A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to bump into Janet Hughes who had the dubious pleasure of teaching me Software Engineering back when I was a funny looking undergraduate at The University of Dundee. We exchanged a few email and, on Monday, I had the great pleasure of giving a talk on Agile Data Warehousing to Janet's 3rd year students and then to the local BCS group.
There have been massive changes since I was last there. Not least the fact that the Department of Applied Computing, as it was, has moved to a fantastic new building and become the School of Computing. The range of courses has expanded to include degrees in E-commerce Computing, Computing with Electronics and Computing with Interactive Media Design, along with the Applied Computing degree in which I graduated in 2000.
The software engineering course has changed radically as well. Janet clearly has a great feel for Agile and a passion for teaching it. She told me how she discovered Agile through her own reading, was immediately taken by the way it is tune with the way that we really develop software - as opposed to waterfall; which isn't. After attending a Scrum Master course to learn more, she has added a very strong Agile focus to the Software Engineering course I took all those years ago. While I was there, her students got their marks back for a group project assignment. Working with a real customer to write a scuba dive planning system for a mobile phone in C#, they used Scrum to manage their projects, co-located their teams and developed the code using pair programming and test driven development using nUnit. Part of the final submission was a report from a Continuous Integration system one of the 4th years was writing as a final-year honours project.
I am very impressed! It is great to see a university department teaching Agile so successfully and I think it is encouraging for the development of Agile that students are starting to come out of universities equipped to work effectively on Agile teams and influencing their future colleagues and managers to adopt better practices.
Both talks went well. I was impressed by the students' knowledge of Agile practices when I ran a short discussion at the start of the talk in which I asked them to suggest practices that support each statement on the Agile Manifesto. For example, one group identified working with a product owner as an example of a practice that values individuals and interactions over processes and tools. One of the students asked a great question about how to organise multiple teams working together on the same code base.
The second talk to the BCS was quite a different audience. I was pleased that there was a good turnout for my talk – especially since the talk was at 5.30 on a Monday evening! Many of the attendees professed no Agile experience at the start, but they asked lots of good questions showed a particular interest in Test Driven Development and if/how to integrate Agile with the wider process frameworks like Prince2 you tend to find in large organisations.
I wanted to say thanks to everyone I met for a fantastic day and for looking after me so well. Hopefully I will get the chance to come back again soon!
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Book Reviews Kick Off
My Agile/Technical/Consulting bookshelf is coming along nicely.
In fact, it was my birthday last month and I took the unprecedented step of asking people not to buy me any more books. I reckon I can make time to read about one a month so I'll be doing well if I finish this lot before next Christmas!
Reviews
As I pointed out in my previous post, most Agile technical literature is focused on software development using Object Oriented languages and I think it's important for the development of Agile that we publish research into how to apply this vast resource of knowledge and experience to Data Management.
Now I have an influx of new books, I think now is a good time to start publishing reviews. I expect the format and structure of the reviews the evolve as I learn what works best but I think it will be helpful to the reader if I were to give each book a headline score that is easy to digest...
Let's see how we get on with that. I'm off to review a book now...
I have always been a bit of a book hoarder, and being introduced to Agile was more than enough encouragement! Christmas 2007 was especially fruitful since I pointed everyone in my family at my Amazon wish list and I got a nice little haul.
There are also a couple more titles that didn't make it in time for Christmas...
- Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler
- Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans
- The New Turing Omnibus (66 excursions in Computer Science) - A.K. Dewdney
In fact, it was my birthday last month and I took the unprecedented step of asking people not to buy me any more books. I reckon I can make time to read about one a month so I'll be doing well if I finish this lot before next Christmas!
Reviews
As I pointed out in my previous post, most Agile technical literature is focused on software development using Object Oriented languages and I think it's important for the development of Agile that we publish research into how to apply this vast resource of knowledge and experience to Data Management.
Now I have an influx of new books, I think now is a good time to start publishing reviews. I expect the format and structure of the reviews the evolve as I learn what works best but I think it will be helpful to the reader if I were to give each book a headline score that is easy to digest...
- Overall Score - how much did I get out of the book. Ranges from 1 to 5
- Relevance to Data Management - how much of this book is relevant to people on data management projects. Ranges from 1 to 5.
- Technical vs Management - 1 pure management, 2 bit of both, 3 pure technical
Let's see how we get on with that. I'm off to review a book now...
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Naked Agilist Podcast
The Naked Agilist conference podcast is now available at http://www.nakedagilists.com/jan-08 complete with my presentation on TDD on Data Management projects.
While I am on the subject, I was very pleased that Brian Marick took the time to review my previous post which was in response to his talk and advertise it on his blog. Thanks Brian!
While I am on the subject, I was very pleased that Brian Marick took the time to review my previous post which was in response to his talk and advertise it on his blog. Thanks Brian!
wevouchfor.org - A Community Approach To Certification
Certification is a controversial issue in the Agile community at the moment. Some people think its a great idea that is necessary for Agile to grow, while others argue it makes it harder to separate truly talented contributors from the rest of the pack.
Laurent Bossavit presented an alternative (complementary?) approach on January's Naked Agilists mini-conference which he and Brian Marick have cooked up with a little help from their friends.
It's a website called wevouchfor.org which borrows a few ideas from social networking sites to allow software people to publicly "certify" each other based on hard evidence of a job well done. For example, Clarke Ching certified Laurent as follows..
I think this is a wonderful approach, and very well executed too. One of Agile's strengths is its strong focus on team decision making as the only way to get reliably solid decisions on matters which affect the team's ability to deliver - your boss can only act on what he or she can see, but you can never pull the wool over your peers' eyes! This site is typical of that ethos and if it is widely supported it has the potential provide a very reliable indicator of an individual's true credentials. This would be as good for the individual as it would for his or her colleagues or potential employers.
The first iteration is now live and Laurent promises more features are in the pipeline. The registration and certification process is extremely quick and easy so I hope you can find a moment to sign up and give some credit to people who have helped you in the past.
Laurent Bossavit presented an alternative (complementary?) approach on January's Naked Agilists mini-conference which he and Brian Marick have cooked up with a little help from their friends.
It's a website called wevouchfor.org which borrows a few ideas from social networking sites to allow software people to publicly "certify" each other based on hard evidence of a job well done. For example, Clarke Ching certified Laurent as follows..
Clarke Ching certifies that Laurent Bossavit is qualified as a master, capable of innovating in the skill agile adoption, based on this evidence:
I spoke with Laurent on the nakeagilists podcast and I was very impressed with his thinking, intentions and attitude: putting his spare time into producing this website wevouchfor.org (along with Brian)which benefits our community. The website speaks for itself and for both Laruent and Brian's skills and motivations. Well done!
I think this is a wonderful approach, and very well executed too. One of Agile's strengths is its strong focus on team decision making as the only way to get reliably solid decisions on matters which affect the team's ability to deliver - your boss can only act on what he or she can see, but you can never pull the wool over your peers' eyes! This site is typical of that ethos and if it is widely supported it has the potential provide a very reliable indicator of an individual's true credentials. This would be as good for the individual as it would for his or her colleagues or potential employers.
The first iteration is now live and Laurent promises more features are in the pipeline. The registration and certification process is extremely quick and easy so I hope you can find a moment to sign up and give some credit to people who have helped you in the past.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Sentient Life Found Beyond Objects
Brian Marick made a bold statement in his presentation on last night's Naked Agilists Skype conference. The podcast will be available soon but, put simply, his point was this.
With reference to Moore's technology adoption life cycle, Agile methodologies have crossed the chasm between visionaries and pragmatists only to find that, in his opinion, there are not many true pragmatists out there and the only option is to skip straight to the conservatives. He feels that the original visionaries are now spread very thinly across the world consulting with Conservative companies and the development of Agile would be better served if they were to retreat back to Visionary companies and work together on real projects creating new innovations.
Well done to Brian for sticking his neck out and making such a bold statement. As one of the original signatories on the Agile Manifesto and a consistent contributor and leader in the community, he is well qualified to comment on how Agile is being applied across the industry. Clearly, he has seen some things that have disturbed him greatly and has been moved to comment this strongly.
He is also the first to admit (listen to the podcast) that he would love to discuss this much further so I would like to offer an opinion on a factor he might not have considered...
The Agile community is too heavily skewed towards Object Oriented languages and people believe it only works with Object Oriented languages.
Back in the day, the patterns community, who were the thought leaders in the objects community, met up with the leaders in the methodology community and created what we now know as Agile (OK, so I skipped a few steps along the way, but please run with it). Naturally, the technical practices on OO projects continued to evolve and the people involved wrote the definitive works on refactoring, TDD and Agile design.
Let's be absolutely clear on something. I don't want to, even slightly, cast any doubt on the excellence and relevance of these books and I am certainly not trying to belittle the efforts or success of the people who wrote or have read them. But there is a problem. No one is writing technical books about anything other then OO technologies.
So why is this important?
Because Big Companies Are Conservative
The converse is not true (there are small conservative companies too), but in order for Agile to become truly mainstream it needs to establish itself in IT departments at multinationals like telcos, banks, media companies, major retailers and energy suppliers (the list is endless!)
Big companies like these employ legions of programmers, designers, architects, testers, managers and support staff who don't know about objects, don't do UML and think Ruby is a sort of red diamond. It's not a problem though. They don't need to know about objects because they have built their careers with languages and environments like Ab Initio, COBOL, Siebel, SAP, SAS, PeopleSoft, Business Objects, Brio and Teradata to name but a very few.
These technologies are the heart and lungs of the company and the latest J2EE or Rails website would be pretty useless without them quietly churning away in the background supporting the business's ability to deliver. Of course, we know that nothing really churns away quietly, so we need people to look after them and projects to update them and add new functions when the business environment changes - just like anything else.
It's not glamorous or sexy, but it's still very challenging and often cutting-edge work which is subject to exactly the same project pressures as the latest marketing initiative.
Unfortunately, when the IT director at a multinational looks at Agile, his or her first reaction is not that of one of Moore's Visionaries who would wonder "will this help me achieve 10X productivity gains". It's more likely to be "how does this affect my ability to keep the lights on". And that's the right place to focus - failure to do so would be reckless, career ending and maybe even illegal (governments tend to take a dim view of telecoms operators that cannot reliably provide, for example, 999 emergency services).
So what can we do?
Scrum, Crystal and DSDM have shown us how to work iteratively, Lean has taught managers how to think about software development, but a team cannot be truly Agile without the Extreme Programming technical practices that allow it to truly embrace change. It is essential that we can provide documented proof and guidance on how to apply the technical practices across a wide range of modern and legacy technologies rather than just the new era of OO toys.
The adoption pattern is there to see from the OO world. We need expert visionaries from untried technical domains to stand forward, say "YES! This is possible using Product X", and then go and make it happen. We need blogs, articles, conference presentations, training courses and, ultimately, books to guide Agile virgins through the technical practices using a range of technologies. We need to show business software vendors that they can differentiate themselves by supporting their clients Agile development needs.
That's what I am doing, but I can only work with what I know so I will end with a rallying call to the next generation of visionaries:
If you are breaking ground in non OO environments - especially business software - please write about it! There has never been a better time to make a real difference and maybe a name for yourself too.
With reference to Moore's technology adoption life cycle, Agile methodologies have crossed the chasm between visionaries and pragmatists only to find that, in his opinion, there are not many true pragmatists out there and the only option is to skip straight to the conservatives. He feels that the original visionaries are now spread very thinly across the world consulting with Conservative companies and the development of Agile would be better served if they were to retreat back to Visionary companies and work together on real projects creating new innovations.
Well done to Brian for sticking his neck out and making such a bold statement. As one of the original signatories on the Agile Manifesto and a consistent contributor and leader in the community, he is well qualified to comment on how Agile is being applied across the industry. Clearly, he has seen some things that have disturbed him greatly and has been moved to comment this strongly.
He is also the first to admit (listen to the podcast) that he would love to discuss this much further so I would like to offer an opinion on a factor he might not have considered...
The Agile community is too heavily skewed towards Object Oriented languages and people believe it only works with Object Oriented languages.
Back in the day, the patterns community, who were the thought leaders in the objects community, met up with the leaders in the methodology community and created what we now know as Agile (OK, so I skipped a few steps along the way, but please run with it). Naturally, the technical practices on OO projects continued to evolve and the people involved wrote the definitive works on refactoring, TDD and Agile design.
Let's be absolutely clear on something. I don't want to, even slightly, cast any doubt on the excellence and relevance of these books and I am certainly not trying to belittle the efforts or success of the people who wrote or have read them. But there is a problem. No one is writing technical books about anything other then OO technologies.
So why is this important?
Because Big Companies Are Conservative
The converse is not true (there are small conservative companies too), but in order for Agile to become truly mainstream it needs to establish itself in IT departments at multinationals like telcos, banks, media companies, major retailers and energy suppliers (the list is endless!)
Big companies like these employ legions of programmers, designers, architects, testers, managers and support staff who don't know about objects, don't do UML and think Ruby is a sort of red diamond. It's not a problem though. They don't need to know about objects because they have built their careers with languages and environments like Ab Initio, COBOL, Siebel, SAP, SAS, PeopleSoft, Business Objects, Brio and Teradata to name but a very few.
These technologies are the heart and lungs of the company and the latest J2EE or Rails website would be pretty useless without them quietly churning away in the background supporting the business's ability to deliver. Of course, we know that nothing really churns away quietly, so we need people to look after them and projects to update them and add new functions when the business environment changes - just like anything else.
It's not glamorous or sexy, but it's still very challenging and often cutting-edge work which is subject to exactly the same project pressures as the latest marketing initiative.
Unfortunately, when the IT director at a multinational looks at Agile, his or her first reaction is not that of one of Moore's Visionaries who would wonder "will this help me achieve 10X productivity gains". It's more likely to be "how does this affect my ability to keep the lights on". And that's the right place to focus - failure to do so would be reckless, career ending and maybe even illegal (governments tend to take a dim view of telecoms operators that cannot reliably provide, for example, 999 emergency services).
So what can we do?
Scrum, Crystal and DSDM have shown us how to work iteratively, Lean has taught managers how to think about software development, but a team cannot be truly Agile without the Extreme Programming technical practices that allow it to truly embrace change. It is essential that we can provide documented proof and guidance on how to apply the technical practices across a wide range of modern and legacy technologies rather than just the new era of OO toys.
The adoption pattern is there to see from the OO world. We need expert visionaries from untried technical domains to stand forward, say "YES! This is possible using Product X", and then go and make it happen. We need blogs, articles, conference presentations, training courses and, ultimately, books to guide Agile virgins through the technical practices using a range of technologies. We need to show business software vendors that they can differentiate themselves by supporting their clients Agile development needs.
That's what I am doing, but I can only work with what I know so I will end with a rallying call to the next generation of visionaries:
If you are breaking ground in non OO environments - especially business software - please write about it! There has never been a better time to make a real difference and maybe a name for yourself too.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Naked Agilists: 19 Jan 2008
I am giving a talk at the Naked Agilists skypecast on the 19th to talk about TDD on data management projects. My synopsis is as follows...
We are having a few problems getting Skypecast to work at the moment, so please join the list to find out the new arrangements as they become clearer.
The conventional wisdom in the design and testing of Object Oriented systems is to isolate application functionality from the underlying data model. How then, do we adopt Test Driven Development for projects where the goal is to transform the raw data and Object Oriented languages are not used? This presentation introduces the TDD approach I have successfully pioneered on my own data management projects and FIT4Data - the FIT-based testing framework I wrote for the purpose.
We are having a few problems getting Skypecast to work at the moment, so please join the list to find out the new arrangements as they become clearer.
Yahoo Agile Data Management Group
I have started an Agile Data Management group on Yahoo. It's at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-datamgmt/
This group is for the discussion of all aspects of applying Agile principles and practices to data management projects. It is intended to compliment the existing Agile Databases group and the key distinction between them is that this group covers situations where working with raw data is the primary focus of the project or application. For example, data warehousing, data migration, data cleansing and operational data transformations.
The focus of the group is wide ranging covering both technical and management topics and is open to everyone from novices to experienced practitioners.
This group is for the discussion of all aspects of applying Agile principles and practices to data management projects. It is intended to compliment the existing Agile Databases group and the key distinction between them is that this group covers situations where working with raw data is the primary focus of the project or application. For example, data warehousing, data migration, data cleansing and operational data transformations.
The focus of the group is wide ranging covering both technical and management topics and is open to everyone from novices to experienced practitioners.
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