Phone calls used to be so expensive while I was growing up and the cost increased exponentially as the distances increased. Often I had to plan what to talk to people when making a call to keep it short; as my entire pocket money for the month can be used up if I spoke to my parents for 30 minutes during peak hours. Communication was expensive so that people planned carefully on how to talk, when to talk and how much to talk. Some people even chose to be contactable only in person and mails by avoiding a telephone line to save big on telephone costs.

What happens when something that was expensive becomes cheap, do we spend that savings elsewhere? This is where Jevons Paradox occurs. When communication became cheaper we stared overdoing it. What used to be a routine 3 minute call to a friend once in a while is now well over 30 minutes. We started paying more by time spent rather than money spent. It is a systems problem, the inefficiency just moves to another place.

This is applicable for anything, food was expensive and refrigerating food was even more expensive so we had invented a lot of ways to carefully store, cook right amounts, recycle leftovers into new dishes and also find ways to preserve through fermentation, pickling etc. My grandmother almost never generated trash or food waste to be dumped, all the edible portions were eaten and organic waste like peels went to plants which again gave back food. We are talking about this cycle as a new way of simple life and as if no one did this before.

This is an important factor in web development in particular and software development overall. Developers are given a lot more freehand to use resources at will to deliver the experience for the user. This has resulted in loading a ~500 KB homepage of which most of the code that is downloaded and processed is not directly useful or seen by the user (A good portion would be to track what a user is doing!). In a constrained environment, elegant solutions appear; in an abundant environment everything is bloated and there is no judicious use. A single webpage can potentially crash a browser or slow down the entire system.

How can this be solved? In many other industries the problem of plenty is not there for users, there are always constraints to work with to get efficient and elegant solutions. We need something like ‘Muntzing‘ for software industry; instead of needlessly hammering through generic all in all bloated solutions we can cut out the fat and concentrate only on core work.

 

You have a business which needs apps running on iOS and android; which one is easy, building native apps or hybrid ones?

If you are the one who right away answers either native or hybrid without asking what are the considerations for the apps then you are setup for failure or great hardship. There is no blanket right approach to build apps that look similar and works similarly across the ecosystems.

Building rich native apps require depth in understanding of the capabilities of the  platform and designing a common experience for the users even though the capabilities of the underlying system might be different. Two separate teams, two different development pace add to the complexity.

On the other hand, building hybrid apps require a great breadth in mobile development. This means the team should have developers who understand iOS and android systems, knowledge of javascript, some experience in trouble shooting applications in iOS and android (may even require java, kotlin or swift exposure for some native code). It is a tall ask, requires a fair deal of experience and knowledge for everyone in the team.

Choose wisely, a blanket approach of one over the other for everything we do is not right and often leads into difficulties. If you say ‘As a company we decided to only hybrid apps’ then you don’t either understand the complexities or have not given enough thought on how to implement.

 

There are lots of certified masters and trainers programmes available for various Agile methodologies but it is extremely hard to find one for Extreme Programming (XP). You can get certified in any methodology in 3 days and claim to be a practitioner but claiming to be a good XP developer is extremely hard.

It takes a few years of dedicated practice in XP to get some mastery in XP be recognised as one by peers. It does not come with just knowing how to write stories, estimate and sequence them. The most distinguished feature of XP is its emphasis on developers and technical aspects of software development.

Most of the people I encounter have modified waterfall into mini waterfalls following super rigid plans but tracking on a weekly basis in the name of agile development without giving much thought to the technical aspects. This will not help in realising many of the goals that we set out to achieve. Also to improve the speed, work is usually allotted in silos thereby increasing dependency on people and reducing collaboration.

Try answering Yes or No to the following questions

• Do you do pair programming (May not be followed for simple straight forward tasks)?
• Can any developer in the team call for a huddle when stuck or when there is a need for a design discussion?
• Do you follow Test drive development (TDD)?
• Is your team’s CI sacred, no one breaks the build or if broken it comes back green soon?
• Do you do frequent commits/merges (short lived branches) to the master or do Trunk based development?
• Can anyone in the team question the quality of code?
• Does the team get together often to do mob code reviews or do some learning sessions on best practices?
• Is it easy for you to roll off or onboard developers at least once a quarter?
• Is there automation at all levels that people do not spend any time on recurring tasks?
• Does your team seems to be productive enough if they work only for 5 days a week?
• Is the team able to interact and negotiate on the stories with the Product owner during development?

The list above is not exhaustive but if there are questions that you have answered ‘No’ then you are not on the path to mastering XP.