Category: English language

Robert C. Martin (aka uncle Bob) is one of the men who wrote Agile Manifesto. He created lots of worth while material for developers and championed TDD in a very hands-on approach – thanks for 3 laws of TDD.

I read couple of his books and watched countless hours of his teachings on YouTube. I invested heavily into TDD (thanks to Kent Beck ), which payed off for me in more ways than one and my commitment goes beyond words – please feel free to download and print TDD posters.

So I’m a fan, well… not really. I see lots of value in uncle Bob’s ideas and practices, so I have to give credit where it is due. However I don’t agree with everything he says and so I have couple of bones to pick over the book, but first things first.

The book came out at a very interesting times (end of 2019), when agile is a mainstream – everyone does agile now. Agile coaches without any technical background are training software teams, management happy to track development progress by every commit you make on hourly basis and damn the XP practices, full speed ahead. So timing of the book feels spot on, my only wish is that the book ends up in hands of managers.

But what about developers? Did I as a developer waste my time on the book? No, absolutely not! The book is a very good – easy read, short, concise and no fluff. It contains core concepts on what agile is, what it is meant for and all the practices associated. Now don’t expect details, it is a short book with it’s main focus on agile as a whole and not a full blown technical guide. However, it will provide enough to go and dig into each individual practice and believe me, some of these practices worth their own book. For example:

• Refactoring: Martin Fowler & Kent Beck – “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code”
• TDD: Kent Beck – “Test Driven Development: By Example”
• Branching: Paul Hammant & Steve Smith – “Trunk Based Development”
• Unit testing: Roy Osherove – “The Art of Unit Testing with examples in C#”
• Coding: Robert C. Martin – “Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship”

Now I can’t shake the urge, so I’ll indulge it: I read Kent’s Beck TDD by example book in 2019, however the book originally was published in 2000 – speaking of being late to the party. By that time I was doing TDD for few years and participated in a few heated discussions on the subject. I guess 19 years is enough time for any subject to become semi-mysterious, bloated and extended beyond the original purpose. So the book was short of a revelation to me, it was simple, pure or how uncle Bob puts it: “back to basics”. It cleared the water, set boundaries and removed mysticism. Is it dated? Yes. Does it deal with modern complexity of micro services? No. But that’s the whole point: what is the original issue and how to deal with it; nothing more, nothing less.

Uncle’s Bob book is exactly the same way. It describes original issues and explains how to deal with them, nothing more and nothing less. If agile doesn’t fit into your team/organization then so be it. Don’t buy into over extended claims of agile industry that it will solve your problems. See for yourself what is agile all about, if it fits, go for it, if it doesn’t then look for something else. Perhaps there are next generation processes and perhaps they are based off agile, but don’t try to force something that doesn’t fit. One last note that I can’t pass, because it is personal and eats me up, I believe Kent Beck summarized it the best:

good engineering is only a small part of a successful project but bad engineering is main reason project fails

Kent Beck

Now it is time to pick a bone or two with the book. I respect uncle Bob and with this in mind let me ask: why go into something that he has limited knowledge and/or interest. In particular he offers his thoughts on agile in large enterprises. The subject came out iffy at best and confusing at worst. “Agile is for small teams” – yes and let’s leave it at that. There is no need to elaborate on the subject with dubious conclusion: world knows how to manage large projects, the modern society is a testament to that. I guess modern Boeing 737 MAX is also a testament to world’s ability to manage large projects. While he might be right, the book doesn’t answer or give much insight into the subject, so why talk about it at all?

Another bone is the value itself, I always been confused by the word and perhaps the whole argument stems from that, but let me elaborate. If we ask developer why he created so much code for let’s assume rather simple requirement, an answer could be: the code is fail safe, optimized and design wise allows for extensibility. Now in the mind of that developer he created ultimate value for the customer! What could be better than having a safe, fast and extendable code? Another developer might look at the same code with a very different perspective: it took too long to write, by making the code safe, it has many conditions that will never come to be, simply because such a data doesn’t happen that deep into the module. It is fast, but the functionality is not time bound, so unnecessary complexity for no apparent value. The code is extendable but no one has a crystal ball, so why make the code extendable at a cost to a customer who might not need to extend or modify it at all. Has this ever happened in your team?

Now I know, there are XP/Agile practices that guide us through all those tough technical challenges. But in order to invoke those practices (TDD, Simple design, refactoring, pair programming and so on) we must once again talk about the value. One developer with years of experience will look at TDD and say: “nonsense, overkill, waste of time”. Another developer might have exactly the opposite view, but do those opinions matter? If the entire team has to decide on values, then each opinion will matter, now it becomes a debate and political struggle to adopt XP practices/policies. More over how do you go about proving the value of those practices? The book says: “Instead of pushing TDD, maybe we could start agreeing on the value of reducing the time it takes to test our entire system. How long does it take today? Two hours? Two days? Two weeks? How many people are involved? What if we could reduce it to 20 minutes? Two minutes? Maybe even 2 seconds? And what if we could do that at any time just by pressing a button? Would that give us a good return on investment? Would that make our lives easier? Would we be able to release reliable software faster?”

Brilliant, we need to measure and record everything and apply statistics. Now, complexity of the decision making and cost of the entire team is going up, at the cost to a customer and thus far with no apparent value. And by the way, there are other ways to achieve the same result without let’s says TDD or any other practice. But let’s move on next and assume that we agreed on practices. Statistics is powerful, but does management need convincing? Do they want to spend more money? Is data all it takes to convince management and customers? Could there be other values at play? Ultimately a value is an elusive term, we all want a value but which one is a great question. Humanity is diverse and so value is very relative. All of us see value in different things even when statistics and data dictates otherwise. In lots of cases we don’t even have the right or enough data to deduce a value, yet we place bets and talk about the value.

Now the value topic is endless and perhaps I should examine it in a separate post, but now it’s time for final thoughts. The book has its flaws, some I discussed, some I didn’t (hello to end-to-end testing and QA responsibilities). However I wholeheartedly believe that the book is worthwhile the investment. Uncle Bob is entertaining as ever, the timing is spot on, the subject is fascinating and engaging. More importantly though, it brings agile back to the inception, drawing boundaries and highlighting essentials.

In a nutshell:
-: a bit short and has some confusing topics
+: easy read, to the point, concise
+: useful examples and discussions
+: helpful for managers, clients and developers
+: much needed refresh on agile
=: good book, has a lot of value for any developer, manager and client. Book is a bit short and some topics could have been expanded, but over all worthwhile the investment.

Title: Clean Agile: back to basics
Author: Robert C. Martin
Cover:

I made few note while I was reading the book, so I figured to leave them here just for fun:

“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

Brooks’s Law

Sooner or later every developer learns about Brook’s Law, for me it was later, but still better than never. After the encounter and countless references to the book on the internet, I decided to read it for myself and see what it’s all about.

The original book came out in 1975 and the latest revision in 1995. I think it is important to set expectations right, and accept that the author wrote a lot from that perspective – good old days when the industry still debated “if-else block” vs “goto statement”. In addition, the book isn’t an easy read, lot of technologies/terminologies aren’t familiar to me and that made it harder to follow. However I don’t think any of that should be a showstopper, I say: “push through”!

Opinions are like assholes – everyone got one and I’m no different. However I’m really struggling to express my thoughts on this book. On one hand the book is quite insightful, on the other hand, for the lack of better word – irrelevant. On one hand human behaviour didn’t significantly change since 1975, on the other hand business did. Let me give you an example from my personal experience: 45 years after the book has been published, managers still think that adding new developers to meet a three-month deadline is a solution. Never mind that a good developer typically needs more than three months to even get up to speed on our projects. However, adaptation of scrum (or alike) methodologies and business acceptance of small value-adding iterations has changed the way developers schedule and deliver code. There is no more hiding, in every sprint something of a value must be developed, demoed and shipped.

I can grumble, agree and disagree with the author on several points, but I think it is meaningless and unfair. I think the book should be taken for what it is, and not some sort of a guide from the days long gone to the present generation. Nevertheless, perhaps some people must read it for the sake of not solving the same old problems, the same old way, that never worked anyhow. Perhaps everyone should read it and understand that not all IT problems uniquely belong to IT industry and an answer is readily available just outside of it. Perhaps I should stop rambling and admit: may be the book didn’t impress me as much as I hoped it would but at least I don’t feel any regrets spending my time with it.

In a nutshell:
-: Not an easy read if you aren’t familiar with terminology and technology of the past
-: Some irrelevant concepts
+: A lot of insight into software industry, some still hold true
+: Interesting references and opinions
+: Enjoyable, with certain expectations
=: I don’t think this book should be atop a reading list. However if you are curious and have time, I wholeheartedly recommend it. Don’t set any expectations, remember the book originated in 1975 and enjoy the essay.

Title: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Author: Frederick Brooks
Cover:

Notes & Quotes from the book, I couldn’t help myself but to take:

“Solutions to many IT problems already exist in other industries, but IT pro feel and act as those don’t apply.”

“Techniques proven and routine in other engineering disciplines are considered radical innovations in software engineering.”

“Self-Documenting Programs – a basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchronism. It is far better to combine them into one file with each record containing all the information both files held concerning a given key. Yet our practice in programming documentation violates our own teaching. We typically attempt to maintain a machine-readable form of a program and an independent set of human-readable documentation, consisting of prose and flow charts. The results in fact confirm our teachings about the folly of separate files. Program documentation is notoriously poor, and its maintenance is worse. Changes made in the program do not promptly, accurately, and invariably appear in the paper.”

“Long before any code exists, the specification must be handed to an outside testing group to be scrutinized for completeness and clarity. As Vyssotsky says, the developers themselves cannot do this: “They won’t tell you they don’t understand it; they will happily invent their way through the gaps and obscurities.””

“Day-by-day schedule slippage is harder to recognize, harder to prevent, and harder to make up than calamities. The first step in controlling a big project on a tight schedule is to have a schedule, made up of milestones and dates for them. Milestones must be concrete, specific, measurable events defined with knife-edge sharpness. A programmer will rarely lie about milestone progress, if the milestone is so sharp he can’t deceive himself.”

“Cosgrove advocates treating all plans, milestones, and schedules as tentative, so as to facilitate change. This goes much too far— the common failing of programming groups today is too little management control, not too much.”

“Intercommunication is worse. If each part of the task must be separately coordinated with each other part/ the effort increases as n(n-I)/2. Three workers require three times as much pairwise intercommunication as two; four require six times as much as two. If, moreover, there needs to be conferences among three, four, etc., workers to resolve things jointly, matters get worse yet. The added effort of communicating may fully counteract the division of the original task”

“The basic fallacy of the waterfall model is that it assumes a project goes through the process once, that the architecture is excellent and easy to use, the implementation design is sound, and the realization is fixable as testing proceeds. Another way of saying it is that the waterfall model assumes the mistakes will all be in the realization, and thus that their repair can be smoothly interspersed with component and system testing.”

“The first step is to accept the fact of change as a way of life, rather than an untoward and annoying exception. Cosgrove has perceptively pointed out that the programmer delivers satisfaction of a user need rather than any tangible product. And both the actual need and the user’s perception of that need will change as programs are built, tested, and used.”

“First, the man with strong management talent and strong technical talent is rarely found. Thinkers are rare; doers are rarer; and thinker-doers are rarest.”

“The job done least well by project managers is to utilize the technical genius who is not strong on management talent.”

“In tasks that can be partitioned but which require communication among the subtasks, the effort of communication must be added to the amount of work to be done.”

“In tasks that can be partitioned but which require communication among the subtasks, the effort of communication must be added to the amount of work to be done.”

“Failure to allow enough time for system test, in particular, is peculiarly disastrous. Since the delay comes at the end of the schedule, no one is aware of schedule trouble until almost the delivery date. Bad news, late and without warning, is unsettling to customers and to managers.”

“But false scheduling to match the patron’s desired date is much more common in our discipline than elsewhere in engineering. It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers”

“The fate of WIMP: Obsolescence. Despite its excellencies, I expect the WIMP interface to be a historical relic in a generation. Pointing will still be the way to express nouns as we command our machines; speech is surely the right way to express the verbs. Tools such as Voice Navigator for the Mac and Dragon for the PC already provide this capability.”

“Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them”

“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

Frederick Brooks