Continuous Digital - the new name for the #NoProjects book

Regular readers will be familiar with my rants against projects and my posts about NoProjects - if not you have a lot of catching up to do: NoProjects Q&A, Beyond #NoProjects, the podcast with Tom Cagley, presentations and lots more. And as many readers will know I’ve been working on a #NoProjects book on Leanpub.

The book will soon reach a point where the content is there, code-complete if you like. (Yes there are some batch process and debugging todo, another story.) The book has reached a point where it has outgrown the #NoProjects moniker and needs a new name. The new name is: Continuous Digital.

Before I explain the name change something special for readers: I’ve set up a discount on LeanPub for Blog readers. Continuous Digital is available for just $5 for this, the last week of April. Use that link or the code AprilBlog.

Now why the name change?

#NoProjects is a great rallying cry and accurately sums up my feeling that in many environments the cost and difficulty of project management actually makes things worse not better. Simply removing it and letting people do work would be a big improvement.

But #NoProjects is also absolute, confrontational and doesn’t actually say what one should do which is a pretty big flaw. An alternative needs a name which isn’t “No”.

#NoProjects has been a necessary step in this evolution, once you relax the mindset that says “everything is, or should be, a project” you see the world differently. This is more than just adopting a product model - although there is a lot of that.

What becomes immediately obvious is that the idea of “Projects” is itself a model - hence why I refer to “the project model”. And the project model is not the only way of managing. Indeed, project management has not always existed, there was a time before “projects” and there will be a time after “projects.” I see evidence all the time that companies are backing away from the project model.

Many of this things project advocates want are entirely possible in an alternative model: goals, estimates, new developments, portfolio management, governance and deadlines to name a few. One of my aims with the book has been to show how these ideas can still work in an alternative model.

The thing I come back to again and again is: successful software lives, it is used and continues to change. Projects, by definition, end. Success is continuous.

(I tried the name BeyondProjects for a while but it didn’t catch on and it got confused with things that go on top of the project model like portfolio management and governance. ProjectLess was another suggestion but “Less” is already overworked as the name of an agile scaling framework and as a CSS preprocessor.)

Now think for a minute, the word “digital” is all around us: “Software is eating the world”, almost all start-ups are software technology based, legacy corporations are rushing to embrace new ways of working and operating.

Yes this is about developing software but it is more. 30 years ago really only software companies developed software as their product. Today every business is, or soon will be, a software based business. Hence the word Digital.

We stand at a point in time where business is changing. The term “digital” tries to capture this change.

As more and more companies rush to embrace digital business it is vital they leave behind the idea that software is ever done.

In business world being done is bad: if you walk into you local Walmart, Tesco or Aldi and the shelves are empty and the manager says “Well we sold everything so we are closing” it is bad.

If Ford and Toyota turn around and say “Everyone who wants a car has one so we are closing” its bad.

Business thrives on change. If a business is digital then the change is going to be digital.

Digital business needs an alternative model to projects. A model that actually matches their business and does not pretend everything will be done one day.

Continuous Digital sets out that a model. Please buy and enjoy the book, its not finished (yet).

Stating the obvious: Pre & Post conditions and TDD

Can you have an epiphany more than once?

Well I did. In early January - perhaps the result of all the Christmas drink - I had an epiphany and wrote this blog post. As I finished writing the post I realised I’d said it all before… Something old, Something new:

Requirements and Specifications.

Still, I think the message is worth repeating…

Back in the early 1990’s everything was better, the Cold War had ended, the world seem be fighting just wars, I was having fun at University and my lectures were convinced that formal methods - logic based VDM-SL to be specific - were the silver bullet to software development. And so I spent three years being schooled to write pre and post-conditions on every function I wrote.

Actually, this made sense to me at the time and I continued it long into my professional career. I still find it useful to think like this although I long ago gave up actually writing them as comments. That was one of the failings, if you just wrote them as comments then they aren’t enforceable and they can easily become another piece of documentation which doesn’t match the code.

An improvement to this, and the way I used to write a lot of C++ code was to use assert. So my code would look something like this:

std::list<std::string>

extract_reviewers(std::map<std::string, int> *votes_cast) {

        // pre

        assert(votes_cast != null)

        assert(!votes_cast.is_empty())

        …

This was an improvement but you needed to execute the code to make it happen. And that meant powering up the whole system.

So today I’m writing some Python, and my app just crashed, and I looked at the code and its obvious that the function in question shouldn’t have been called. “Arh… there is a test I missed somewhere…”

And it dawned on me… probably again…

When I write a test for a function I’m writing executable pre and post conditions. Here is the code:

self.assertEquals(dedupvotes.retrieve_duplicate_report(self.c.key), None)report = dedupvotes.generate_duplicate_vote_report(self.c.key, 1)self.assertFalse(report.has_duplicates())voterecord.cast_new_vote(submission_keys[1], "Allan", 1, "One", VotingRound)voterecord.cast_new_vote(submission_keys[1], "Grisha", 2, "Two", VotingRound)self.assertFalse(report.has_duplicates())voterecord.cast_new_vote(submission_keys[1], "Allan", 1, "One", VotingRound)self.assertTrue(report.has_duplicates())

See?

In the test setup I setup the pre-conditions. I may even test them.

I call the function, generate_duplicate_vote_report, and I check what happens, the post conditions.

(OK, it is not the most polished code, the refactor step has yet to happen.)

What has happened here is that I’ve moved the policing of the pre and post conditions outside the function. In VDM the pre and posts were comments wrapped around some imaginary code. In C++ the asserts top-and-tailed the method, with TDD the pre-and-post it in a special function. And the test harness allows just that code to be tested.

I was always taught to write the pre and post conditions first. Indeed, in VDM there was no actual code so you could only write the pre and post conditions. In other words: I was writing the tests before the code.

And now I write this, I remember I have made the same point before. When I made this point before I was discussing TDD’s younger, but possibly wiser, brother, BDD. If you want to have a read it is Something old, Something new:

Requirements and Specifications. That essay is also included as an appendix to Little Book of Requirements and User Stories.

What does this prove?

Perhaps not a lot.

Or perhaps that TDD and BDD are the logical continuation of an old, 1970’s at least, approach. They have a longer lineage than is commonly recognised and that in turn increases their credibility.

It also reminds me of 1994 when I was working in the dungeon of a small company in Fulham. Myself and another programmer, Mark, were racing to deliver a C++ system to a client and save the company. We were writing test harnesses for our code and I was writing pre and post conditions. In retrospect his tests were better than mine, mine often needed a human key-press, I think his might have been added to the build to.

In retrospect too, we came perilously close to Test Driven Development but we didn’t think it was anything very special, we didn’t name it, we didn’t codify it and neither of use made much money out of it.

What does a CTO do?

The last few years have been good to me, I’ve enjoyed giving advice to teams and companies and helping people get started with better ways of working, ways of working which usually go by the name of “agile” but the name is the least important thing. But…

I’ve been questioning if I want to keep doing this. Like most of us do from time to time I’ve wonder if I need new challenge, if I should join something big, more continuity and… as you might guess from my posts on Mimas I’ve kind of missed being closer to building something.

From time-to-time people have suggested I take on a CTO role - and certainly my ego likes the idea, it sounds important! - but, seriously, I think I’d like to give it a go. But that leads me to a question of my own:

Just what does a CTO do?

This is something I’ve pondered before because while I’ve met a good few CTOs in my time I can’t really see a consistent pattern to describe what they do. Everyone knows what a CFO does, they look after the money so a CTO should “look after” the technology but… how do you do that?

Before I come up with even more questions lets try some answers.

First up, lets be clear, not all CTOs are code-centric. I know organization where the primary role of the CTO is to understand the technology domain and code - software - is secondary. Take telecoms for example, the CTO in a telecoms company may actually be an expert in telecoms technology. Software may well be something someone else looks after, although the two need to work closely.

Such examples seem to becoming less and less common, perhaps that is just another example of software eating the world. CTOs are increasingly about the code…

Some CTOs are programmers, some CTOs are the only programmer.

This view seems common with non-technical entrepreneurs and in job-adverts for start-up companies. Maybe it is because these companies can’t afford to pay senior salaries that they hand out grand job titles instead. Or maybe it is because the founders really don’t understand technology and anyone who can code looks like a god to them.

I worry about these companies because the attributes which make the first “CTO” attractive (code god willing to work for peanuts and therefore young and mortgage free) are most definitely not the attributes you want a CTO as the company grows.

CTOs should most definitely be able to code - even if this was sometime in the past. And many CTOs I know, and have know, do continue to code. That is good when they are part of a team.

A CTO is also in part an architect role - and hence they should code from time to time. The CTO may well be the Chief Architect or Chief Engineer although such a role is more about building shared understanding not mandating plans.

And since software design is a copy of organizational design the CTO needs to understand Conway’s Law and organizational form and structure. Organizational architecture is as important as software architecture, they are symbiotic.

Some CTOs have a lot of say in organizational structure. Many CTOs run the technology development group - all the programmers and testers, and possibly analysts and project managers, report to the CTO. As such the CTO is the Chief Technology Manager.

But not all CTOs do this. Some CTOs are actually further down the organization. And some CTOs leave the running of the technology group to someone else - the Vice President of Engineering or Director of Development. Again the CTO may work closely with this person but the CTO fills more of an advisor or expert role rather than a management role.

Such expert CTOs may well be on the board, they may well have the ear of the CEO but they leave the day-to-day operation of development to someone else. And some don’t, some are deep in the detail.

Perhaps as more businesses become truly digital, and technology and business become truly one, then CTOs running development operations will become less common and CTOs as experts will become the norm.

CTOs need to keep their finger firmly on the pulse of technology - what is happening, whats new, what is taking off, what is going down, what are Apple planning? And Amazon? And Microsoft?

But actually understanding the latest technology may well be less important than understanding how that technology changes business, changes competition, changes organization and structure. Manager-CTOs may well put that understanding directly into action but Expert-CTOs will educate others in the organization, from new recruits all the way up to the board.

CTOs also have a role in recruitment and forming the development culture. If CTOs think quality is important the engineering staff will take quality seriously. And if the CTO says, like one I knew once, “I’d rather it was on time with bugs than late and working” then every engineer will know within about 5 minutes.

While CTOs may not interview every candidate for a role they will certainly interview some of the key roles. More importantly the CTOs needs to work as a cheer-leader for the companies recruitment campaigns. Finding good engineers is hard, a CTO who gives the company a profile and makes it a place people want to work will help a lot.

CTOs often have a role to play too in sales. They are wheeled out to meet potential customers, talk technology and show the company takes the client seriously. When a company is R&D heavy the CTO doesn’t do much pre-sales but then the company makes a living selling products or services to other companies CTO as pre-sales is very important.

And it is perhaps at the highest levels, the board, the other CxOs, that the CTO role is unique. Almost by definition each CxO (Chief something Officer) is a specialist in their own field: the CFO knows about finance and the CMO knows about marketing. Although the CEO should be more of a generalist they come from another function so once upon a time where specialists. The COO (operations) may be another exception although this is often post held by the soon-to-be-CEO so it is a training post. (In my experience, the CSO role (chief strategy officer), when it exists is used to sideline someone before helping them leave).

In the CTO the other CxOs have a peer they can talk about the technology implications for their business. It is here that the CTO has the opportunity to influence the rest of the company and help them maximise the benefit of technology.

The common theme in all of this is the CTO leads the thinking of others. To use a rather over-used, and perhaps equally vague term, the CTO is a thought leader around technology. The CTO helps others in the organization understand not so much the technology itself as the implications of technology for the business. (And that implies the CTO needs to be a good communicator.)

That of course is provided the CTO has those opportunities, that they are at meetings and senior meetings, if “CTO” is simply a grand title for a programmer then they have little influence.

Summary

• The title CTO should be reserved for roles which are more than just programming
• A CTO should be able to code
• A CTO should understand software architecture and will be one of the architects but probably not the only architect
• The CTO needs a firm understanding of Conway’s Law
• The CTO needs to understand organizational structure and play a role in designing the organization
• Some CTOs are technology experts while some or powerful managers with their own department
• CTOs need to keep abreast of the latest technology development
• The CTO may well be the most senior pre-sales consultant in the business
• More importantly the CTO need to understand the implications of technology and how business is changed by technology
• A CTO helps to guide other company executives in their use and understanding of technology
• Ultimately the CTO is a “thought leader” - they guide the thinking of others.

Given that it is pretty obvious that very few, if any, individuals can fill the role. Any CTO will inevitably be good at some things and not so good at others, as humans they will inevitably flawed.

And me?

Do I still want to be an CTO? - well yes but actually, I’m not concerned about the title, call me what you will - Chief Engineer is a title I’d love too - but what I’d love is a role which allows me span boundaries: as someone who understands technology, can code, can architect, knows how to align business with business structure and technology architecture; as someone who knows the importance of knowing what is being build will meet customer needs.

If you know of such a role I can always be tempted, until then, I’ll stick to consulting.

Mimas: What it does

My last entry I discussed some of the lessons I learned coding the Agile on the Beach submission and review system, Mimas (feel free to have a play). For completeness I’d like to tell you what the system does and what I want to do next for the system:

For the speaker….

What you get is a fairly basic form to submit a proposal. You receive an e-mail confirmation and at some later date notification of the outcome. You should also receive a link to the scoring and comments your submission received - that is, if the organiser wants to send it.

Before I go on, it is worth pointing out that Mimas is build around the assumption that conferences have tracks, e.g. software coding track, product design track, etc. Submissions are tied to a conference track, reviewers are asked to review all track submissions and final decisions are made on a track-by-track basis. Since tracks are configured when the conference is set up they are largely fixed. That could change in future but right now they are fixed.

For the reviewer…

Reviewers are assigned to one or more tracks and asked to review the submissions in the track. They get a list of all the submissions and for each one can score the submissions from -3 (don’t want) to +3 (really want.) That is round one. The conference organisers can then decide which submissions to shortlist for round two.

In round two reviewers are asked to rank the shortlisted submissions - from 1 at the top to… well however many are shortlisted, 5, 6, 10, 16 - whatever.

For organisers….

Creating a conference goes without saying! - They can configure it too: maximum number of submissions per speaker, max number of co-speakers, tracks, talk types and durations, expenses options, e-mail templates, e-mail ccs & bccs and a few other bits.

But all organisers are not equal. There is a permissions system which allows the conference creator can decide just what other organisers are allowed to see and do. They also get to decide who the reviewers are and assign them to tracks.

Most of what the organisers see are reports which slice and dice the submissions in different ways but those with the correct permissions can do some other things:

• Move submissions between tracks
• Review submissions and reviewer scores
• Shortlist submissions from round one to round two
• Decline and accept submissions
• Export submissions data
• Send bulk (personalised) e-mail to submitters
• And of course change permissions for other organisers

What happens next?

There are two “big” changes I’d like to make…

I want to revise the way the system handles review so that rounds become configurable. Right now there are two rounds of reviews: one a scoring system, -3 to +3 and a second ranking round. I want to allow conference organisers to decide how many rounds of voting there should be and select the type of round they want. That will allow me to configure scoring (e.g. 0 to 5 instead of -3 to +3), add some more types of voting (e.g. multi-criteria), configure rounds and allow speakers to be anonymised.

The other big change, which comes from reviewer feedback, is to allow private comments. At the movement all reviewer comments on submissions are shared with submitters. But reviewers want the ability to make comments that are not shared.

This is a difficult one, I’d like reviewers to be open and share all their thoughts but some reviewers don’t like that. And because of that they find the system less useful. If I was Apple maybe I’d just say No, thats the way it is. But I’m not Apple and I need to meet client expectations.

Technically, I want to change the e-mail handling system, again. Although this is in its third version I’ve seen better ways of doing it. This is classic refactoring, each time I’ve change the way the e-mail system works I’ve seen a better way of doing it. Submitters and reviewers won’t see much change but improving the architecture will allow me to make enhancements more easily in future.

The other technical change I should make concerns testing. I really should look at ways to bring more of the UI under test - or at least run “bigger” tests. While there are lots of fine grained unit tests increasingly I find it necessary to manually test how the system hangs together, e.g. when I make changes to mail handling. This is because actions happen in the UI which cause quite a lot of stuff to happen below.

There are many more small changes I want to make to the system but they would probably take longer to describe than to write about!

So the last question is: is this worth while?

If the system is only ever for Agile on the Beach then probably not. It works.

If the system is used by other conferences then some of these changes, perhaps all, are worth doing. But then, maybe until I make those changes none will use it!

A classic dilemma.

If the system is my own little play thing then yes, all these changes are worth doing because I enjoy coding it! But enjoying doing something is different from it being commercially worth while. Financially I’m certainly better off doing something else. But if I value a hobby then it is worth doing.

Another classic dilemma.

One might ask: has it been worth doing so far?

Improved the AOTB submission and review process: Definitely!

Refreshed my programming: Yes

My own personal learnings: Yes

Created an option for others: Yes

Financial returns? No

Its just a shame that the first four don’t pay the bills!

Another classic problem.

10 Lessons from coding the Mimas conference submission & review system

The picture above is the documentation for Mimas, the conference submission and review system I wrote for Agile on the Beach. The documentation is three A4 sheets (2 state diagrams and one short paragraph of an assumption) plus an A3 object model - actually the database object model. All stuck to the wall in my office.

That is all the paper documentation, there are over 100 unit tests too which form pretty good documentation and have allowed me to continue changing the live system. There is also a physical stack of cards on my desk which form the backlog, although the most important changes I need to make are firmly logged in my brain.

A couple of my blogs have mentioned Mimas before but in this entry I just wanted to share some lessons about the system and my first serious programming effort in years.

For the record the system runs on the Google AppEngine, it uses standard Python AppEngine libraries, e.g. webapp2 plus a light coating of BootStrap on the UI - thanks to Sander Hoogendoom for that suggestion - and SendGrid for mail but apart from that is pretty much free of libraries. It comprises 8500 lines of Python including 3300 lines of test code. There are another 2400 lines of HTML which contains about a hundred lines of JavaScript. The JavaScript gave me an interesting insight…

I like to think I know Python but I don’t think I know JavaScript, the JavaScript I used here was 50% scrapheap challenge and 50% programming. On the few occasions I did anything more than a simple function I found I spent an inordinate amount of time getting it to work. I kept putting this down to not really knowing JavaScript - plus perhaps being a bit snobby about JavaScript not being “real” language.

But, fairly late in the process I realised why JavaScript took so much time and why Python was so fast: The Tests.

The Python was properly Unit Tested. When I needed new functionality in the server end I built it test first. And it just worked. Time and time again I surprised myself how quickly I got things working.

Not so in JavaScript, I kept avoiding it and when I did something it just took too long which made me dislike JavaScript all the more.

But… when I came to UI I’d let myself off about the unit tests. I never set up a test framework. And so I never unit tested my JavaScript either. I slowly, lately, realised a lot of my JavaScript mistakes would never have happened if I had unit tested it. And I’d also wager my UI development generally would have been faster if I had properly unit tested it. UI tests take longer, manual tests take longer, it takes longer to find out something doesn’t work and to try something else. Fail fast, fail cheap.

Lesson 1: Be even more honest with unit testing.

Lesson 2: Yes unit testing the UI is more difficult but that shouldn’t be an excuse for not trying.

To some degree I would defend myself by saying I was really new to JS and a lot of the webapp2 UI ideas and was just learning. But that begs the question: would I have learned faster with tests? At some point, before today, I think I would have done.

Although I didn’t unit test the front end I did keep a strict front-back division and pushed as much logic as I could not the back.

Lesson 3: I was already (subconsciously?) compensating for where I knew I was weak.

(By the way, Python support for mocking and stubbing is good but can someone in the Python community please document it properly? Its still a bit of magic too me.)

One of the reasons I avoided third party libraries was because of the time it took to get them working. Take dragular - for example, it is a JS drag and drop library which claims to be “so easy it hurts the brain.” I couldn’t get it to work.

I spent a couple of days with it. (I could really do with drag and drop in one part of the system).

Then I gave up and in a day knocked together a non-drag and drop alternative - not as good but it works.

Lesson 4: Even ready to use code libraries have learning curves, sometimes that learning curve is longer than doing it a different way. The cost of reuse.

Something else I relearned: those really trivial bits, the bits you easily convince yourself you don’t need to test? Like getters and setters.

Well, if you do the tests you may well find they were so trivial you didn’t pay attention and got them wrong.

Lesson 5: Unit testing the most trivial stuff can actually be the most valuable.

I say I relearned this because I learned it with a previous development a year or two back and comparing notes with James Lewis found he’d had a similar experience!

In general I’m impressed by the Google App Engine. There are some places I got stuck and a couple of things which just don’t seem to work or are not really good enough (__init__ constructors and NDB come to mind.)

Mail handling caused me a lot of problems. In some ways I can’t blame Google for this ‘cos their documents discourage you from using their own mail handling system. When I eventually did cut across to SendGrid not only was the change far easier than I expected but it also solved some other issues I had.

Lesson 6: Sometimes we resist changes which are actually good for us.

Live running the system caused surprisingly few problems. The only real problem we had in live was hitting a Google quota limit. It turned out this was a quota limit around mail sending and was eventually force the move to SendGrid.

But… The Google docs on quota limited a far from clear. Or rather, the Google diagnostics are far from clear. The logs told me I’d blown a quota but not which one. It took a lot of hunting, and some guesswork, to find it was mail - not the number of mail messages but the frequency. Even then I got it wrong because the Google quota allowances have changed over time, not only is a lot of old information still on the web but some of the limits aren’t clear or seem to contradict one another.

Lesson 7: Select may not be broken but sometimes it hard to know exactly what isn’t working.

Overall, I managed again to prove Hofstadter's law but in part that was because I enjoyed myself so much! Really, I’d forgotten how much fun coding, and seeing the code work, is. Quite possibly, I spent too much time coding last year and not enough doing paid work.

And perhaps, this is what non-coders don’t like about coders. They see programmers enjoying their work and they fear the programmers are doing more because they are enjoying themselves. And maybe, they are right. But that isn’t a reason to make programming miserable!

In the first few weeks of coding I kept a very sharp focus on “Only what do we need for Agile on the Beach” but at some point I let myself go and enabled it for other conferences. But at that point I actually found it easy to change the system because it had been built well and built with tests.

Lesson 8: It is really hard to keep a focus on just what you need for now

Lesson 9: If you focus on good engineering broadening it out will come naturally; if you focus on broadening it out you’ll forget the good engineering.

This made me wonder if I could work as a programmer again. I can still program but I’m under no illusions: I’d never get past the CV filtering let alone an interview. Firstly nobody would hire me because I haven’t commercially programmed for over ten years. But, more importantly I don’t have the libraries or other related technologies.

To pick a Python job at random, here is the one that came up first just now on JobServe:

+ Exceptional Python knowledge/experience

No, I’m not an exceptional Python programmer

+ Java, C/C++

My Java is very very rusty, my C++ just rusty but worse, I’m a C++98/2003 guy, I’ve no idea whats in 11 let alone 14.

+ Flask and/or Django

None

+ Agile, TDD, CI/CD

I’m rumoured to know a little about Agile, and a tiny bit about TDD but CI or CD… never really done it.

Fantasy over.

Lesson 10: Middle age ex-progammers may try to recapture their youth in code.

In my next entry I’ll say a thing or two about what Mimas does, but try it yourself. I’ve also set up a little site to publicise it - ConfReview.com.