At least have a taste

We teach our children to at least have a taste before they judge anything as "yak".

We also teach engineers to try out practices before they judge anything as "yak".

"Just try it, if it does not work - ditch it".

TDD (test-driven development) is probably the most difficult technical skill associated with so called agile development especially in constrained embedded environment. It is also probably the most rewarding when in use.

The problem with TDD is that it has a learning curve. To make things worse the earlier debug-later development model has an unlearning curve. Most of the true benefits can concretely be seen after a fairly long period of time. It is not enough just to have a taste before judging, you actually need a prolonged tryout period. You most likely need some external help in the beginning. Your short term productivity suffers because of learning new skills and solving new kinds of problems.

You need someone in customer's role who is willing to talk about long term productivity as well.

Never the less I recommend to just have a taste.

Just remembered when I was just nodding on embedded TDD

Recently I have been talking a lot about embedded TDD to different, mostly experienced, embedded programmers. I thought I would jump right into a bit more advanced issues, to start a discussion, and maybe walk out with few new things myself. After all they were excellent programmers. I didn't want to waste the opportunity to learn.


During these sessions I have seen a lot of nodding people. I have though that "wow, I'm pretty good at explaining this". I have left with a smile on my face after a huge sense of agreement. I know better now. It's a much longer journey than one day seminar.

The challenge, or one of them, as I realize now, is that if you give a basic introduction with mickey mouse stuff examples to experienced embedded developers you will be immediatelly shot down with "that won't work in our environment, because [choose your favorite item identified on Embedded Agile Yahoo group]".


On the other hand if you rush straight into embedded TDD specific stuff, people are going to just nod.

And this is the other end of the same challenge. They are nodding so that you would go away faster. Not understanding fully is scary for a seasoned engineer who has not opened a book in the past 15 years or so. This nodding experience alone is not going to make anyone start practicing TDD. The best is to give a hands-on experience on TDD itself, show the benefit, and not on mickey mouse stuff but on real deal.


Advice that I'm going to follow is to try to remember when I was also just nodding and how many years, books, articles, conferences, talks, discussions, trials, failures, small successes, and so on, it took for me to get it. And I'm still only beginning to understand TDD.

Islands of Expertise Can Get You Lost

You may be familiar with the following scenario. The embedded software development department has finally launched a large new system. The system obviously immediately gets new feature requests and other modification needs. During the initial development each developer has found a pet part in the overall system. When the improvements/modifications start it is intuitive to assign these smaller projects to a person whose area the change mostly concerns. In this approach we launch several, as many as there are developers, projects to run in parallel. This seems like a natural way to go.

While tempting at the first look, there are several problems in the above scenario. First is the customer’s role. It is difficult enough to get a functioning product owner for one project. Running multiple projects at the same time is ridiculously challenging. If we get one person to act as a customer proxy for all these small projects, this person soon becomes a bottleneck for all these projects. A project needs collaboration with the customer representative, and the sooner we get the feedback the better. The customer needs to be available at all times, and this is easier to achieve for one project at the time.

Second problem follows from the fact that it is rare that all these projects are completely independent. While we think that no one works on more than one project at the time, we actually have created a highly complex hidden multi-project environment. Typically one, or few, developers know something about everything. This means that people that are supposed to be working for their own project need to consult other projects continuously. These people become the bottlenecks for other projects, and their own project is impossible to estimate. As a net result we push all our projects to be more, and more, late without any control to what is going on.

Thirdly, assigning a developer to her previous pet part of the system further develops the specialization in a narrow part of the overall system, creating small islands of expertice. More and more closed silos of expertice emerge in the department. This is a high risk path as in an unfortunate case of loosing that person for one reason, or another we halt the development of that part for unpredictable period of time. Yes, I have heard that documentation should be there for allowing anyone to work on new part. Well, having been in the development game for nearly 15 years I kind of have lost faith to that approach. Maybe if the previous developers have focused their energy mainly on enabling future work –type of documentation. Never the less, safer path is to several developers to know the work.

The fourth problem is the lack of possibility to gain from the superior performance of true teams. Assigning each person to a single small project will at its best only accomplish the sum of each developer in development department. If we are successful in getting a true team to jell we can accomplish a lot higher performance that the sum of team members. This is important especially when the work we are engaged with gets more complex, and needs higher problem solving capability.

Changing to work in teams and in the same part of the system may feel difficult and weird at the beginning. Progress may also appear slow as most of the team members are unfamiliar with the parts of the system they need to work with. It may also take old school engineers by the surprise that they also need the softer skills, interaction and communication. It is crucial that collective ownership is still enforced. Teams have a remarkable capability in finding the ways to work. The practices supporting the work of team will merge rapidly. You don’t have to know everything to start working this way. Just follow the basics;

1. do fast paced iterative development,
2. have reflective retrospectives, and
3. create open, learning-driven culture.
   

Is There Any Value in Values?

Recently I was blessed with an opportunity to facilitate a project retrospective for globally distributed project at the end of their 9th Sprint. Project has development in Europe, China, and Mexico. It is an embedded system development project involving electronics, plastics, mechanics, and firmware development. For all the participants this is the first contact with Agile project management. As a starting exercise we had each participant try to describe the project so far with a single word. The words we got:

• "Chido" (This is something like "cool")


• "Good"


• "Good"


• "Skilled"


• "Challenging"


• "Spectacular"


• "Fun"


• "Speed"


• "Improvement"


• "Interesting"


• "To Be Finished..."

This was interesting in itself.

An article "Manage Your Embedded Projects" in Embedded Systems Design described developer motivators:

• "Achievement"


• "Growth"


• "Work itself"


• "Personal Life"


• "Technical supervision"


• "Advancement"


• "Relationship with peers"


• "Recognition"


• "Salary"


• "Responsibility"

This data is adapted from Boehm, Software Engineering Economics (1981) and Herzberg, "One more time: how do you motivate employees?" Harvard Business Review (1987). So it is a bit outdated. The data in the article is used to demonstrate the difference in motivators between developers and managers. Similar findings are presented in Motivators of Software Process Improvement: an analysis of practitioners' views (2002) and De-motivators for software process improvement: an analysis of practitioners' views (2003), both by Nathan Baddoo and Tracy Hall.

We can go on to generalize this further, and think about differences of people and organizations. Value system of people has been recorded and studied for a long time. Von Rosenstiel and Koch (1) reported that the values have changed towards respecting the uniqueness of people, individualism, enjoyment and discipline,self-development and also material values. That is not enjoyment, it is enjoyment AND discipline among other things. To me the "just words" exercise showed that agile work actually builds on these values; the project was challenging and needed lot of skill, but that just made it interesting and fun - chido. In many cases this however is not following the values of the company, which often are still drawn from old school thinking, like punctuality, hard work, modesty and other values related to duty and acceptance. This discrepancy between values of employee and employer affects the commitment level. Lack of commitment, in turn, reduces employee motivation and effort.

Of course in large organizations values are mostly just lip service, but nevertheless above should lead organizations to rethink the value in their values.

(1) von Rosenstiel, Lutz and Koch, Stefan, Change in Socioeconomic Values as a Trigger of organizational Learning, Published in (Dierkes, Meinolf, Berthoin Antal, Ariane, Child, John, and Nonaka, Ikujiro, Handbook of Organizational Learning & Knowledge, Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2001).

Book: The Tipping Point

I finally read The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point tells us how little things can make a huge difference whether an idea will success or not. Will it tip or not. Examples and cases presented by Mr. Gladwell range from young men's high suicide rate in Micronesia, via fashion trends, cigarettes, children's tv shows, all the way to warning mechanism in surroundings of Boston about the upcoming attack of Brittish in 1775.

Malcolm explains, in a very understandable way, the law of the few; Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen. These are the three different personalities needed for a new idea to become epidemical. He talks about social epidemics. He then further explains the concept of stickiness factor, and the power of context.

What has this to do with things we are interested in? Graig Larman calls introduction of agile development methods a paradigm shift. When you introduce an idea of this magnitude, what you are doing, is asking people to unlearn much of their current knowledge. We of course know that the old knowledge is by no means useless, we just need to update it with some new knowledge. Never the less, introduction of agile methods and lean thinking is a novel idea in most organizations. The theories and concepts presented in The Tipping Point help us to understand the process of making this change and getting it to last. I have learned a long time ago, that it is not enough that you understand, you need to get others to get it as well.

Let's see what these theories in my opinion tell about agile intervention. In many cases, especially early in the decade, agile methods were introduced to organizations by younger champion developer, usually from position of no power. They just happened to be interested in learning and continuous improvement. They read a lot, they go to conferences, and they talk to fellow craftsmen. Furthermore they like to analyse the new things, and then tell these ideas to others. They are the Mavens. If things go nicely they will meet a Connector at some point. Connector knows everyone inside the organization, and knows who to talk to in order to get the change started. After the initial start, to make the idea of agile development really tip, we need extra ordinary people called Salesmen. They are the ones that can translate the ideas and experience reports so that we can communicate with lots of different people in order to get real structural changes to happen in an organization. Agile coaches and consultants are a good bet at this if you can not find someone in your organization fast enough. On top of that agile is a nice sounding word, and it can help to increase the Stickiness Factor. The first agile pilot project should have importance and wide enough commitment, creating the right Context for the intervention to tip.

Other literature (for example Pinchot, Intrapreneuring: Why You Don't Have to Leave Corporation to Become an Entrapreneuer, 1985) documents the same kind of process. Terms used elsewhere include 'Brain workers' who have the intellectual ability to think in novel ways and are able to argue their decisions. 'Intrapreneuers' are daring in using their vision of innovation regardless of for example political resistance. 'Gate keepers' have strong contacts to the organization's environment and have communicational competencies for making initiatives 'digestible' for the organization. Further a top management mentors, godfathers, or corporate angles are terms used for expressing the need for management commitment in such a venture.

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.