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Building software is always a task of trying to hit a moving target. The complexity keeps growing on every parameter if not managed well. Projects which build softwares that have to talk to each other are often built by different teams under different managements, leaving less scope to find schedule and contract to match for smooth integration. Many times I have observed that there is so much of dependency on each other that the projects look like they are progressing so well until they hit a dead lock on integration.

rocking-horseIn my view such projects are like rocking horses, for a child it gives an illusion that s/he is in control of the horse and its movements but there is no real progress, it is just moving not progressing. The illusion of movement in a project is formed when developers implement the requirements which is neither validated nor integrated but just added to growing source code, followed by an all out big bang effort to integrate and push it to production. The result of rework and last mile dash leaves the teams burnt out and demotivated that there is hardly enough energy to move on to the next work.

Research say that we have two kinds of thinking which I encountered in the book ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, it says that people who work with the brain (knowledge workers) need to make use of both focussed and diffused modes of thinking which is mentioned as L-mode and R-mode in the book. Procrastination is the key to R-mode as it props up the answers we are looking for, at a moment when we are not thinking about it. It has worked for me very well as I have observed that I get great ideas in shower, while driving, while having coffee staring outside the office window.

Sadly management is trained to look at people furiously typing at their computers for long hours as work and any thinking time saharais deemed as a luxury. This problem gets compounded when management in the guise of agile leaving out all the people aspects behind; which help in looking back, taking stock of situation and plan well but use it solely for micromanagement. People if lost will usually walk in circles, it is a proven fact that people lost in a desert in the night time or an overcast condition without the direction markers will walk in circles, more about it in this link from Nat Geo.

Directionless movement is just a movement for the sake of movement like a rocking horse, there is no real progress.

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Building software is not an engineering problem, it is a communication problem between engineers and business. Agile Manifesto‘s first and foremost point is about the individuals and interactions. It is imperative that the feedback loop should be as short as possible to reduce the cost of late rework. Each team in an organization would be unique in terms of composition, their communication and means of interaction will be fine tuned for that particular group. The teams should be guided through non negotiable philosophies rather than intricate set of policies, restrictions and tools.

Cliche – ‘Any code can be understood by machines, code should be written such a way that it should be readable by humans’

MatrixCode is read many times more than it is written, so it is everyone’s desire to keep the code base very neat to adhere to good coding standards. One way of ensuring this is to do a code review. With Git the collaboration got easier that you ask anyone to clone your repo, do some work and contribute back through a pull request. Pull request is the only way of contributing code to a project which is otherwise a closed read only repository. The owner reviews the pull requests and decides what goes into his/her repo. The feedback cycle in this manner is too slow but works well for social coding.

Cliche – ‘If you have a hammer then all your problems look like nails’

It is becoming increasingly difficult to gather the right requirements, translate them quickly into working software and that too in an efficient hammer-147840_640manner. It is necessary for us to be able to roll up information from the environment and translate that into the software. To help the evolution we should be able to keep the feedback loop as small as possible so that it is very easy to add the right functionalities at a good pace. I happened to read a nice writeup on the importance of rolling up information from the environment. Many people fail to visualize what their intent is in selecting a tool in the first place, pull requests work very well in controlling what goes into someone’s personal project. It will also be successful in team setups, but it comes with a cost. The cost is the speed of evolution, as it will take longer and longer to sync the commits when the codebase grows.

Cliche – ‘Give a carpenter a latest power drill instead of a hammer, he will use it as a hammer’

penguin-158551_1280In the SOA context it is a double whammy where there are many micro repos and pull requests are used to control the quality of the code. Choice of tools and technologies are always like rock, paper & scissors; what works in one context will not work in the other. Choose the right one considering the intent and moving targets in all dimensions in the system, change the approach if it does not fit in or the situation has changed.

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Roadmap A typical roadmap is something which gives a chosen possible path with alternate routes, options and milestones. But these alternatives and options stop at the map level and do not move into product roadmaps in the industries. It is very common to see product roadmaps published with milestones and when to expect them but all of them are linear. It is not a roadmap, it is just the road ahead which is more or less static. Responding to change is possible only when you have a roadmap, else every problem that comes in the way puts us in a hardship as we were not prepared to respond with alternatives.

How do we come up with a roadmap for software projects? Just like maps the requirements have to be visually triaged. We need to collect them at granular level such that it can be captured recorded in one or two sentences that can be written in bold on an index card. These granular requirements are popularly called as stories which represent an action of an end user or the ability of the system.

Once we collect most of the possible actions and abilities then we lay them all together on a large table or put it up on a wall to see them all at one glance. This helps us to triage quickly and discard duplicate ones and add some more if they were found to be missing. Once we have come up with an initial list then we collect the cards as per the priorities and arrange them linearly. If a requirement can be done in parallel then a parallel stream is introduced. In this manner we will be able to have a visual data on what are the dependencies and how much can be done in parallel.

We should play around the sequence and parallel streams to come up with multiple options for milestones and these multiple options together constitute a roadmap. Every few months it is better to revisit to the roadmap as software projects are always a moving target. This is nothing but the release planning meeting mentioned at XP website. We have to be aware of the options and not just rely on the first release plan that we have created, if we rely only on the first draft then it is just the road ahead; we will achieve all the milestones as per the plan but it may mostly lead to a not so desired location.