Keep your product in ship shape

Originally ship shape meant to adhere to the standards of tidyness and alertness necessary on seagoing vessels of the old times, where things tended to get turbulent from time to time.

Nowadays, with paradigms like ship it or the famous potentially shipable product increment another meaning emerges, at least in my perception.

Don't strip the headlights to get the tail lights working

When I was much younger than today I used to repair my cars myself. Partially out of interest, partially out of distrust towards the garages and partially because of financial restrictions. And of course, because in those days it was still possible to work on ones own car.

One of the things we used to do when some part didn't work was to exchange it with something that did. (duh!)

For example one time when the headlights where not working me and a friend tried a variety of things – after exchanging the bulbs and some tweaking with the wires we finally concentrated on the fuse which looked fine. But to make sure, we exchanged it with a fuse we knew to be in working order – the one that was wired into the headlight circuit.

And sure enough the taillight lit up. So we changed everything else back to the original state – bulbs and wires and all. Or so we thought.

The one thing we did not change back was the fuse. Silly – we simply forgot.

Happy to have working taillights again (the bug was fixed) I drove home. Almost. At least as far as the next police station, where a friendly officer motioned me to stop and explained that I could not drive with a car with only one headlight.

Today I see this happening with software all the time – people fixing just the problem at hand, without realizing what havoc they bring upon the rest of the system.

So please – whenever you “fix” a piece of software: Make sure that you can still ship the whole system.

My car was definitely not shippable at that time – make your software-craftsmanship better than the car-mechanic handywork of an untrained teenaged boy and keep your product in shipshape. In a state where it can be shipped to the real customer all the time.

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg

The next big thing...

... probably won't save your project.

If you have seen the Gartner hype cycle model you are probably familiar with the terms “Peak of Inflated Expectation” and “Trough of Disillusionment”

Gartner Hype Cycle Model

While the hype cycle model itself is heavily debated and criticized, I for one see that a lot of “new things” follow this kind of adoption curve.

But why is that? And why is it so common around things as diverse as programming languages (e.g. Java), Infrastructure (e.g. Build Servers), Methods (e.g. eXtreme Programming) and techniques (e.g. test driven development, TDD) to name a few?

What works for Early Adopters doesn't have to work for everybody

One reason I have seen for this is the simple fact that tools in the hands of experts can become menaces in the hands of laymen. This is not only true for things like the beautiful Katana (a Japanese sword) a friend of mine inadvertently used to cut an artery in his arm. No worries: he got treated real soon and has no lasting injuries. And the tatami (floor mats) got cleaned as well by now.
But back to the question at hand – other tools are also often quite dangerous in the hands of the “non-expert.” While it is hard to injure yourself on the sharp edge of the Java programming language, it still is quite possible to use it in a harmful way – for example by over-using mechanisms like reflection, a powerful feature that makes it possible to change the program from within while it is running or change the accessibility of parts of the software.

In my experience this is what happens when the tool reaches the “Trough of disillusionment” – badly trained people start cutting themselves too often and the effectiveness of this tool for the masses becomes a subject of discussion.

In Iado (an art of moving the Japanese sword) there are several ways to avoid the self-injury of the novice swordsmen. They either use a Bokken – a wooden sword look-alike – or a Katana-like thing with a blunt edge, the so called Iaito.

This, to me, seems to be what happens, when these tools reach the “plateau of productivity” – they get blunted down to make it harder to injure oneself.

And of course it works. In a way. With their blunted down instruments, it is much easier to let more people with less training do jobs similar to the ones that the early adopters did. Those early adopters whose efficiency with these tools made the tools so compelling.

But there is a drawback – with a Katana you can easily slice through a steel plate (for example). You just can not do that with a Iaito.

So please – if you use the blunted down version of a tool – don't expect it to still work like the real thing.

Adjust your expectations and always take into account who is wielding the tool.

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg