Tag: lean

Getting better at programming without coding

Almost two decades ago one of the programming books was published that had a big impact on my thinking as a software engineer: the pragmatic programmer. Most of the tips and practices are still fundamental to my work. If you haven’t read it, give it a try.
Over the years I refined some practices and began to get a renewed focus on additional topics. One of the most important topics of the original tips and of my profession is to care and think about my craft.
In this post I collected a list of tips and practices which helped and still help me in my daily work.

Think about production

Since I develop software to be used, thinking early about the production environment is key.

Deploy as early as possible
Deployment should be a non event. Create an automatic deployment process to keep it that way and deploy as early as possible to remove the risk from unpleasant surprises.

Master should always be deployable
Whether you use master or another branch, you need a branch which could always be deployed without risk.

Self containment
Package (as many as possible of) your dependencies into your deployment. Keep the surprises of missing repositories or dependencies to a minimum of none.

Use real data in development
Real data has characteristics, gaps and inconsistencies you cannot imagine. During development use real data to experience problems before they get into production.

No data loss
Deploying should not result in a loss of data. Your application should shutdown gracefully. Often deployment deletes the directory or uses a fresh place. No files or state in memory should be used as persistence by the application. Applications should be stateless processes.

Rollback
If anything goes wrong or the new deployed application has a serious bug you need to revert it to the last version. Make rollback a requirement.

No user interruption
Users work with your application. Even if they do not lose data or their current work when you deploy, they do not like surprises.

Separate one off tasks
Software should be running and available to the user. Do not delay startup with one off admin tasks like migration, cache warm-up or search index creation. Make your application start in seconds.

Manage your runs
Problems, performance degradation and bugs should be visible. Monitor your key metrics, log important things and detect problems in the application’s data. Make it easy to combine, search and graph your recordings.

Make it easy to reproduce
When a bug occurs or your user has a problem, you need to follow the steps how the system arrived at its current state. Store their actions so that they can be easily replayed.

Think about users

Software is used by people. In order to craft successful applications I have to consider what these people need.

No requirements, just jobs
Users use the software to get stuff done. Features and requirements confuse solutions with problems. Understand in what situation the user is and what he needs to get to his goal. This is the job you need to support.

Work with the user
In order to help the user with your software I need to relate to his situation. Observing, listening, talking to and working along him helps you see his struggles and where software can help.

Speak their language
Users think and speak in their domain. Not in the domain of software. When you want to help them, you and the user interface of your software needs to speak like a user, not like a software.

Value does not come from effort
The most important things your software does are not the ones which need the most effort. Your users value things which help them the most. Find these.

Think about modeling

A model is at the core of your software. Every system has a state. How you divide and manage this state is crucial to evolving and understanding your creation.

Use the language of the domain
In your core you model concepts from the user’s domain. Name them accordingly and reasoning about them and with the users is easier.

Everything has one purpose
Divide your model by the purpose of its parts.

Separate read from write
You won’t get the model right from the start. It is easier to evolve the model if read and write operations have their own model. You can even have different read models for different use cases. (see also CQRS and Turning the database inside out)

Different parts evolve at different speeds
Not all parts of a model are equal. Some stand still, some change frequently. Some are specified, about some others you learn step by step. Some need to be constant, some need to be experimented with. Separating parts by its changing speed will help you deal with change.

Favor immutability
State is hard. State is needed. Isolating state helps you understand a running system. Isolating state helps you remove coupling.

Keep it small
Reasoning about a large system is complicated. Keep effects at bay and models small. Separating and isolating things gives you a chance to overview the whole system.

Think about approaches

Getting to all this is a journey.

When thinking use all three dimensions
Constraining yourself to a computer screen for thinking deprives you of one of your best thinking tools: spatial reasoning. Use whiteboards, walls, paper and more to remove the boundaries from your thoughts.

Crazy 8
Usually you think in your old ways. Getting out of your (mental) box is not easy. Crazy 8 is a method to create 8 solutions (sketches for UI) in a very short time frame.

Suspend judgement
As a programmer you are fast to assess proposals and solutions. Don’t do that. Learn to suspend your judgement. Some good ideas are not so obvious, you will kill them with your judgement.

Get out
Thinking long and hard about a problem can put you into blindfold mode. After stating the problem, get out. Take a walk. Do not actively think or talk about the problem. This simulates the “shower effect”: getting the best ideas when you do not actively think about the problem.

Assume nothing
Assumptions bear risks. They can make your project fail. Approach your project with what is certain. Choose your direction to explore and find your assumptions. Each assumption is an obstacle, an question that needs an answer. Ask your users. Design hypotheses and experiments to proof them. (see From agile to UX for a detailed approach)

Pre-mortem
Another way to find blind spots in your thinking is to frame for failure. Construct a scenario in which your project is failed. Then reason about what made it fail. Where are your biggest risks? (see How to map your fears for details)

MVA – Minimum, valuable action
Every step, every experiment should be as lightweight as possible. Do not craft a beautiful prototype if a sketch would suffice. Choose the most efficient method to get further to your goal.

Put it into a time box
When you need to experiment, constrain it. Define a time in which you want to have an answer. You do not need to go the whole way to get an impression.

From Agile to UX: a change in perspective

Usually a project starts with a client sending us a list of requirements in varying levels of detail. In my early days I started with finding the most efficient way to fulfill these requirements with written software.

Over time and with increased experience I broke down the large requirements into smaller ones. With every step I tried to get feedback from the client if my solution matched his imagination.

Step by step I refined this iterative process by developing more efficiently, getting earlier feedback, testing and asking questions for more detail about the constraints of the solution. Sometimes I identified some parts that weren’t needed in the solution.

In the journey to getting more agile I even re-framed the initial question from ‘how can I get more efficiently to a satisfying solution’ to ‘which minimal solution brings the most value to the customer’.

This was the first change of perspective from the process of solving to a process of value. But a problem still persisted: the solution was based on my assumptions of what I believe that brings value to the customer.
The only feedback I would get was that the customer accepted the solution or stated some improvements. But for this feedback I had to implement the whole solution in software.

The clash of worlds: agile and UX

Diving into the UX and product management world my view of software development is questioned at its foundation. Agile software development and development projects in general start with a fatal assumption: the goal is to bring value through software that fulfills the requirements. But value is not created by software or by satisfying any requirements. For the user value is created by helping him getting his jobs done, helping him solving his problems in his context.

This might sound harsh but software is not an end in itself but rather one way to help users achieve their goals.
On top of that requirements lack the reasons why the user needs them (which jobs they help the user do) and in which situation the user might need them (the context).
In order to account this I need to change my focus away from defining the solution (the requirements) to exploring the users, their problems and their context.

The problem with finding problems

As a software developer I am skilled in finding solutions. Because of this I have some difficulties in finding the problems without proposing (even subconsciously) a solution right away. If you are like me while talking with a client or user I tend to imagine the possible solutions in my head. On top of that missing details that are filled by my experience or my assumptions. The problem is that assumptions are difficult to spot. One way is to look at the language. A repeatable way is to use a process for finding them.

The product kata

Recently I stumbled upon an excellent blog post by Melissa Perri, a product manager and UX designer. In this post she describes a way named ‘the product kata’.

The product kata starts with defining the direction: the problem, job or task I want to address.
After a listening tour with the different stakeholders (including clients and users), the requirements list and a contextual observation of the current solution I can at least give a rough description of the problem.

These steps help me to get a basic understanding of the domain and the current situation. In my old way of doing things I would now rush towards the solution. I would identify the next step(s) bearing the most value for the client and along the way remove the shortcomings of the current solution. But wait. The product kata proposes a different way.

A different way

Let’s use an example from a real project. Say the client needs a way to check incoming values measured by some sensors. The old solution plots these values over time in a chart. It lacks important contextual information, has no notion of what ‘checking the values’ mean and therefore cannot document the check result. Since the process of checking the values is central to the business we need to put it first and foremost. Following the product kata I define the direction as ‘check the sensor values’.

Direction: check the sensor values

To see if I reached the goal the kata needs a target condition which I define as ‘the user should be able to check the sensor values and record the check result’.

Target condition: the user should be able to check the sensor values and record the check result

Currently the user isn’t able to check anything. So the next step of the kata is to look at the current condition. If the current condition matches the target condition I am done. The current condition in my example is that the user cannot check the sensor values in the right way.

Current condition: the user cannot check the values in the right way

The first obstacle to achieving the target condition is that I don’t know what the right way is. Since the old solution lacks some important information to fulfill the check my first obstacle I want to address is to find out what information does the user need.

Obstacle: what additional information (besides the values themselves) does the user need

Since the product kata originates from lean product management I need to find an efficient step which addresses this obstacle. In my case I choose to make a simple paper sketch of a chart and interview the user about which data they needed in the past.

Step: paper sketch of chart (to frame the discussion) and interview about information needed in the past

I expect to collect a list with all the information needed.

Expected: a list of past data sources which helped the user in his check process

After doing this I learned what information should be displayed and which information (from the old solution) was not needed in the past.

Learned: two list of things: what was needed, what not

Now I repeat the kata from the start. The current condition still not matches the target condition. My next obstacle is that we do not know from the vast resources of information that is needed and the possible actions during the check which are related, form a group or are the most important ones. So my next step is to do a card sort with the users to take a peek into their mental model. I expect to find out about the priorities and grouping of the possible information and actions.

After I gathered and condensed the information from the card sorts, my next obstacle is to find out more about the journey of the user during the check and the struggles he has. From my earlier contextual observation I have the current user journey and the struggles along the way. Armed with the insights from the earlier steps I can now create a design which maps the user journey and addresses the struggles with the data and the actions according to the mental model of the user.
For this I develop a (prototypical) implementation in software and test them with a group of users. I expect to verify or find problems regarding the match of the mental model of the user and my solution.
This process of the product kata is repeated until the current condition meets the target condition.

Why this is needed

What changed for me is that I do not rush towards solving the problem but first build a solid understanding by learning more about the users, their jobs and contexts in a directed way. The product kata helps me to frame my thoughts towards the users and away from the solution and my assumptions about it. It helps me structure my discovery process and the progress of the project.
My old way started from requirements and old solutions improving what was done before. The problem with this approach is that assumptions and decisions that were made in the past are not questioned. The old way of doing things may be an inspiration but it is not a good starting point.
Requirements by the client are predefined solutions: they frame the solution space. If the client is a very good project manager this might work but if I am responsible for leading the project this can lead to a disaster.
The agile way of developing software is great at executing. But without guidance and a way of learning about the users and their problems, agile software development is lost.