RobG3D

BPS Research Digest is a great site, highly recommended for anyone interested in why people behave the way that they do. A little while ago, they reported on a study where anxious participants were more likely to cheat and excuse their own unethical behavior than the control group.

When we’re stressed out and feeling threatened, our priority becomes self-preservation. According to new research, this defensive mode even affects our morality, making us more likely to cheat and excuse our own unethical behaviour.

What’s striking is the cause of the anxiety: they listened to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score. Compare this to the stress of micromanagement, yearly review season, project bonuses and deadlines, or even general water cooler politics, and it’s no surprise what goes on in most corporate offices.

I’ve written before about how a manager’s primary job is to build trust and this is a good, concrete example why.

It’s also a good example of why it’s a company’s job to remove anxiety-causing policies. The less anxiety you cause your employees, the healthier they are and the healthier your culture and company is (we want people working together, not behaving selfishly). These policies include:

• Annual performance reviews. Much has been written about this.
• Individual performance-based bonuses. They have been proven to be counter-productive, without a single shred of evidence supporting their utility.
• Limiting career and salary growth based on positions. People should not compete for a single “senior” spot.
• Limiting PTO and not having separate sick days. Being sick is not a vacation.
• Not forcing/encouraging people to take a vacation. This causes paranoia, burnout, and envy.
• Limiting the flow of information. People will worry if they know what they need to know.

The list goes on and on. And the lesson is very simple:

When you reduce anxiety, you get better work.

In the tech-artists.org G+ community page there was a comment on a thread about unit testing:

A key factor in TA tools is the speed at which we need to deliver them, and our audience is considerably smaller than, say, engine tools code. Therefor it becomes somewhat hard to justify the time spent on writing the unit tests, and then maintaining them as the tools change or are ported or updated to match new APIs.

In other words: Testing is great, but we don’t have time for it. Or the common alternative: Testing is great, but it’s not feasible to test what we’re doing.

Codebases without tests manifest themselves in teams that are stressed and overworked due to an ever-increasing workload and firefighting. Velocity goes down over time. Meanwhile, I’ve never known a team with thorough test coverage that delivered slower than a team without automated tests. In fact I’ve observed teams that had no tests and crunched constantly, added tests and became predictable and successful, then removed the tests after idiotic leadership decisions to artificially increase velocity, and watched their velocity drop way down once the testing infrastructure, and especially culture, fell into disrepair.

Companies that do not require automated tests do not respect their employees, and do not care about the long-term health of the company. It’s that simple (or they are incompetent, which is equally likely). We know that no testing results in stress, overwork, and reduced quality. We know that more testing results in more predictability, higher quality, and happier teams. I would love to blame management, but I see this nonchalant attitude about testing just as often among developers.

The “do it fast without tests, or do it slow with tests” attitude is not just wrong, but poisonous. You are going to be the one dealing with your technical debt. You are the bottleneck on call because your stuff breaks. You are the one who doesn’t get to work on new stuff because you spend all your time maintaining your old crap. You are the one who is crunching to tread water on velocity.

I have a simple rule: I will not work at a job that doesn’t have automated testing (or would be in any way inhibited instituting it as the first order of business).

• I have this rule because I love myself and my family. There are enough unavoidable opportunities to interrupt evenings and weekends for work reasons. It is irresponsible to add more ways for things to break.
• I have this rule because I care for the people I work with. I want them to have the same option for work-life balance, and work with me for a long time.
• I have this rule because I want the company I’ve decided to invest in (employment is the most profound investment!) to be successful in the long term. Not until the end of the quarter, or even until I leave, but for a long, long time.

Have you heard about #noestimates? No? Well I’m sure you can guess what it is anyway. But reading the debates reminded me of a story.

While at Game Developer’s Conference a few years ago, I was arguing about estimation with a certain project manager, who, despite having no actual development experience, was in charge of development (Icelandic society is notoriously nepotistic).

“So, maybe no estimation works for your small projects, but when you have to do big projects, and you need to ask for budget, and coordinate many departments and offices, and you need to plan all this in advance, what do you do? How would you plan Incarna?”

Incarna was CCP’s expansion that introduced avatar/character-based “gameplay” into EVE Online. What shipped was the ability for your avatar to walk (not run!) around a room. It was massively over budget, behind schedule, and under delivered. A few months later, 20% of the company was laid off. There’s been no active development on Incarna since 2011, and World of Darkness- which continued to use Incarna’s core technology- was cancelled and the team laid off earlier this year. It was, quite simply, the biggest disaster I’ve seen or heard of my career.*

A character-based game is also something CCP had never done before. They are massively- MASSIVELY- more technologically complex than the “marbles in viscous fluid” EVE flight simulator. CCP did not have the in house experience, especially in Iceland, where most of the (very smart) engineering team had never worked on character based games.

So it was pretty hi-larious that a project manager was using Incarna as an example of why estimation is necessary. But cognitive dissonance is nothing new. Anyway, my response was:

“You don’t plan Incarna. You greenlight a month of development. At the end of a month, you see where things are. Do you keep going for another month? If you are happy with the spend and progress, keep going. If not, pull the plug. Once you can make a prediction at the start of a month, and it holds true for that month, and you do this two times in a row, maybe make a prediction for two months and see how it plays out.
You may pass a year this way. Well, a year isn’t a long time for developing a character-based MMO and game engine from scratch. But at the end of the year, you at least have some experience. But you keep going. If your velocity is consistently predictable, you estimate further out. Eventually, if you can get your velocity stable at the same time you’re growing and developing, you have a fighting chance.**
When your velocity isn’t stable, you reign things in and figure out. If you go through a year of missed month-long predictions, you need to change things drastically (or reboot entirely) if you hope to get something predictable.”

Nothing really insightful there of course- I’m just parroting what has worked me me and many, many others, from Lean-inspired methodologies (and this one in particular says traditional yearly budget cycles are responsible for many terrible business decisions).

A couple months ago I was asked if a significant new feature could get done by June. It would build on several months of foundation and other features. I responded that I was pretty confident that if we aim for June we would have it by September. My rationale, simply, was that previous similar projects shipped 3 or more months late, and I didn’t have enough experience with the team to give a more accurate estimate.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. You need to create historical data before you can extrapolate and plan.

The historical data also needs to be “meaningful.” That is a much more nuanced topic, though.

* It should go without saying that disasters the scale of Incarna are 100% at the hands of management.

** On Star Wars: The Old Republic, management took an interesting strategy of driving velocity into the ground so that while it was terrible individually, it was at least stable. They could then increase the number of people resources and predict, pretty reliably, when it could ship. The game ended up costing about $200 million (I suspect much more, actually), but it wouldn’t have shipped otherwise.

In The Beauty of Testing, Steven Sinofsky writes:

…great testers understand one the cardinal rules of software engineering—- change is the enemy of quality.

This is not a cardinal rule. This is a outdated and obsolete mode of thinking. Change is how you discover great UX. Change is how you refactor and reduce technical debt. Change is how you incrementally improve both your product and code quality.

Maybe that’s too obvious, and clearly Sinofsky isn’t arguing for static software. More nuanced (and the rest of the piece provides that nuance) would be “change inevitably introduces bugs, and bugs reduce quality.”

This too I take issue with. Your codebase should be verifiably better after you fix a bug: you’ve found a shortcoming in your automated tests, so you add a test, and maybe refactor some stuff as well. Or, you’ve identified a bad experience, and can change it to be better in a controlled manner. A bug is an opportunity for improvement. Without bugs, it can be very difficult to improve.*

It can be difficult for anyone who hasn’t worked in a codebase with extensive testing to understand this. In most cases, fixing bugs is playing whack-a-mole. Whack-a-mole is unacceptable to me. Every change we make at Cozy is making the code clearer, simpler, better tested. It’s making the product smoother, faster, and more intuitive.

Change is necessary; it is up to you to determine if it is a friend or foe.

If you’re practicing disciplined development and automated testing and not creating many bugs, good job! This post isn’t for you :)

In my previous post about technical debt, I explained how modern definitions of technical debt are harmful. Now I turn my attention to equally harmful metaphors.

Viktoras Makauskas made the following metaphor in a comment on my last post. This is a pretty perfect stand-in for metaphors I’ve read in other articles that harmfully define technical debt.

Imagine your car gets a strange rattle. You go to your mechanic and he says, “it’s your exhaust pipe holder, you need to replace it, but it’s gonna take a while to order a part and ship it, so just park your car here and come back in a week”. You say “no, I have this weekend trip planned, is there something we can do now?”. They say “yeah, we’ll put a strap on it meanwhile, just drive a little more careful and it should hold, but make sure to come back and do a proper fix”. Mechanic charges you now, and then a bit later.

This seems sensible on first read. But upon closer inspection, it’s quite clear the roles here are totally wrong*:

• The mechanic is the programmer (the role of the “expert”). Well, a mechanic may or may not see your car ever again. They do not have a vested interest in your choice. A mechanic’s relationship to a car is totally different from a programmer’s relationship to code.
• “You” are the “business” (the role of the “stakeholder”). The metaphor assumes that if you are irresponsible, it only impacts you (it’s your car, your money, your time). This is a problem. A programmer is impacted by business decisions in a way a mechanic is not impacted by whether you fix your car now or later.

This isn’t a simple language problem. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of roles that is naive to the way software development works. Programmers will be the primary sufferers of technical debt. Eventually the business will suffer with a slower pace of innovation and development and higher turnover. But well before that, programmers will be fixing (and refixing) obscure bugs, will bristle under management that tells them to go faster, will be working extra hours to try to improve things, and will eventually burn out. The business will only suffer once real damage has been done to a programming team, and many have given up.

This is why control of technical debt must be in the hands of programmers. Definitions or metaphors that urge otherwise are actively harmful.

Let me close by pointing out I’m just repeating what Ward Cunningham has already written about the original technical debt metaphor. The article ends with:

A lot of bloggers at least have explained the debt metaphor and confused it, I think, with the idea that you could write code poorly with the intention of doing a good job later and thinking that that was the primary source of debt.
I’m never in favor of writing code poorly, but I am in favor of writing code to reflect your current understanding of a problem even if that understanding is partial.

Thanks Ward.

* There are also a couple other problems with this metaphor. First, if “you” and the mechanic are the same person, and responsible for both business and implementation? In that case, there’s no need for a metaphor at all. Second, what happens if the exhaust fails? Do you become stranded? Does the car catch fire? What’s presented here is a false choice between a “correct” solution (replacement) or a “sloppy” solution (strapping it on). Why not rent a car? If there’s no responsible-but-relatively-cheap decision (there almost always is!), it’s still never acceptable to make an irresponsible decision.

David Smith over at baleful.net makes some interesting points about the length of most interviews:

So mathematically, you will most likely get the highest confidence interval with: 1) Resume screen, 2) Phone interview, 3) In-person interviews 1-3. From the above, this should represent about 50% of the total causes, but should produce 91% of the total effect. Adding additional interview steps after that 91% brings only incremental improvement at best and backslide at worst.

He makes an extremely compelling argument, and I encourage you to read the entire piece. That said, I still prefer a full day of interviews as both the interviewer and interviewee.

The interviewee angle is easy. I enjoy interviews. I like to dig into my potential employer. I want to grill your second-string players. I want to hear how junior people feel treated. I want as much information as possible before making my choice. But I know this is just me, and people who are less comfortable with interviews probably prefer shorter ones. I also admit I don’t think I’ve learned anything in the second half of a day of interviewing that would have made me turn down a job. But I have learned things that helped me in my job once hired.

The benefits of full-day interviews for the interviewers is much more complex. There are several factors:

• We have diverse backgrounds and expertise, and each group brings a unique perspective. Candidate postmortems are not dominated by the same couple interviewers.
• I want to give as many people experience interviewing as possible. I consider it an important skill. Limiting things to three in-person interviews means the interviewers are all “musts” and I don’t get to experiment at the periphery with groups or combinations.
• People want to be a part of the process. I’ve personally felt frustrated when left out of the process, and I know I’ve frustrated others when I’ve left them out.

For a developer role, I want them to meet with at least: founders, ops, lead developer, two developers, myself. We’re at an absolute minimum of 7. That is with a narrow set of views, without inexperienced interviewers, and leaving good people out. What am I supposed to do?

• For starters, the interview process should be more transparent and collaborative. Ask the interviewer if they want a full day, two half days, morning or afternoon, etc.
• No group lunches. I’ve never gotten useful feedback from a group lunch. Keep it down to one or two people. A candidate just doesn’t want to embarrass themselves, so they just shut up, and side conversations dominate.
• Avoid solo interviews. I used to hope to solo interview everyone. But over time, I’ve found that pairing on interviews enhances the benefits listed above. There are still times I will want a solo interview, but in general I will pair.
• Cut the crap. Interviewers should state their name and role. Don’t bother with your history unless asked. Don’t ask questions that are answered by a resume. Instead of “tell us about yourself” how about “tell us what you’re looking for”.
• Keep a schedule. Some people are very bad at managing time. If someone isn’t done, too bad, keep things moving. They will eventually learn how to keep interviews to their allotted time.

Thanks to David for the insightful post. I’ll continue to keep full-day interviews, but we’ll definitely change some things up.

Ben Sandofsky wrote a post about why QA departments are still necessary, specifically with regards to mobile app development. He makes a good point: mobile apps create a distribution bottleneck that makes very rapid iteration impossible. I agree, and this is a good angle to think about. I would have been happy with an article focused on this.

Ben is clearly a talented guy but this post was insane. In a literal sense. It is a rant for anti-Agile curmudgeons at best, and would leave me questioning the experiences of anyone that thinks this way at worst.

Websites ship embarrassing bugs all the time. They get away with it because they didn’t ship it to all users. You roll-out everything out to 1% of users, and watch your graphs. If things look good, slowly roll out to 100%.

The idea that this is this sort of incremental rollout is ubiquitous amongst web developers is crazy. It requires infrastructure, code designed to support split testing, experienced operations engineers, robust monitoring, a disciplined process, and more. The institutions with this sort of sophistication all have strong automated testing environments. Which brings me to my next issue:

I think automated testing accelerates development, but I haven’t seen a direct correlation between testing and quality. On projects with massive, high quality test coverage, I’ve seen just as many bugs slip through as projects with zero coverage.

This is the software equivalent to climate change denial. Where does this experience come from? I am not sure I’d be able to find a single developer who would corroborate this. Oh, right:

Tell a game developer you don’t need [QA], they’ll tell you you’re nuts.

The game industry is full of these folks who believe what they are doing is such an untestable snowflake. Unsurprisingly, games have historically been the buggiest software around. Never, ever look at game development as an example of how to do QA right. Not just automated testing, but manual QA too.

…a great QA team is far from a bunch of monkeys clicking buttons all day.

Game development has a hallmark technique of hiring masses of QA people and have massive layoffs at the end of projects. There is an entire website dedicated to tales of horror from QA people. It makes The Daily WTF look like paradise.

Take the unicorn of “two week release cycles.” As you build infrastructure for faster releases, simple code becomes unwieldy. Tasks that should take hours take weeks.

What does this even mean? There are endless apps on two week release cycles. I am confused how building infrastructure for faster iterations ends up adding complexity to simple code or tasks.

Disciplined development is a lost art.

You could make this argument when we moved away from punch cards. But the idea that success in mobile apps is achieved through discipline, but success on the web can be achieved by recklessness, is beyond baseless. It’s downright insulting.

I consider it a tragedy that, when faced with the reality of App Store distribution bottlenecks, Ben’s answer is to go back to the process of yesteryear and throw out the lessons we’ve learned. Why not invent new ways of building in quality? New ways of iterating on apps faster? There are so many interesting problems to solve.

Finally, Ben cautions:

Today, any web developer who wants to stay employed has learned to build apps. If web companies want to remain relevant, they’ll have to do the same.

I have a better warning. Don’t throw away the incredible advances we’ve made over the last decade. Don’t downplay the success and rate of innovation in web development as something that doesn’t apply. Don’t throw away the universal “good idea-edness” of automated testing. Don’t rely on a separate department to enforce quality. Don’t stop looking for ways to make development better.

Uncle Bob, who I consider my favorite programming writer, had a post a few weeks ago titled “Thorns around the Gold“. In it he describes how writing tests for your core functionality first can be harmful. Instead, Uncle Bob prefers to probe for “thorns” around the “gold” first.

I shy away from any tests that are close to the core functionality until I have completely surrounded the problem with passing tests that describe everything but the core functionality. Then, and only then, do I go get The Gold.

I haven’t been doing TDD for nearly as long as Uncle Bob but I was shocked to read this. I’ve always learned and taught that you should create positive tests first, and only need as many negative tests as you feel are warranted. While you may not grab the gold immediately, you at least step towards the gold. How many thorns you expose is a judgement call. In Python, most people don’t even bother validating for None inputs, and instead just let things raise (or not). Of course, this depends on your users. For libraries limited to one internal application, I wouldn’t “probe many hedges.” For open source libraries, I validate pretty aggressively.

Of particular interest was this:

I often find that if all the ancillary behaviors are in place before I approach the core functionality, then the core functionality is much easier to implement.

I always thought you should only program what you need and no more. It seems very strange to assume the ancillary behaviors will be needed. It seems like a violation of YAGNI.

I have been trying to reconcile Uncle Bob’s advice here, and the TDD best practices I’ve learned and developed. But I cannot. Either I’ve been receiving and giving years of bad advice, or Uncle Bob has made a rare mistake.

From this post by Rands, titled “The QA Mindset”:

At the current gig, there’s no QA department. […]

My concern is that the absence of QA is the absence of a champion for aspects of software development that everyone agrees are important, but often no one is willing to own. Unit tests, automation, test plans, bug tracking, and quality metrics. The results of which give QA a unique perspective. Traditionally, they are known as the folks who break things, who find bugs, but QA’s role is far more important. It’s not that QA can discover what is wrong, they intimately understand what is right and they unfailingly strive to push the product in that direction.

I believe these are humans you want in the building.

At my current job, we don’t have a QA department either. And like Rands, I wasn’t comfortable at first. I’ve worked on teams without QA, but an entire company without a QA Department? I’ve certainly had questions about the use of a QA department, but does that mean they are a bad idea?

Yes, and this line in Rands’ defense is why:

Unit tests, automation, test plans, bug tracking, and quality metrics. The results of which give QA a unique perspective.

I am a staunch believer of “building quality in.” Every bug that slips out is a failure of your development process. The way to higher quality is not to find, or fix, more bugs. It’s to avoid them in the first place.

If you rely on QA to champion unit testing, automation, bug tracking, and quality metrics, your development process is lacking its most important tools and measures to improving quality. Quality can’t be imposed by QA, it must grow out of enabled and engaged development teams.

I have a saying: “Don’t hire to fix a problem.” If you have a quality problem, hiring a QA department isn’t going to fix it. You instead hide the systematic problems that cause quality issues in the first place.

This is not to say “the QA mindset” isn’t valuable. It is. One of my best hires was Bjorgvin Reynisson, who was a Test Engineer at Nokia and I hired as a QA Engineer at CCP. He was embedded with the graphics engine team and he helped them develop extensive automated correctness and performance testing systems. He worked with them to recognized holes in their process and test coverage. He helped with tracking issues and increasing quality. This is the “QA Mindset” I treasure, and this type of person is invaluable to development teams. Bjorgvin unlocked a latent “culture of quality” in the team he was a part of.

I contrast this “QA Mindset” with the “QA Department Mindset“. The QA Department Mindset has two damning characteristics. First, it is innately adversarial, as Rands notes.

Yes, there is often professional conflict between the teams. Yes, I often had to gather conflicting parties together and explain[…]

Second, it is by definition a separate department, which creates obstacles to better integrating engineering and QA.

Bjorgvin should be spending time with his teammates and the rest of the developers figuring out how to improve the entire development process. He should not be spending time with other QA personnel focused on QA functions. When I was Technical Director for EVE Online, I made sure there were minimal discussions gated by job title. Talk of a trade went on in Communities of Practice, which were open to all. Sometimes this didn’t happen, and those times were mistakes.

Like Rands says:

Yes, we actually have the same goal: rigorously confirming whether or not the product is great.

If that’s the case, QA should not be broken out into a separate department. QA should be working side by side, reporting into the same people, measured by the same success metrics, contributing to the holistic success of an entire product.

I love the QA Mindset. It’s tragic that having a QA Mindset gets confused with having a QA Department.

From a wonderful post by Matt Williams about the type of business he is looking for:

A Business Manifesto
We are uncovering better ways of running a business and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
– People and interactions over profits and prestige
– Quality service over quantity of service
– Customer relationships over contract negotiation
– Flexibility over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

In a nutshell I want to work for a company which values people — both inside and out of the company. I want to work where people strive to do things right.

When I go home, I want to be able to look in the face of my daughter and not have to make excuses for the work that I do and the effect it has on others.

Sums things up nicely (and definitely what we aspire to at Cozy, by the way we’re hiring).

It is a reason I left the video games industry. I wanted to use my skills to do something I felt was more constructive.

But more than that, I was amazed and frustrated with how the industry was run (almost as bad as films). Mass layoffs even on successful projects. Over-managed projects that go on for 4, 5, 6 years and are cancelled. Creating an exploitative product in order to milk a customer base. Huge budgets, huge marketing, appeals to lowest common denominators (often sexual). There are good companies but the business models are so insane that you can be around for 10 years and fold tomorrow.