Tag Archives: agile

Two Angles to Sustainable Pace

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At the Scrum User Group South Africa meeting last night Marius de Beer did a really good talk about Software Development Practices.  It’s been a long while since I saw anyone attempt to draw so much from such widely spread corners of wisdom.  In one slide Marius mentioned the practice of Sustainable Pace.  Many take the view that this is about cutting back on working overtime and that it supports the principles of energised work, and work-life balance.  Marius did make the same point, and it is correct.
But there is another angle to Sustainable Pace.  As a developer, you need to build a rhythm, or flow.  It’s a cadence that you establish as you are writing code.  It’s a cadence that TDD helps you establish itself.  This cadence is also sustainable pace.  And one thing that kills this cadence and your pace in a flash is a mid-stream meeting.

In the panel discussion afterwards, there was a question at the end regarding ways to reduce the number of meetings which I just glossed over.  If you schedule meetings with developers for only the first hour in the morning, you not only reduce the number of meetings but, also, you don’t destroy the sustainable pace built up from the morning.

So, don’t think about pace as just working 7 hours a day, it’s about what you do in the 7 hours that matters.  Get the rhythm going and be anal about things that can kill your flow mid-stream; especially meetings.

Flowing in the Waves

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I just had a quick Google Wave experience with Willem Odendaal and the experience of seeing the other person type was a bit weird for both of us.
Lesson to both of us: Think before you wave!

Also, I have to remind myself to not think about waves as email, or tweets or instant messages. It’s just something else! And it has a different spin on the time dimension of communication.

I suspect that Google Wave will force us to be better at the way we communicate, how we express ourselves and the relevance of the content to the conversation.  I can imagine a wave growing over time that describes a story started by a domain expert with feedback from a developer and a nice cadence emerging between them.  It all is in one nice wave, with playback that tells you how you got there in the first place.  I wonder if this will have an influence on effectiveness of remote pairing?

I also have a feeling that if you’re a waterfall type of person, then waves will not have an impact on you.  It’s all about feedback and dealing with the changes, which is at the heart of agility.

Now I just need someone to wave with to try out a slightly modified development flow.

Trust Everything

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Trust has popped up in so many of my conversations recently.  It came up at home, at a new school that Lia will be starting next term, in the DDD course that I gave earlier in the month, in Peter Hundermark’s scrum master certification course.  And I got a one line email that said this.

The entire world lives on trust. Every aspect in life moves with trust.

The more I think about situations in life that will prove this statement false, the more it seems to hold true.  Even in design it holds true.  Your most fundamental architectural decisions are based on trust and the implementations of that architecture work because of trust.

It’s true for code too.  If you don’t trust the code on which you build or depend, then you might as well write everything yourself, and give up your place on your team.

I was thinking about the AOP with DDD tutorial that I will be giving at OOPSLA this year, and this trust thing came up.  Here again, aspects and the classes into which they get woven, need a trust relationship.  It may seem like a stretch to make that statement, but I think it holds true again.

So, how do you gain trust?  I am not sure, but I think you have give up something first.  Maybe you need to show your vulnerability first, then it becomes easier to let someone into your space.  Then, perhaps, they will let you in to their space too.  When ego walls are erected, then trust finds it hard to grow.  By ego, I don’t mean arrogance, I mean awareness of your self that you hide from others for fear.  Perhaps, it is only when you show your true interface, that the other will worry less about hidden agendas.

In code, trust lies in interfaces and types, not in implementations.  It’s really about trusting the implementation that makes types worthy.  When you trust the type and send it a message and it behaves as expected, then you trust it.  If you request something of an abstract type and the message was received by an instance of a subclass, then you expect the subclass to behave like the abstract type.  You don’t hope that it does behave consistently, you trust that it does!

Trust is tied in with ubuntu too.  You can’t be part of a community nor allow yourself to be defined and shaped by the people around you, if you can’t trust them.  I think ubuntu coding needs trust as one of it’s values.  It’s already a value in XP, and Scrum, and families.  It needs to be in teams, and organisations, and communities and nations too.