Wayne Allen's Weblog

XP/Agile Universe 2003: Day 3, part 2

XP/Agile Universe 2003 was held Aug. 10-13 in New Orleans, LA (NOLA). See my previous posts regarding day 1, day 2 and day 3.

During lunch Alejandro Goyen of Microsoft talked about how MS was going agile and the issues encountered. Most of the issues are typical of grassroots adoption (programmers don't want to test, pair, etc.) as well as some cultural ones (8,000 developers work on Windows Server). It is nice to see MS trying, but as one question pointed out, they are not asking for any help by those who have been there before.

Kent Beck was the final speaker of the conference. His topic was “Avarice: the Fifth Value?”. Essentially Kent is trying to pull XP over the early adopter curve into the mainstream. He sees the way to accomplish this by understanding better how XP might appeal to business. He points out that the 4 values of XP appeal to technologists, but not to business. So how to relate those values to business? He mentioned that maybe the values need to be modified or added to, but rejected that possibility. Instead he sees money as the feedback value of business. If a business gives you money in exchange for something, that is feedback that you are doing the right thing. If you give money to a business, you are telling them they are doing the right thing. I.e. feedback.

All in all the conference was great and I am looking forward to Calgary in 2004. Maybe I'll even have a paper to present.

Version Control: Decision Revoked

XP/Agile Universe 2003: Day 3, part 1

XP/Agile Universe 2003 was held Aug. 10-13 in New Orleans, LA (NOLA). See my previous posts regarding day 1 and day 2.

Day 3 started with “Uncle Bob” Robert Martin giving a talk on Aristotle's Error. If you haven't seen Uncle Bob talk, make sure you do, he is a great speaker. Aristotle's error is essentially about the fact that Aristotle (1200AD)observed several things and then “went meta” and invented things because they sounded right. Such as a 30lb rock falls 30x faster than a 1lb rock. This hypothesis could have been checked with a 5 minute experiment (observation) but wasn't until Galileo (1600AD). This story was Bob's warning that the XP community was running the risk of “going meta”. He warns that we need to continue to observe and not just hypothesize.

Next was an Openspace discussion on “Performance Management of Agile Teams”. This was centered around how to manage and reward individuals working in team environments. Much of the discussion revolved around dealing with “slackers” since the team will compensate for their lack of effort to achieve the goals. No real answers here, just that the managers should really know who is working and who is not. The second part of the discussion revolved around compensation/rewards at the individual level vs. the team level. Once again, no real answers, just experiences about how others are handling it (for better or worse). Essentially it is all subjective.

Just before lunch was Uncle Bob again. This time the topic was “Agile Architecture Principles, Patterns & Practices”. Some of the talk duplicated his earlier talk, but with a different emphasis. This time the focus was “what is our craft?”. Bob discussed the Principle, Patterns & Practices (PPP) that developed in each of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, & 00s. He also discussed the pathologies that emerged from each decade. Ultimately he proposes that the synthesis of PPP gives our craft definition in the following way:

• Practices guides daily work and detects problems.
• Principles diagnose problems
• Patterns solve problems

Bob finished up with the following observations:

• Practices are tools, not laws
  • pairing helps, so we do it.
  • test first helps, so we do it.
  • collective code ownership helps, so we do it.
  • but we are not constrained.
• Principals are tools, not laws...
• Patterns are tools, not laws...

Our craft is to use these tools to deliver.

XP/Agile Universe 2003: Day 2

XP/Agile Universe 2003 was held Aug. 10-13 in New Orleans, LA (NOLA). See my previous post regarding day 1.

The first session of the day was the Panel of Authors: Unit Testing Tips and Techniques by Gerard Meszaros, Shaun Smith, Jennitta Andrea, Rong Ou and Robert Wenner. Gerard and Shaun discussed their paper “The Test Automation Manifesto” where they discussed test automation patterns, test automation smells and discussed their experience writing automated tests. Rong Ou discussed his paper “Test Driven Database Development” where he describes the difficulties of testing database hosted functionality. The proposed solution of using an in memory database for tests is novel, but limited to applications using ANSI-SQL (i.e. no stored procedures, triggers, etc.). Robert Wenner discussed his paper “JNI Testing” where he described how he simplified the testing of the JNI layer.

Next was an Openspace that was a follow-up of Gary McGraw's security talk on day 1. We discussed some techniques for making code more secure, defining trust boundaries, and how XP practices might better address security needs.

The afternoon started with another Openspace titled “Agile Fusion Recap”. Agile Fusion was an event that Brian Marick & Rob Mee put together to bring together context-driven testers and agile programmers to build product together and learn from each other. The Openspace was meant to discuss the results of Agile Fusion and continue the dialog. The interesting points that came up were whether programmer/customer tests are really tests or something else and whether XP style testing is really enough. This is a fascinating topic and I'll be writing more about in the future. See Brian's blog as well.

I wrapped up the evening with another Openspace titled “Writers Roundtable”. The attendees were either published authors, or authors yet to be published (Micheal Feathers, Robert Wenner, Lowell Lindstrom, Mike Hill, Joshua Kerievsky and David Astels). An interesting discussion was how everyone got started writing, and almost everyone started because they were dismayed at the level of knowledge in their clients and co-workers and wanted to fix that. We also discussed writing work habits, when to edit, how to maintain your voice when editing, how to include beginner/advanced info without alienating the other, dealing with sample code in 1 or more languages, writing tools for book sized projects (i.e. not MS Word) and other sundry topics.

Openspace was new to me at this conference, but as you can see I spent a lot of time there on day 2. In fact I believe Openspace or something like it is required at a conference so that many can contribute their experience rather than just the speakers. Without Openspace the conference would have been marginally good. With Openspace the conference was excellent.

XP/Agile Universe 2003: Day 1

XP/Agile Universe 2003 was held Aug. 10-13 in New Orleans, LA (NOLA) and was a great experience.

Ivar Jocobson did the keynote on the future of process. I was impressed that Ivar is not a prescriptive process proponent. He is working toward the goal of having an invisible software development process, much like the process of driving a car is invisible. His current tack is to define (in a standards body) all the best practices along the various dimensions (technical, project mgmt, human, organizational, ...). Given this list of BPs, process definition becomes choosing all the BPs you need/want (if you believe him).

Ward Cunningham also had a keynote about the limits of XP. Essentially the limits come down to organizational values conflicting with XP values and teams dealing with specialized hardware (firmware development). He then demonstrated some techniques for pushing the limits back when dealing with hardware by writing an emulator for the hardware.

Gary McGraw did a session on how XP and software security do and don't mesh. His grasp of XP was sketchy in some places, but he had good questions. The best question was whether security could be refactored into a system, his opinion was that it is doubtful. He also pointed out that static code analysis could remove most of the security issues that get reported on the news and that continuous integration is a good insertion point for this technique.

J. B. Rainsberger, Ron Jeffries, and Rick Mugridge hosted a workshop on programmer tests. A goodly amount of time was spent discussing what exactly programmer tests are, with no resulting consensus. Next was the discussion of how or if programmer tests should deal with “hard“ tests such as concurrency, resource starvation, performance, etc. At that point small groups were formed to discuss other topics. I attended one talking about dealing with legacy code. We defined legacy code as code without programmer tests. We discussed the use of “learning tests“ to probe the functionality of legacy code and talked about techniques for modifying it. We also traded war stories on the worst legacy code we had to touch, JB one this one with 20+ singletons in one app. I then joined a group discussing the use of mock objects which turned into a discussion about when to use mocks vs the Object Mother pattern.

I then had a nice dinner with Ken Auer, Bret Pettichord, Gerard Meszaros and others where the conversation ranged greatly.

RE: Roadmap for SourceSafe and Beyond

Korby Parnell recently bloged about the VSS Roadmap. He notes that the big (HUGE) feature increase will revolve around Unicode support, web services, and better IDE integration for Whidbey (i.e. 2004 if no delays).

Now granted Korby has tongue firmly in cheek, but I can't wait that long for even these minor improvements (vss 6.0f?). Is MS even paying attention? Or do they think everyone will wait until they finally fix things?

So as previously noted we've move to SourceGear's Vault which supports Unicode & web services out of the box.