GOOS, finish reading REST in Practice, glance over Continuous Delivery.
• Try to solve more problems event-driven

Hmm... last and possibly least I just realized that I also started writing on this blog (and on twitter) this year. I guess I'll keep that up.