Tag: obsolescence

Wear parts in software

I want to preface my thoughts with the story that originally sparked them (and yes, I oftentimes think about software development when unrelated things happen in the real world).

I don’t own a car myself, but I’m a non-hesistant user of rental cars and car sharing services. So when I have to drive long distances, I use many different models of cars. One model family is the Opel Corsa compact cars, where I’ve driven the models A to C and in the story, model D.

It was on the way back, on the highway, when darkness settled in. I switched on the headlamps and noticed that one of them was not working. In germany, this means that your car is unfit for travel and you should stop. You cannot stop on the highway, so I continued driving towards the next gas and service station.

Inside the station, I headed to the shelf with car spare parts and searched for a lightbulb for a Corsa model D. Finding the lightbulbs for A, B and C was easy, but the bulbs for D weren’t there. In fact, there wasn’t even a place for them on the shelf. I asked the clerk for help and he laughed. They didn’t sell lightbulbs for the Corsa model D because changing them wasn’t possible for the layman.

To change a lightbulb in my car, you have to remove the engine block, exchange the lightbulb and install the engine block again. You need to perform this process in a repair shop and be attentive to accidental leakage and connector damage.

Let me summarize the process: To replace an ordinary wear part, you have to perform delicate expert work.

This design paradigm seems to be on the rise with consumer products. If you know how to change the battery on your smartphone or laptop, you probably explicitly chose the device because of this feature.

Interestingly, the trend is reversed for software development. Our architectures and design efforts try to separate between primary code and wear part code. Development principles like SRP (Single Responsibility Principle) or OCP (Open/Closed Principle) have the “wear part code” metaphor in mind, even if it isn’t communicated in such clarity.

On the architecture field, a microservice paradigm maps a complex mechanism onto several small and isolated parts. The isolation aspect is crucial because it promotes replaceability – you don’t need to remove and reinstall a central microservice if you want to replace a more peripheral one. And even the notion of “central and peripheral” services indicates the existence and consideration of an abrasion effect.

For a single application, the clean, hexagonal or onion architecture layout makes the “wear part code” metaphor the central aspect of your code positioning. The goal is to prepare for the inevitable technology replacement and don’t act surprised if the thing you chose as your baseplate turns out to behave like rotting wood.

A good product design (at least for the customer/user) facilitates maintainability by making simple upkeep tasks easy.

We software developers weren’t expected to produce good products because the technological environment moved faster than the wear and nobody but ourselves could inspect the product anyway.

If a field moves faster than the abrasion can occur, longevity of a product is not a primary concern. Your smartphone will be outdated and replaced long before the battery is worn out. There is simply no need to choose wear parts that live longer than the main product. My postulation is that software development as a field has slowed down enough to make the major abrasive factors and areas discernable.

If nobody can inspect the software product and evaluate its sustainability, at least the original developer can, right? You can check for yourself with a simple experiment. Print the source code of your software (or parts of it), take two text markers (my favorite colors for this kind of approach are green and blue) and mark the code you deem primary with the first text marker. Any code you consider a wear part gets colored with the second marker. If you find it difficult to make the distinction or if the colors are mingled all over the place, this might be an indication that you could improve things.

What is a wear part in software? I would love to hear your thoughts and definitions in the comment section! My description, with no claim to be complete, would be any code that has a high probability to change because of one of the following reasons:

  • The customer/user is forced to make a change request by external forces like legal regulation
  • Another software/system/service changes, forcing your software to adjust its understanding of its surrounding
  • The technical field moved, changing your perception of the code

If you plan for maintainability in software development, you always plan for obsolescence and replacement. Our wear parts are different from mechanical ones in their uniqueness – we don’t replace a lightbulb with the same model, we replace unique code with different, but also unique code. But the concept of wear parts is the same:

Things that are likely to be replaced are designed for easy replacement.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2018-02-11

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 11 February 2018, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedOn Sunday, February 11th, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch, a regular brunch on the second sunday of every other (even) month, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. This brunch was well-attended, with two new guests that seemed to feel comfortable after just a few minutes. The table provided just enough space for us. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. Because we were a larger group, we discussed with an agenda. As usual, a lot of topics and chatter were exchanged. This recapitulation tries to highlight the main topics of the brunch, but cannot reiterate everything that was spoken. If you were there, you probably find this list inconclusive:

Asciidoctor

Our first topic was a presentation of the asciidoc syntax and the asciidoctor converter. The asciidoc syntax can be used to describe structured textual content in a concise manner with a few funny special characters. It looks like markdown at the first glance, but has the benefit of being fully standardized and extensible instead of one of several competing dialects.

The asciidoctor is an active rewrite of the first asciidoc converter. Given the right set of formatters, you can generate a PDF, a self-contained interactive HTML presentation and a static web page from one single source. This follows the “one true source, many derived artifacts”-approach that every software developer should know by heart (Don’t Repeat Yourself!).

Because setting up a productive asciidoctor environment is still some manual work, one of our attendees has published a github repository that automates the manual work as much as possible: asciidoc presentation.

If you need an alternative to markdown or even TeX/LaTeX, have a look at asciidoc. It seems specifically aimed at software developers and is probably already integrated in your favorite IDE (the integration in IntelliJ is seamless).

Yarn

We discussed the two extreme approaches to handle dependencies for your project. The first extreme is to only include links to other projects/repositories that need to be fetched manually or automatically. Most modern build tools orientate towards this approach, even if there are some disadvantages like the recent Go/Github disturbance.

The second extreme is to include everything that’s needed in your repository. For a Javascript project that means that you provide your own, probably out-dated version of leftpad and thousand other libraries. You need a way to deal with transitive dependencies and keep an eye on all the versions to mitigate the risk of long-fixed vulnerabilities.

The second extreme is extremely helpful if you don’t have internet access but want to develop.

A good compromise is the local offline mirror, something that build tools/dependency managers like maven have for over a decade. This local repository is filled with all the leftpads and apache-commons that your projects need. If you checkout a new project, remember to make the build tool download the dependencies to your local repository before you go offline.

for Javascript, this concept seems a bit foreign. Who would develop for the web without the web, anyways? Yarn seems to provide a working offline mirror functionality for npm packages, though. Perhaps it is worth a look.

Opt-Out explained with groceries

During out dependency management discussion, we also compared downloadable installers with malware droppers. But that’s not where our comparisons stopped. We also came up with a good metaphor for Opt-In vs. Opt-Out methods.

If you enter a grocery store and grab a shopping cart, only to find that it already contains two or three packages of sweets and some overpriced milk, you chose an Opt-Out store. Your responsibility is to return the goods to their aisle or to buy them.

You’re probably used to Opt-In type grocery stores.

Book review: Functional Programming in Java

We took a look at Pierre-Yves Saumont’s book “Functional Programming in Java”. This book is a little bit odd in that you shouldn’t read it, you are meant to program it. Or at least try to solve the numerous training exercises and riddles. This makes it hard to read the paper version of the book, because it’s a pick-two situation of keyboard, mouse and book on your desk.

The book explains real functional programming and not the functional additions of Java 8. It explains it on top of the JVM, using Java’s language constructs. But, you will learn it from the origins and develop abstractions like Function oder Supplier yourself. Imagine you had all compiler magic of Java 8 but no JDK classes to leverage it – this book tells you how to use it.

It’s a good book, but unique in its style. It grounds on exercises and your own understanding of the material. It isn’t spoon-fed, you have to work for it yourself. It didn’t chose any existing pure functional language, but plain Java for this. So you have no excuse about weird syntax or unfamiliar ecosystems. It’s boring old Java turned in an exciting new way.

And if you are lazy and don’t feel like writing your own functional groundwork toolkit, you might want to look at vavr, a functional programming library for Java.

Polyglot language idioms

We discussed the portability of language idioms and highlighted the Curiously Recurring Template Pattern (CRTP) from C++. Then we spent some time explaining and understanding the CRTP and finally comparing it to similar things like Java’s Enum<E extends Enum<E>>. It can get wicked complex fast with those constructs.

Laser printer identification

Since 2011, we know that every single page of a color laser printer can be individually identified and traced back to your printer. This is common knowledge as stated on Wikipedia, but it still was a surprise to some of us. Why do we need such tracking? On request of many goverments.

Spectre and Meltdown

We didn’t repeat the fresh common knowledge about the nearly universal CPU security vulnaribilities Meltdown and Spectre. But we noted that it got eerily quiet, as if everybody holds their breath and waits for the morning clock to wake them up.

Some rumors has it that the current prototypes of ARM and Intel CPUs are not vulnerable, as if the manufacturers changed their speculative code execution unit long before the exploits came to light. Maybe they circumvented the problem by pure luck?

We hope to hit snooze soon.

Planned obsolescence

We discussed the notion of planned obsolescence. Typical consumer products have a flaw or weakness that is bound to break soon after manufacturer guarantee is void. Or it is deliberately incorporated into the product like page counters, waste tanks with limited capacity or the infamous short-lived light bulb.

A good start on the topic is the documentary “buy it for the waste” or “Kaufen für die Müllhalde” on german.

Given the recent noise around Apple battery life, we are now in an era where planned obsolescence is sold like a feature. Twenty-five years ago, this was Science Fiction. The author of this blog entry remembers a science fiction story by Robert Sheckley (“Utopia mit kleinen Fehlern” or “A Ticket to Tranai” in english). The protagonist reaches a planet that seems to be perfect. It is so perfect that nothing breaks anymore. The industry is desperate and sees the protagonist as a genius when he invents “planned obsolescence” and “designed discomfort” as means to raise sales. The planet has several other flaws as well. The story and the whole book is worthwhile and right on topic.

Book review (again): Clean Architecture

At last, we spoke about Robert C. Martin’s (Uncle Bob’s) new book “Clean Architecture”. I’ve already published my book review on our blog, but added some impressions and context after thinking about the book for some more time. Summary: The book is good, even if nearly half the pages might qualify as filler material and there are only two main messages. If the announcement of Uncle Bob on the last page in the Appendix becomes true, you might want to skip his next book, though.

Another book review for the future might be the new Effective Java, 3rd edition.

Epilogue

As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei in April. We even have some topics still on the agenda (like a report about first-hand experiences with the programming language Rust). And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.