Author: Craig Smith

Episode 5: Day 1 at Agile 2011 Salt Lake City

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The Agile Revolution's avatarThe Agile Revolution Podcast

Agile 2011Continuing his daily podcasting triumph Craig Smith gives us his quick daily update direct from the Agile 2011 Conference at Salt Lake City.

TheAgileRevolution-5 (8 minutes)

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AAFTT Workshop 2011 (Salt Lake City)

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Agile AllianceThe Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Workshop (AAFTT), held the day before the Agile 2011 conference in Salt Lake City, was once again one of the highlights of the conference. Organised by Jennita Andrea and Elisabeth Hendrickson, it was as always a wide variety of participants with a passion for testing and testing tools. Here are my notes from the day held on August 7, 2011.

From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011


Energy Kickoff & Networking

The session was facilitated by Ainsley Nies, and all of the official session notes are stored on the AAFTT wiki: http://aaftt.agilealliance.org:8080/display/AAFTT/agile2011.

From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011

We started the day with some networking and sharing some areas of passion. Some of these included:

The theme of the AAFTT is: “Advancing the state of the art and the practice of Acceptance Test Driven Development”.

From AAFTT 2011

Ainsley started walking the circle to explain the day and how open space works, but frankly it make me feel a little dizzy! She went on to explain that Harrison Owen invented the open space idea as he noticed the real content at conferences was the passionate conversations. The rules of open space are:

  • whoever shows up are the right people
  • do not hang on to pre-conceived ideas
  • it starts when it starts
  • discussion does not need to be over until it’s over
  • wherever it happens is the right place
From AAFTT 2011

The law of mobility and responsibility (also known as the law of two feet) is if you are not learning or contributing where you are, go some place where you will. Also, butterflies and bumblebees cross pollinate ideas.

From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011

Finally, we were warned to be prepared to be surprised.

From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011

Developers are testers and testers are developers – how do we dissolve and combine the roles 

This was the first session that I attended.

From AAFTT 2011
  • there are two mindsets – offence and defence, testers are defence
  • job is not to find defects but to prevent defects – build quality in
  • define quality and what does it mean to us
  • startups don’t often have the problem – multiple skills required
  • what is the biggest impediment – are we missing the skill
  • there is no team of quality anymore – drive quality through the organization
  • functional testers tend to exploratory test and drive from the UI, technical analysts tend to multiple-skill
  • you need to have a team focus and a product focus
  • don’t start with practices but start with a common vision (eg. zero defects)
  • fear of losing identity if you dissolve roles
  • understanding the historical roles sometimes helps understands why things are the way they are
  • need time – Lisa Crispin mentioned that in her company they were going out of business because the system was not good quality, so management were smart to support the initiative
  • helps if everybody on the team has experienced the entire value chain and needs to understand the value of everybody’s piece of the chain – tendency to optimise the piece of the chain you understand
  • developers often underestimate the precision of data and scenarios and developers underestimate the difficulty of some requests
  • personality issues often get in the way
  • mostly about having the right people – need to let some people go
  • we assign labels to roles which create barriers – break down on teams but need to break down at the HR level
  • payroll is also an issue – need to compensate for people taking on more responsibility
  • need to put queue limits on the testing queue to drive behaviours
  • pairing with developer if they do not understand the scenarios
  • some people have the questioning mindset, some have the practical focus – need both to make sure you ship a quality product
  • mini waterfall problem – long tail feedback loop, change workflow that developer needs to work with tester, avoid lean batching problem
From AAFTT 2011

ATDD Patterns

Jennitta Andrea led this session about the work so far in this space:

Last Mile Tools

Elisabeth Hendricksen led this session on tools that are attempting to solve the problem at the last mile.

From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011
  • NUnit – Liz Keogh – were using Fitnesse but added another level of complication, wrote a DSL that separates tests to make it easier read, WiPFlash is the automation tool, examples are on the website, can call the fixtures from another testing tool like Fitnesse, capture scenarios on a wiki first to get the best out of the automation tool
From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011
  • SpecFlow – Christian Hassa – similar to Cucumber, scenarios written as steps that are bound to execution, uses Gherkin parser (this is a plus as a number of tools use this)
  • SpecLog – maps of your product backlog, capture results of collaboration with the business (Jeff Patton’s story maps), data stored in a single file, stories are initially mapped to a feature file but ultimately get linked to a feature tree
  • SpecRun is under development currently, not bound to SpecFlow or test runner/execution, currently Windows only
From AAFTT 2011
  • Limited Red – Joseph Wilk – uses the probability of failure to run those tests first in Cucumber, can then get failure statistics at a feature level, working on a refactoring tool at the moment
  • Relish – publish Cucumber features to a website
From AAFTT 2011
  • The Smallest Federated Wiki – Ward Cunningham – JSON for data scrubbing, thin columns to display well on mobile, refactoring is the number one edit so allow it to drag and drop refactor, fit for any analytic or outcome-oriented endeavor, sponsored by Nike, under very early development, meant to take spreadsheet data to the next level
From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011

Business Rules

Mary Gorman led this discussion.

From AAFTT 2011
  • business rules – conference website has rules, such as group pack for 5 registrations, what happens to the sixth person, what if someone pulls out
  • need to capture these to describe what our system does
  • business rules manifesto – Mary gives a copy to everyone she work with
  • separation of concerns – a rule is separate from the action which makes the process more brittle and more difficult to test
  • rules are a form of requirements and live beyond the building
  • one process is to extract the rules of a legacy system and then the regression tests – code archaeology
  • the business does not always know the rules of the system or how they got there – rules get added to the system over time or evolve and documentation is unlikely to get updated
  • one insurance company had spent $100 million dollars to bring in a business rule engine, returned investment in two years due to being able to be able to look for conflicting rules
  • put analysis of rules in the hands of developers for way too long
  • simplest part of business rules is having a glossary
  • rules engine enables our rules in productions, and use examples to ensure the engine works correctly
  • testing could look like this – given this data when these rules are applied then I expect this output
  • you need both rules and examples to test them – you need enough examples for now, need to be different paths, decision points, infliction points rather than different values
  • examples are not as expressive as arithmetic, but they are not as understandable
  • lots of rules that we do not think of as business rules because they are baked into the process eg. security access, database schemas
  • “business logic is not” (Martin Fowler)
  • you can’t read English as if it were rules, so we need to use examples
  • the worst systems are the ones that do not have a manual override, humans are usually the best at determining this
  • lots of business rules change due to jurisdiction
  • something will always fall to the bottom – rules need to be valued on risk and value – where is the tipping rule
  • rules are the expression of intent
  • Mars issue – crashed, six week window too costly to fix
  • guts to keep it simple – reporting system (Ward Cunningham) – resisted urge to put in a formula system, wait for requests from users, got 6 requests, sold system based on simplicity of the system
From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011

Other Sessions

As with any conference, there are always sessions you would have liked to have got along to.

Richard Lawrence led a discussion on Static Analysis for Gherkin which turned into a discussion on design patterns for Cucumber.

From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011

George Dinwiddie led a discussion about conversations between roles:

From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011

My mate Jason Montague led a session on Building Conditions Conducive for ATDD Adoption.

From AAFTT 2011
From AAFTT 2011

Closing Circle

We shared some takeaways in the closing circle, he were some that stood out at me:

From AAFTT 2011
  • issues with dealing of people was a theme
  • what are good ways to express a large amount of test data
  • challenge to get corporations over the hump to release data, plus have good tests and examples around the rules
  • testing needs to be a nation, not just a community
  • it’s time we got more respect in our organisations, it’s time we show more respect to those we work with
  • teams need to dependent on the production of the build
  • federated wikis could help solve the test ownership problem

As for me, my comment was the day had renewed my energy again. ATDD is hard, and as a community we need to try harder.

Podcast

Finally, I recorded a short audio podcast for The Agile Revolution wrapping up AAFTT.

Episode 2: Squeeze your revolutionist today

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The Agile Revolution's avatarThe Agile Revolution Podcast

SqueezeA fun filled podcast presented by Craig, Tony and Renee covering the following topics:

Quotes:

“I don’t program software anymore, I program people”

TheAgileRevolution-2 (43 minutes)

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Specification By Example (Book Review & Summary)

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I was lucky enough to be a reviewer on Specification By Example by Gojko Adzic, and the final version was recently released to print by Manning. And I was stoked to see not only my name in the acknowledgements, but that my quote made it to the cover of the book. The following is my brief review and notes from the book.

Review

“I love this book. This is testing done right.” That is my quote on the back cover of the book, and I meant every word of it. Having been a quality advocate in the agile space for a few years now, this is the first book I have read in a long time which had me nodding my head all of the way through, as it resonated with my ideas on how development teams need to reconsider specifications and testing.

The book starts out by summarising why specification by example is so important and outlines some key patterns for success and then, through examples throughout the book, steps through the patterns pointing out the warning signs along the way. The key steps are to ensure the culture is fit, then approach specification in a collaborative manner, use examples and automate and finally evolving a living document / specification.

I really appreciated the fact that the examples were not just the run of the mill greenfield Java web applications that are used in most books. There is a good sampling of different organisations, most of which are using this technique on existing legacy applications on a variety of different platforms. The book is an easy read for the entire team, which means it can (and should) be required reading for the developer, tester, analyst and project manager. I have encouraged many of my teams to take a look at the book, and a couple of my colleagues have indicated this book helped convince and reinforce why this approach is so valuable.

My only concern when reviewing was the fact that the title of this book may not standout to testers and developers (not perhaps as much as Acceptance Test Driven Development or ATDD might). Currently the community has a number of similar approaches with similar names, although I must acknowledge that the specification by example tag has grown on me over the last few months.

The book does not expend much effort talking about tools in this space, by design, I think this fact makes the book more readable and accessible to a wider audience, but that said it suggests to me that there is still a gap for a good text that matches specification by example to particular tools like Concordion, Fitnesse and the like.

Overall, this book is a definite must read for any teams (particularly agile teams) who are trying to balance or find a decent approach to specifications and testing. It is a good balance of patterns and real case studies on how testing and specifications should be approached in an agile world. It would make my list of Top 5 must read testing books and Top 10 must read agile books. And now I know what the proper name is for the cats eyes that are embedded in the freeway!

Finally, I had some other suggestions for summaries for the book that did not make it to cover, but they are just as relevant of my feelings about the book:

  • “One of the best Agile related books I have ever read. Buy it, read it, recommend it to your colleagues.”
  • “This book sums up the right way to attack requirements and testing while delivering to your customer. A must read for all agile teams.”
  • “I loved this book. I could not stop raving about it to my colleagues. It’s testing done right”

Summary

Here are my key notes from the book:

  • a people problem, not a technical one
  • building the product right and building the right product are two very different things, we need both to be successful
  • living documents – fundamental – a source of information about system functionality that is as reliable as the programming language code but much easier to access and understand
  • allows easier management of product backlogs
  • proceed with specifications only when the team is ready to start implementing an item eg. at the start of an iteration
  • derive scope from goals – business communicate the intent and team suggest a solution
  • verbose descriptions over-constrain the system – how something should be done rather than just what is to be done
  • traditional validation – we risk introducing problems if things get lost in translation between the business specification and technical automation
  • an automated specification with examples, still in a human readable form and easily accessible to all team members, becomes an executable specification
  • tests are specifications, specifications are tests
  • consider living documentation as a separate product with different customers and stakeholders
  • may find that Specification By Example means that UAT is no longer needed
  • changing the process – push Specification By Example as part of a culture change, focus on improving quality, start with functional test automation, introduce a new tool, use TDD as a stepping stone
  • changing the culture – avoid agile terminology, management support, Specification By Example a better way to do UAT, don’t make automation the end goal, don’t focus on a tool, leave one person behind to migrate legacy scripts (batman), track who is/isn’t running automated tests, hire someone who has done it before, bring in a consultant, introduce training
  • dealing with signoff and tracebility – keep specifications in a version control system, get signoff of living documentation, get signoff on scope not specifications, get signoff on slimmed down use cases, introduce use case realisations
  • warning signs – watch out for tests that change frequently, boomerangs, test slippage, just in case code and shotgun surgery
  • F16 – asked to be built for speed but real problem was to escape enemy combat – still very successful 30+ years later
  • scope implies solutions – work out the goals and collaborately work out the scope to meet goals
  • people tell you what they think they need, and by asking them ‘why’ you can identify new implicit goals they have
  • understanding why something is needed, and who needs it, is crucial to evaluating a suggested solution.
  • discuss, prioritise and estimate at goals level for better understanding and reduced effort
  • outside-in design – start with the outputs of the system and investigate why they are needed and how the software can provide them (comes from BDD)
  • one approach is to get developers to write the “I want” part of the storycard
  • when you don’t have control of scope – ask how something is useful, ask for an alternative solution, don’t only look at lowest level, deliver complete features
  • collaboration is valuable – big all team workshops, smaller workshops (three amigos), developers and analysts pairing on tests, developers review tests, informal conversations
  • business analysts are part of the delivery team, not customer representatives
  • right level of detail is picking up a card and saying ‘I’m not quite sure’, it pushes you to have a conversation
  • collaboration – hold introductory meetings, involve stakeholders, work ahead to prepare, developers and testers review stories, prepare only basic examples, overprescribing hinders discussion
  • one of the best ways to check if the requirements are complete is to try to design black-box test cases against them. If we don’t have enough information to design good test cases, we definitely don’t have enough information to build the system.
  • feature examples should be precise (no yes/no answers, use concrete examples), realistic (use real data, get realistic examples from customers), complete (experiment with data combinations, check for alternate ways to test) and easy to understand (don’t explore every combination, look for implied concepts)
  • whenever you see too many examples or very complicated examples in a specification, try to raise the level of abstraction for those descriptions
  • illustrate non-functional requirements – get precice performance requirements, use low-fi prototypes for UI, use the QUPER model, use a checklist for discussions, build a reference example for things that are hard to quantify (such as fun) to compare against
  • good specifications – should be precise and testable, not written as a script, not written as a flow
  • watch out for descriptions of how the system should work, think about what the system should do
  • specifications should not be about software design – not tightly coupled with code, work around technical difficulties, trapped in user interface details
  • specifications should be self explanatory – descriptive title and short paragraph of the goal, understood by others, not over-specified, start basic and then expanded
  • specifications should be focussed – use given-when-then, don’t explicitly detail all the dependencies, put defaults at the technical layer but don’t rely on them
  • define and use an ubiquitous language
  • starting with automation – try a small sample project, plan upfront, don’t postpone or delegate, avoid automating existing manual scripts, gain trust with UI tests
  • managing test automation – don’t treat as second-grade code, describe validation. don’t replicate business logic, automate along system boundaries, don’t check business logic through the UI
  • automating user interfaces – specify interaction at a higher level (logging rather than filling out the login page), check UI functionality with UI specifications, avoid record and playback, setup context in a database
  • test data management – avoid using pre-populated data, use pre-populated reference data, pull prototypes from the database,
  • Bott’s Dott’s are the lane markers on the roads that alert you when you move out of your lane, continuous integration has that function in software, run it with Specification By Example and you have continuous validation
  • reducing unreliability – find most annoying thing and fix it, identify unstable tests, setup dedicated validation environment, automated deployment, test doubles for external systems, multi-stage validation, execute tests in transactions, run quick checks for reference data, wait for events not elapsed time, make asynchronous processing optional, don’t use specification as an end to end validation
  • faster feedback – introduce business time, break long tests into smaller modules, avoid in-memory databases for testing, separate quick and slow tests, keep overnight tests stable, create a current iteration pack, parallelise test runs
  • managing failing tests – sometimes you can’t fix tests – create a known regression failures pack, automatically check disabled tests
  • easy to understand documentation – avoid long specifications, avoid lots of small specifications for a single feature, look for higher level concepts, avoid technical automation concepts
  • consistent documentation – evolve an ubiquitous language, use personas, collaborate on defining language, document building blocks
  • organize for easy access – by stories, functional areas, UI navigation routes, business processes, use tags instead of URLs

Agile Australia June 2011

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The Agile Revolution's avatarThe Agile Revolution Podcast

Agile Australia 2011Post the excitement of the Sydney Agile Australia June 2011 conference Tony, Craig and Renee have finally published their first podcast under the banner of ‘The Agile Revolution’.

In this celebratory first episode Renee discusses with Craig some of the background leading up to the Agile Australia event and then Tony joins the revolutionists to delve into the speakers and the buzz of the two days.

Here are the presentations from the Agile Australia and check out the day 1 and day 2 photos.

Additionally you can checkout Renee’s blog of the event and Craig’s at day 1 and day 2 blog.

TheAgileRevolution-1 (47 minutes)

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Agile Australia 2011 Day 2 Review

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Agile Australia 2011Day 2 at Agile Australia 2011 and another jam packed day. Here are my notes from the sessions I attended.

Keynote – Elevating the Agile Community of Thinkers 

Jean Tabaka presented this keynote, barefoot, and her slides are available here.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • “A Community of Thinkers” – drafted by Liz Keogh, Jean Tabaka and Eric Willeke
  • need to apply energy to learning rather than frustration – need to subscribe to the art of the possible
  • it is no longer acceptable in the 21st century to administer in the business, we need to create and provide innovative communities
  • fearful that in the agile community that we are in conflict mode but rather we should seeking enquiry and insights and learning from each other, such as we do in an daily standup
  • to be the best we can be every day, we need to inspire insights from the entire team – the definition of a good daily standup
  • Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” also apply to community
  • “vulnerability can create great workplaces and innovation” (Dr. Brene Brown)
  • our greatest wisdom is every insight in the room and is only as good as the quietest voice in the room – we have to lower the bar
  • in a command and control environment we lose wisdom and lower their IQs
  • in global teams you need to invite their wisdom in anyway possible – secret to distributed teams
  • Kathy Sierra – magic for Creating Passionate Users
  • drop outs give up when they believe they suck
  • amateurs learn how to do it and then become complacent
  • experts – keep pushing themselves to find a better way
  • in agile need to believe past both the “this sucks” and the “kick ass” threshold
  • we need active participants in our communities, rather than passive participants
  • Linchpin (Seth Godin) – being a genius self, being part of community means hard work
  • Principles of Product Development Flow (Donald Reinertsen) – this and Linchpin are Jean’s most dog-eared books
  • empathy mapping (gogamestorm.com) – look at your community and what are they thinking, hearing, saying, doing, seeing
  • use a wall of appreciation as well as a wall of break up letters to improve community and move past blockers
  • writing love letters to agile – interesting…
  • to be a linchpin your message needs to be accessible (charm), need to create talent around your message and have perseverance
  • “Drive” (Dan Pink) – autonomy (able to bring your genius self to work), mastery and purpose (a big hairy goal) – you will be creative
  • need to design a life and not a plan – how can we grow and be emergent in what we do, plans stagnate and stagnation kills
  • “Preferred Futuring” (Lawrence Lippitt) – create concrete wishes on where we want to be, need to bring this more into our workplaces
  • need to move – tell -> sell -> test -> consult to co-creation
  • find your mentor, or become that person
  • think like a genius – creating models of what might be true
  • example of Rally using lino to organize an open space – awesome
  • Jean not wearing shoes in this keynote is going out of your comfort zone – onedaywithoutshoes.com

Panel – Software Engineering is a Dead Craft

I was honoured to be given the opportunity to moderate this panel, consisting of Martin Fowler, Kane Mar and Paul King. My opening comments were as follows:

Software Engineering is defined by the IEEE is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, that is, the application of engineering to software.

This led me to then get a definitive definition of engineering, which is loosely defined by a number of the leading engineering councils worldwide as being the discipline of acquiring and applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to design and build solutions that safely improve the lives of people.

Software engineering as a term has been around since the early 1960s, and, as Rob Thomsett pointed out in his keynote yesterday, was popularized when NATO hosted a conference to address the problems of software development. In there report, they particularly point out that the phrase software engineering was deliberately chosen to be provocative. So for the last 50 years, practitioners everywhere have been debating software engineering, from the software crisis that made developing software into a career, through to Fred Brooks coining the No Silver Bullet argument that no individual technology would make a 10 fold improvement in productivity in 10 years, through object oriented programming and the rise of XP and agile.

So what is software engineering. Is it an engineering practice that is dead? Is it a craft or an art form? Or is it both dead and a craft?

Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks, author of many books on software development and a signatory to the agile manifesto.

Kane Mar is the President of Scrumology, and has been a developer and coach in the software industry for 20 years.

Paul King is the Director of ASERT and has been developing, training and contributing to the software development field for nearly 20 years, and is an active contributor to a number of open source projects including, most notably, Groovy.

My questions started as follows:

Martin – when you do any Google search on software engineering, every second link seems to point back to your website and any number of articles you have written on this subject over a number of years. You indicated your position is that the engineering metaphor has done our profession damage…

Kane – you listed your point of view on the topic is that the paradigm has come and gone and that perhaps software should be viewed as an ecosystem…

Paul – your viewpoint is listed as probably a little more conservative and that continuous learning is important…

The time flew by and I did not get to take anywhere near the number of questions I would have liked from the audience. The highlight was a question from the audience from Phil Abernathy who asked the panel if perhaps we should term what comes out of a number of projects as “crapmanship”.

Agile and Enterprise Architecture are not Mutually Exclusive

I had the pleasure of introducing Rebecca Parsons from ThoughtWorks, her slides (in all their Comic Sans MS glory) are available here.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • architects need to depress their ego and pair on critical stories and calm their concerns
  • some architects believe their job is to stifle any innovation in the development team, but they a disappointed that the team is not innovating
  • the IDE of enterprise architects has been PowerPoint for years
  • developers must code in a box, architects must worry about a bigger box
  • it is hard for enterprise architects to talk to every developer, so documents from high are standing operating procedure, unfortunately they get ignored because the context is hidden
  • use stories for technical requirements – architect communicates his requirements via a technical story and the development team responds with this is what it is going to take – ensures that the value is articulated
  • need architects to articulate their requirements based on acceptance tests
  • harvest components and talk in the community – ask who was the last person to integrate with this component and talk to them
  • development team should be focussed on delivery of their project, agile is the engine and architects need to use this engine

The Speed to Cool: Valuing Testing and Quality in Agile Teams

The session I presented got a good turnout, and plenty of questions afterwards as well as some follow-up emails.  The slides are available in a separate post as well as here.

From Agile Australia 2011

Rolling Out ‘Agile principles’ in a Global Organisation – A Continuous Journey

I introduced Sascha Ragtschaa from Computershare, his slides are available here.

From Agile Australia 2011

A Rogue’s Take on the 4 ‘C’s: Culture Change Costs Currency

I had the pleasure of both introducing and being a live prop (the dragon representing the (large) organisation) in this presentation by my good friend and colleague Renee Troughton from Suncorp. Her slides are available here.

From Agile Australia 2011
From Agile Australia 2011

Keynote – Software development in the 21st Century

Martin Fowler delivered his now famous 3 short keynotes.

From Agile Australia 2011

Non-Determinism and Testing

  • non-determinism – intermittent fails, we don’t know if something is going to succeed or fail – also called a useless test
  • non-deterministic tests infect the whole system – need to quarantine these tests to stop them bringing down the while suite – often caused by interference between tests
  • you can track dependencies or you can use isolation (preferred method)
  • tests should clean up after themselves and leave the world the way they found it but other tests rely on this happening (and hard to track failures when they occur) or start all tests with a clean slate (but it can take a long time)
  • asynchrony – can use a bare sleep but you never know how long to sleep for, could use a polling loop or a callback
  • remote services – don’t talk to them as part of the test, use a test double

Value of Software Design

  • this was a repeat session from last year where Martin did his famous Uncle Bob Martin rant. A highlight for me was in his example he used Nigel Dalton as good code example and me as a bad code example.

Agile Manifesto: 10 years later

  • we know the approach works and we need to use it more and find the boundaries
  • XP was the dominant strain at the time – has appeal of its values and principles as well as its practices like test driven development, etc…
  • many of the original people are unhappy – the core ideas have not moved as fast as the hype (semantic diffusion) and the rollout process is very long running
  • if you say you don’t care about agile you are saying you are happy with flipping the principles back again
  • do not treat stories as one-way traffic, the value is in conversation
  • as software developers we need to ask ourselves if we are making the world a better place
  • mundane work and the little things often make the world a better place

Conference Retrospective

I led a conference retrospective after the post-conference drinks. For those who stuck around, we had a good discussion on what was good and what we could do better next year.

What Was Great

From Agile Australia 2011
From Agile Australia 2011

How Can We Improve

From Agile Australia 2011
From Agile Australia 2011

New Ideas

From Agile Australia 2011
From Agile Australia 2011

Other Stuff

There have been some other wrap-up and retrospectives written about the conference including:

Also, a couple of mentions for some of my other friends and colleagues who presented on day 2 but due to my other commitments I could not attend their sessions.

Jonathan Coleman, Steve Jenkins and Phil Abernathy all did lightning talks which were all well received.

Nicholas Muldoon from Atlassian delivered a talk called “Be The Change You Seek”, his slides are available here.

Paul King (who I have presented with many times previously) delivered a workshop called “Leveraging Emerging Technologies in Agile Teams”, his slides are available here.

Agile Australia 2011 Day 1 Review

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Agile Australia 2011Agile Australia 2011 was held for its third year last week at the Hilton in Sydney. Once again I was honoured to be offered an opportunity to present, be an MC for speaker sessions on both days, moderate a panel discussion and run the end of conference retrospective. The conference attracted 675 attendees and the buzz over the two days indicated to me that the conference was a huge success.

For the second year, it was a great pleasure to be one of the conference advisors. As the conference was brought forward to June, there was only six months to prepare between conferences and lots of suggestions and improvements to implement from previous years. A lot of review, debate and discussion went into putting the program together and ensuing there was a good mix of speakers, variety of topics and sessions for different levels of expertise. More effort was also put into shepherding speakers. A huge thank you needs to go to Rachel Slattery and Zhien-U Teoh from Slattery IT for their commitment to the conference as well as my fellow conference advisors Phil Abernathy, Adam Boas, Keith Dodds, Martin Kearns, Dave Thomas and Nigel Dalton.

The following are my notes from the sessions I attended on the first day.

Keynote: On Beyond Agile – The New Face of Software Engineering

Alistair Cockburn delivered this keynote, the slides are available here.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • agile software development is for wimps
  • cooperative game – invention, communication and decision making
  • projects are in a position, look for strategies to move our position, no fixed formula for winning the game (competitors and the economy are some of the enemies), only three moves to invent, communicate and decide
  • communication – whiteboard discussion provides stickiness over time (can just point back to conversation) as well as proximity
  • need about 3 minutes of video to enhance the distributed conversation, becomes archived documentation to remember user point of view or architect design decisions
  • craft – a lot has changed, software development changes every 5-10 years and you need to keep up
  • people learn skills in 3 stages – shu, ha and ri
  • work in progress is decisions that have been made but have not been shipped and delivered
  • like lean we we want multiple deliveries per day – continuous integration has evolved to continuous delivery
  • in decision making, look for the bottlenecks, the person with the full inbox is the person limiting the work in progress of the whole organisation
  • knowledge acquisition – real moment of learning often happens at the end when the surprise factor occurs when we deliver work, suggest that at the beginning of a project deliver a knowledge curve ahead of the cost curve (a number of small experiments)
  • agile says deliver highest level of business value first but projects tend to always deal with the risks first – learn about your business risk (should we build it), social risk (do we have the right people), technical risk (API’s, performance, architecture), cost/schedule risk (gain knowledge about the solidity of the estimates) – you need to decide whether to deliver business values or knock off some of these risks
  • need to identify the tail to determine whether we deliver business value early or add more features later (Apple are good at this, for example shipping an iPad without 3G initially)
  • self awareness – the team is self aware when the team can talk about the team and where they are

Keynote – Is Business Ready for Agile

Rob Thomsett delivered this keynote, his slides are available here. He advised that he was going to run his talk in two sprints and check the heart beat halfway

From Agile Australia 2011
  • agile is a church of all people – the newbies through to the true believers and a few drooling old people
  • agile is not new – been going for 40 years
  • is business ready for agile? – yes and no – every company in the world is ready for agile, they just don’t know it – how do we develop agile into a broader organisational paradigm
  • we work on a set of models that were developed when the world was relatively stable
  • the average window of stability for an organisation is about 3 months, change is normal and everything changes
  • old business techniques have reached their use by date (Gary Hamel – Management 2.0)
  • 100% of C-level executives believe that project management is too bureaucratic, projects take too long, business cases are poorly developed, transparency is adequate, they expect to be ambushed, steering committees are a waste of time, reports are not accurate
  • in 1968/69 NATO held a conference to address a perceived crisis in software engineering – sound familiar?
  • software is not engineering, wrong paradigm, it is a craft
  • the closest to what we do is not making buildings but making movies
  • summary: we took the wrong model, flogged it to death so let’s throw it out
  • agile is a cultural and disruptive journey – first question to ask is are you up for the cultural challenge, for every company that says no there is one that says yes
  • business approach needs to pass the simple and transparent test – most powerful test to clean up broken processes
  • go back to work and annoy people by asking people if we can make it simpler
  • cultural values are openness, honesty, courage, trust and money
  • the people at the top are the easiest folks to get on board with agile
  • most people link budgeting to estimating – agile demands we move money around more quickly
  • sponsors must get dirty – they must be part of the process because they own it
  • PMO should exist for resourcing, not reporting

Panel – The Changing Role of the CIO

Beverley Head moderated this panel with Jeff Smith from Suncorp, Steve Coles from Allianz, Daniel Oertli from REA Group and John Sullivan from Jetstar.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • key is to turn decision making over to employees and leaders need to become coaches and create a great environment
  • The Corner Office by Adam Bryant gives advice for success – passionate curiosity, battle hardened confidence, team smarts, simplicity, fearlessness
  • role is to understand where the company is going and deliver things for them to succeed
  • relax the old techniques like governance that gave a veneer of confidence
  • need to understand and remove the barriers by becoming an active listener
  • fundamentals like attract and retain the best have not changed
  • learn the business in which you operate and realise the definition of leadership has changed (don’t be afraid to higher smarter people than you)
  • need clarity of purpose, avoid constraint of thought and don’t filter based on your experience
  • resistance at the frozen layer – middle managers are typically the blockers so need to change the communication structure (for example, using Yammer for communication to give everyone an equal voice)
  • distributed teams always need a local decision point like an iteration manager
  • leaders need to eliminate information handlers
  • offshoring value proposition – you need to decide if your assets are a strategic advantage, do not offshore things that are volatile or if the project is too big to handle yourself (which essentially means you can’t explain it to someone else), offshoring is good because it keeps us on our toes to be competitive and continuously improve
  • need to look at outsourcing from a productivity point of view and not just a cost point of view (we are not buying pencils)
  • life long learning for developers – people have to follow their own course, inject talent and different thinking, look back each year and think about what you added to your bag of tricks
  • most people are capable of learning new skills, that’s the beauty of human beings
  • what does quality mean – quality is something that is fit for purpose and testable and maintainable, quality is everything
  • pushing agile into the business – need to agree on one way of working, once you are successful people want to jump on the bandwagon

Agile Architecture & Design

I had the privilege to introduce Neal Ford for this presentation, and his slides are available here. As I had seen many parts of this presentation previously, I did not take many notes as they can be found across other posts on this blog.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • in the software world we deal with known unknowns
  • spikes are your friends, purely informational gathering
  • ckjm – tool for reporting complexity and coupling
  • don’t pay for technical debt that you may never justify

Key Metrics for an Agile Organisation

It was my pleasure to introduce Craig Langenfeld from Rally Software to deliver this presentation (originally scheduled to be presented by Mark Ortega). The slides are available here.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • cumulative flow – look at the top of the line to see what is the scope and how has it changed (total features), then ask if the team limits their work in progress by looking at the time between the boundary of in progress swim lanes, finally look at the lead times and how long it will take to deliver a feature
  • work in progress limits allow the team to move through work more effectively
  • lead and cycle time report – allows you to see where your bottlenecks are
  • stop focussing on the workers and focus on the work product – so rather than lines of code look at the the value delivered
  • productivity – understand your teams velocity, throughout mapping stories that were completed and carried over
  • earned value – useful to measure how much value we are delivering (the difference in agile is we are actually delivering the value)
  • predictability – answering the question of when we will be done – throughput chart can show you if a team is getting more predictable over time, burn up is used to show predictability of meeting scope, release burndown to show meeting a date and demonstrate additional scope being added
  • use cumulative flow to track the cone of uncertainty
  • quality – defect trends and counts, most code altered, number of changes, etc…
  • net promoter score for tracking customer satisfaction and if it is increasing
  • get customers to vote on what aspects of the product they like and don’t like
  • for cloud computing track the features that are actually used

Leading by Serving

Simon Bristow delivered this presentation, his slides are available here.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • a perfect team is one that can do anything, in control, do anything thrown at them
  • lots of teams act in an agile manner, the leader makes the difference
  • Robert Greenleaf – The Servant As Leader – others highest priority needs are being served first
  • bridge the gap – gaps when making a decision which is the unknowns, bridges the gap to the future by seeing the unseeable
  • one action at a time
  • forcing a decision on someone will engender resistance, some you must persuade – need to listen to connect at the grass roots level
  • withdraw and acceptance – step back from the team to allow them to look after themselves and accept that the team know best as they are the subject matter experts and will get the job done
  • facilitate community – need to build
  • lead using art not science – if you turn to science in agile you will turn to process

Soldering Irons, Consumer Devices and Hardware Manufacturing in the world of Agile Software

Dean Netherton and Neil Brydon for DiUS delivered this talk which was one of the highlights of the conference for me. The slides are available here.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • DiUS working on a fire danger smart meter and technology for charging electric cars
  • how do you demonstrate value when haven’t built the device?
  • had to work around the vendor for the smart meter because they had a traditional process for building the device – aligned project plans around hardware drops and had to simulate the hardware in many cases
  • used wireframes to drive design but had to spend longer on design to ensure it was right – for example, can’t add a bigger battery later
  • first drop was an off the shelf component board to kick start the software
  • second drop was a bare board that was the basic board without the LCD
  • third drop was the plastics without the screen as the component had not arrived so replaced with paper
  • challenge on how to articulate stories – had to break stories own technically
  • used Cucumber to test as there was an embedded USB port on the board – helped embedded engineers assist the Ruby engineers understand how the device worked
  • did continuous integration by plugging a device into the build server, had an issue about flashing the device when the code changes
  • hardware engineers slightly change the design with each revision which had affects on software design as well as having hardware for continuous integration
  • built own hardware prototypes and used local suppliers to cut down lead times (China cheaper but added 6-7 weeks to the lead time)
  • used mocking to show users the idea ahead of hardware being available
  • planned for multiple hardware revisions to allow for late decisions
  • these days you can send a 3D model to a design house and they can pop out a prototype, design exercise ensures that screws line up, etc
  • no excuses for automated testing, in the past it was not embraced in hardware, can test the integration layer without the need for hardware
  • no benefit in running tests for the hardware design as you only get a handful of drops
  • use automated test to ensure buttons and light work, good when you get new hardware and good for checking faults on the production line
  • had to learn about the hardware stack early on which challenged whether value was being added
  • firmware development not integrated onto the story wall
  • technical tasks are OK but really understand what done is
  • luckily the stakeholders were quite technical

Putting It All Together – Agile Transformation and Development Tooling

Philip Chan from IBM delivered this presentation, his slides are available here. I failed to see a lot of agile in this talk personally.

  • established teams – communication difficult across timezones but tools make it easy, different tools used in different teams,
  • IBM agile process – 2 week iterations, 2 day inter sprint break every 4 weeks, develop for first 6 days followed by 2.5 days for bug fixing, do acceptance testing for first 6 days and 2.5 days of exploratory testing, showcase on day 9
  • test management very waterfall for audit purposes
  • using automated tests and continuous integration to assist global team optimise processes

Panel – Continuous Delivery

Evan Bottcher, Neal Ford and Martin Fowler from ThoughtWorks were on this panel.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • continuous integration – everyone in the team integrates with the mainline at least once a day
  • continuous delivery is taking the same approach as continuous integration and apply it to the last mile – decision to deploy should be business only with no technical barriers
  • continuous deployment is continually delivering on a regular basis – continuous delivery enables this if you want it
  • rare to find a company that is pulling in the same direction, so you need to automate in pockets and add manual checkpoints and then you can look for ways to automate them
  • risks – need to bring pain forward, which was the tenet of XP, not doing it is much more risky, there is pain and effort to setup, you need to look for a leverage point in your production systems to justify
  • if you do something rarely you don’t get practice, by doing it more often you improve which actually results in a process that is more auditable and gives you more confidence
  • is a good approach to shorten feedback loops, also allows you to give confidence to the business on delivery timelines
  • packaged software makes continuous delivery hard, important to look at the automation of the configuration as well as automated tests, looking for fast feedback to give confidence in delivery
  • need to push software vendors to make things more deliverable (this was a rant by Martin Fowler, that I tend to agree with)
  • make database changes with the same fundamentals – break them down into small changes and combine schema changes with the data migration and string them together into a package, tools have got more specific like dbdeploy and Liquibase support this and Ruby on Rails just supports this out of the box
  • DBA’s are the final frontier because they like to fiddle with scripts, need to bring them in or deal with smaller changes
  • testers tied to manual processing – need to separate the low and high value testing work, fear that they will be replaced by a small shell script, will make their job vastly easier, need to get buy in by demonstration
  • difficulty is always the human element – testers are moved from the backend to the front end of the process, specification by example at the front now, need to look at incentives and make them common between developers and testers
  • key is a business decision of when to delay so you can deal with business change, training, etc…
  • people are now used to the fact that websites or apps on their phones are continuously changing
  • gives the option to deploy to different types of users when they need it
  • Go was built with continuous delivery in mind, version control systems are critical because everything needs to be in there, automated testing tools are also critical, continuous integration servers can help if they have an extra build pipelines
  • Puppet and Chef both allow you to script your environments
  • need to place people in teams who believe things are possible

Other Stuff

At the end of a very long day, it was good to network with attendees at the ThoughtWorks open office.

Also, I have to send congratulations to my colleague Adrian Smith from Ennova on his talk Agile for Startups which I hear was very well received (I have attended previous incarnations of this talk).

Agile Australia 2011 Pre-Conference Workshops Review

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

Agile Australia 2011Ahead of the Agile Australia 2011 conference this year in Sydney, I was lucky enough to both present and sit in on the pre-conference workshops.

From Agile Australia 2011

First Steps in Agile

On behalf of the Agile Academy, Tony Ponton and I presented First Steps in Agile to a small but enthusiastic class. The course covers introductory material around the values, principles, practices and agile approach.

Alistair Cockburn – Introduction to Advanced Agile Development

I had the pleasure of sitting in the back for Alistair Cockburn‘s workshop, with Tony Ponton and Martin Kearns. Whilst I had seen some of this content in Alistair’s Agile 2009 keynote, Tony and Martin had been lucky enough to sit in Alistair’s 3 day class earlier in the year.

From Agile Australia 2011

Alistair does not use slides but rather a one page laminated handout. My comment to Alistair at the end of the workshop was “Second time hearing it, learnt twice as much”, so here are my notes from this time around.

From Agile Australia 2011
  • advanced agile is not more tricks
  • efficiency is short term horizon versus effectiveness which is long term horizon
  • why is agile less efficient – agile people are looney because we keep changing everything over and over and over again (requirements, design, test) plus the skills needed to be around for the entire project
  • why is agile more efficient – we make things more tacit which means teams work faster (not writing things down)
  • shu, ha, ri (practices, theory, self awareness) – move up and down the scales
  • The Oath of Non-Allegiance – “I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.” – basically, I will not reject an idea just because of it’s heritage
  • shu – when people encounter a problem, they want a technique (shoe box)
  • ha – when you start collecting techniques
  • ri – when you start making things up, merging ideas together
  • there is often combat between the shu and the ri on projects
  • craft – skills in a medium and life long learning – many 10-15 year programmers don’t see themselves in a craft, your medium is your programming language and for project managers the medium is people
  • cooperative game – people issues matter, software development is the combination of invention, communication and decision making, agile has brought team collaboration the top level
  • right level of documentation – might be more if people are joining and leaving the team regularly but might be less if the team is stable and there is little movement
  • most efficient documentation is video taping two people at a whiteboard, faster than typing and easy to create – users to describe their problem, etc…
  • design = distributed cognition – need to get everybody to understand the theory of how the whole works and a theory of a solution and we need to find the answer between the two that everybody can understand
  • keep an open mind
  • each project should keep the next project in mind
  • a little out of balance is OK
  • the length of a programming episode is 1 hour – separate slices to demo within a sprint – (see the Carparccio exercise)
  • tip off for a bottleneck – “we don’t have time for…” or “spare capacity to develop…”
  • learn early in the project to learn and reduce risk, then develop for value once risks are down, then deliver early or delay for scope / quality
  • Zynga put in features that don’t work and count the clicks to determine whether to build it and other companies get users to pay a Paypal account and if they get enough money they will build the feature
  • every month / iteration / delivery – reflection of what we keep and what we try to do next month (two columns) – what we did wrong does not help me
  • the people who know how to do more, learn more
  • blitz planning as a different way to tackle estimation

Agile Australia 2011: The Speed to Cool – Valuing Testing & Quality in Agile Teams

/ Craig Smith / 5 Comments

Agile Australia 2011My presentation from Agile Australia 2011 called “The Speed to Cool – Valuing Testing & Quality in Agile Teams” is available on SlideShare.

Ensuring that the approach to testing and quality is understood and appropriately valued in an Agile world can be a struggle for many organisations, especially when resources are limited and our customers are expecting business value in a timely manner. In this session Craig Smith will define what quality means, share a number of tools for measuring it as well as discussing approaches to improving the skills, empowerment and role of testing in the organisation and share why testing is the coolest role on the team and why it is everyone’s responsibility.

Some of the comments on Twitter included:

@AgileAcademy: Good luck today with your presentation at 11.30am on The Speed to Cool: Valuing testing and quality in Agile teams @smithcdau #agileaus

@vivierose: Waiting for room to fill at @smithcdau was standing room only last year! #agileaus

@adrianlsmith: #agileaus @smithcdau Software is a crime – Testers are detectives

@vivierose: Testers think ‘Everything is guilty until proven innocent’ @smithcdau #agileaus

@adrianlsmith: #agileaus @smithcdau discusses increasing technical skills of testers http://t.co/WPhbDsV

@mrembach: seeing an excellent talk by @smithcdau at the qualityInn #agileaus

@vivierose: Everyone likes to be seen as valuing quality, just like they love kittens, but it’s the 1st thing to be dumped #agileaus @smithcdau

@stephlouisesays: #agileaus loving @smithcdau challenging how well we apply the manifesto to testing. Card wall stages look remarkably like a waterfall… Hmm

@adrianlsmith: #agileaus @smithcdau applies agile manifesto to testing practices – great analogies

@AgileRenee: @smithcdau use the quality assessment tool now avail on the @AgileAcademywebsite http://lockerz.com/s/111080989

@stephlouisesays: #agileaus acceptance test development = specification by example… Beats heavy documentation any day @smithcdau

@timechanter: Fabulous presentation by Craig smith on agile testing. Liking the specification by example stuff. #agileaus

@stephlouisesays: #agileaus awesome session by @smithcdau quality and testing – relevant content, interesting slides (love the pics!) and fab speaker #newfave

@SMRobson: #agileaus @craigsmith finally!! Well done!

@AgileAcademy: 150+ watching great talk by @smithcdau on Valuing testing & quality in Agile teams. Terrific energy & passion. #agileaus #yam

@AgileAcademy: A tester is like Robocop – part man/woman; part machine but all tester! @smithcdau #agileaus #testing #quality #yam

@AgileAcademy: Thanks for the mention about the Agile Quality Practices sheet on our website. @smithcdau agileacademy.com.au #agileaus #yam

@seat_paul: #agileaus very good talk by Craig smith. As he says testers can be very cool!!

@mrembach: @smithcdau great talk Craig. Lots of take-aways

@smamol: Really cool #agileauspresso – beautiful slides: The Speed to Cool – Valuing Testing in Agile Teams http://t.co/1m1jwBL #in

Agile Q&A: Wording User Stories

/ Craig Smith / 1 Comment

A former colleague contacted me the other day with a question along the lines of:

I am working with some guys who are looking at creating User Stories and there is a lot of discussion about how they should be worded. When a call comes into the business, the call centre need to search for the details of the person being queried.  The search may be on an identification number, name, date of birth etc etc. Is the user story:

As a call centre consultant I need to search for a customer so that I can process a customer update.

On the back will be the various search options that could be employed such as by company name, customer name, identification umber, date of birth, address, etc.

Or is it:

As a call centre consultant I need to search for a customer by company name so that I can process a customer update

As a call centre consultant I need to search for a customer by identification number so that I can process a customer update

As a call centre consultant I need to search for a customer by customer name so that I can process a customer update

There is no official right or wrong for user stories, except to remember that they are a “promise for a conversation” and that every story should follow the INVEST model:

Independent
Negotiable
Valuable
Estimable
Small
Testable

They also more valuable if written in the As a… I need… So that format, but the above examples already have that covered.

So if you apply that logic to the first example, it could fall down on some of these. If one or many search types are more valuable, or they are a large piece of work (not estimable or small) then it would make sense to do the second example. That said, you would not do your second examples if all the searches could be delivered in a small chunk of work.

A good size for a user story in my opinion is about 3 days. Regardless, the common logic is a good user story should fit inside your iteration length, and preferably within half your iteration length.

The other thing to consider is the testable aspect, it is good to set some acceptance criteria that defines the definition of done. That is usually noted on the back of the card.

This is a starting point, but as always the answer it is “it depends”.

Finally, a good reference book around this topic is User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn (http://www.amazon.com/User-Stories-Applied-Software-Development/dp/0321205685)