Pols Consulting

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Luke Hohmann is in London and has agreed to come along to XTC on the 17th November to describe and play some of his Innovation Games.

I became hooked on Innovation Games when I read an early draft of Luke’s book. Customers can’t always tell you what they want because sometimes they don’t know themselves, so asking them to rank requirements or write stories might not be the best place to start. I’ve found using Innovation Games really helps with situations like this. Luke has lots of practical ideas for Agile Teams.

Talk starts at 7:30 on the 17th Nov at  Zuhlke Engineering‘s offices  (43 Whitfield Street, London W1T 4HD).

It’s free, but please signup on the XTC website so we get an idea of numbers.

Many thanks to Luke for doing this and Keith Braithwaite for kindly offerring the use of the Zulke offices to run this session (knowing Luke, there will be lots of noisy audience participation so our usual pub venue wouldn’t work too well).

I have always been a fan of teams sharing experience and knowledge within a company. It’s a great way to learn new techniques, find our how people have solved similar problems and discover who’s doing cool things in your organisation.

Today I witnessed a session on agile software testing that made be rethink this.

The key problem was that the person had been told to do it – it was not something he volunteered to do. He had no passion about the subject.

He started berating the audience for producing “crap”. Not the best technique for wining people over to your point of view!

It also appeared that he didn’t have much experience in using test driven development techniques (as he had some rather strange viewpoints).

Perhaps this is an indication of the corporate culture?

One of my clients was telling me about the problems that they are having with “Aspirational Planning“.  I thought this was an excellent description of the problems lots of organisations have with planning.

Then it slowly dawned on me that he was serious – they really do create “Aspirational Plans”.  They are fully aware that they don’t reflect reality (as they take so long to prepare), but the senior management love to spend lots of time and (other people’s energy) creating detailed plans of what may or may not happen one day.

The teams on the ground just roll their eyes when I ask about these plans. I’m going to have my work cut out on this one.

The old bambinos made me laugh with this suggestion.

An improvement on XP’s stand-up meeting, or scrum’s daily scrum is the New Bamboo Hang Up Meeting. You are only allowed to talk while performing pull ups from a steel girder. Not only does this keep the meeting short, but ensures the team reamins physically fit

David Anderson gave a talk about kanban at XTC a few weeks ago (11th March 2008).  David’s pictures os  projects using kanban struck a chord with me.

My current project is split across multiple locations (well, countries!) and we keep track of what we are doing in Jira.  Jira is great for tracking and chunking work into releases, but it wasn’t highlighting our process bottlenecks.  We’d been caught out a couple of times by juggling multiple streams of work and having too much work building up in UAT.

I emailed David’s slides around the team and asked people if they thought the kanban view of the project would be helpful. The technical people thought it was a great idea, but the business people couldn’t see the point – they already had this information to hand and did not think it would be worth the effort.

One of the guys (Paul Allton) did a little experiment using ruby to automatically create a kanban work-in-progress view of our existing jira data.  It’s gone through a few iterations, but this is what it looks like now:

Taking the kanban picture to the standup was fascinating.  The people who thought it was unnecessary suddenly became animated about the bottlenecks. This picture makes it very easy to see the state of the project and where people need to spend their energy.

The poor man’s kanban (because we’re not really doing kanban, and it would be much better if we had a physical board) has proved very popular with the team.

I enjoyed reading Keith Braithwaite’s post on tests and gauges. I like the way Keith uses the the metaphor of gauges in metalwork to describe Fit style tests:

You don’t work anything out from a gauge. What you do is apply it to see if the workpiece is within tolerance or not.  And then you trim off, or build a bit up, or bend it a bit more, or whatever, a re-apply the gauge. And repeat.

I agree with Keith.  The fit tests I write are business facing and for the benefit of the business customer.

On a recent project our customer got really enthusiastic about our fit tests, so much so that he got extremely upset when I implemented a story without a fit test.  He refused to let the system go live until we had the fit test in place.

The story in question was very technical and involved sending a particular xml message to an external system. We just couldn’t work out what a fit test would look like for this type of requirement.  Placing the expected xml message, with all it’s gory detail,  in the fit test wouldn’t have been helpful as it’s a technical artefact and of no interest to the business.  We could not work out what to do.  The customer was not around to discuss it, so I just went ahead and implemented the story (very naughty!).

The Customer was using the fit tests to show him what the system was doing.  In this case he wanted to be sure that we were sending the correct product information in the xml message.  To resolve the issue, I suggested that we have a Fit test that shows how the product attributes get mapped onto the xml message using xpath; although I still thought this was too technical for a business user.

We gave the Customer a couple of links to explain what xpath was so he could explore if this was a good solution for him. To my amazement, he was delighted with xpath (I now know who to turn to when I have an problem with xpath) and filled in the fit test.

The interesting bit for me (and why I’m posting it on the blog) is that as soon as he knew what the message looked like and how it was structured, he realised that it did not really support the business – we were sending information that was outside our scope of our work and should have been supplied by another system.  He was also sceptical about the speed the external team could add new products due to the complex nature of the xml.

Most agile people I tell this story to think we have the “perfect customer”!  I agree.

Steve Freeman had an interesting post in which he wondered if there was a tendency for geeks to be B-people?

Well, I hate going to bed and hate getting up in the morning. So it must be true! It could also explain why there is so much bad software in the city (they tend to start really early in the morning!)

As a follow up to my post on pair programming based interviews, I noticed this on a recent job advert:

In chess it is possible to place eight queens on a board so that no one queen can be taken by any other. Write a program to determine all such possible arrangements for all eight. I am not looking for a Chess Games Developer. I am looking for Java Developers who have the OOA and OOD skills to solve this problem….

Which one would you prefer (to receive if going for an interview, or to use to find a good candidate to work in your team)? A test that’s abstract and has nothing to do with the work involved, or one that that involves doing the job you are interviewing for?

I wonder if they have run this test on all of their existing staff to see if their is any useful correlation.

I noticed an interesting discussion on the IXP mailing list about pair programming with developers during an interview. I was surprised by the number of people who thought it was a bad idea.

I have done a lot interviewing for various companies and one of the best ways to find out the beliefs and values of a software developer is to look at their code. The best way to know what someone is like to work with is to work with them! This is why I really like pair programming interviews. It’s one of the best interview techniques I know.

Another nice feature of a pair-programming interview is the continual conversation you have with the candidate. It provides you with ample opportunities to ask sensible questions about the code you are writing. This gives the candidate a better understanding of why you are asking the question. There’s nothing worse than crazy interview questions that make no sense!

There are certain things you have to be aware of. You have to be very good at putting people at ease. You need to explain why you are running the interview like this. Some people get very nervous at an interview. You have to treat it as if you are pairing with a colleague. If people get stuck, you should help them out.

An interview is a two way process . The candidate also gets a much more realistic idea of what it would be like being in the team. They see what it’s like working with the team and experience the development environment first hand.

Jennitta Andrea has published a wonderful experience report in http://www.stickyminds.com/BetterSoftware called The Case of the Missing Fingerprint.

Well worth reading. Nice work.