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Scrum, Agile, Extreme – when programmers get ahold of a thesaurus.

agileComputer people just love to name things.   The server guy who names all his machines after Star Wars characters competes with the network guy who names all his routers and switches after Star Trek characters to see who has the more obscure references.  Usually the Desktop guy wins with his collection of Windows PCs named after Transformer characters, but that’s beside the point.  It sounds like it is all in fun, but there is a very important reason we all do it.  Technology is hard for humans to relate to.  It is cold and lacks personality.  Names help give definition to the undefined. They help give things context.

Programmers, being computer people,  really get into the naming of languages and processes.  I’d like to take this post to identify and briefly explain some of the terms you may have heard your programmers using.

Agile development

If San Francisco could be considered not just a place but a lifestyle, Agile development would have a similar vibe in the programming world.  Typically it refers to the 12 guidelines people in software teams follow when working together on software projects, though there are widely different ways to actually put those guidelines into practice.  The ideal behind an Agile development team is that it is small, it meets all the time with each other and with the clients, and it writes code in small chunks that the customer sees working every couple weeks.  Agile was a reaction to the inflexibility of older programming procedures that didn’t allow the customer any flexibility to change their mind late in the delivery cycle.  Since customers are constantly rethinking their needs, Agile was developed to allow the code to change with the requirements.  Below are the 12 principals of the Agile Manifesto.

  1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
  3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  5. Build projects around motivated individuals.  Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  8. Agile processes promote sustainable development.  The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
  11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Scrum

HR, Sales and Accounting may have meetings, but only programmers can take the basic idea of getting together in the same room and rename it a ‘scrum’.  Borrowed from the term used to describe a huddle in rugby, a scrum is a highly organized, short daily meeting of all people involved in an agile project.  It has the singular goal of keeping people focused on the project, which is really important since a ‘sprint’, or stretch of time allotted to write working code, is usually only two weeks.   Guidelines for scrums can sound harsh, only three questions are asked, everyone should remain standing, only people with a stake in the project should speak, but it was invented in direct contrast to pointless time-wasting mega-meetings that the Dilbert comic made an empire satirizing.

Extreme Programming & Test Driven Development

Who wouldn’t want to work on an something with the word ‘Extreme’ in it, huh?  Extreme Programming (XP) is very similar to Agile, or it might be more accurate to say that it is a good case study of Agile programming before there was such a term.  The real big take home from XP that sets it apart is its absolute devotion to the idea of testing.  Now, as a lil programmer, I thought testing code was for suckers who worked government jobs.  Then I was turned onto the wonders to full stack testing and how it changed my whole outlook on my craft.  Testing is really the only way to write Enterprise ready code.  Some guys saw that if you wrote your tests first, then wrote code that made the tests pass, your applications would have fewer bugs.  They called it Test Driven Development (TDD).   Turns out testing is becoming the rock star of the programming world thanks to web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Symfony having it baked into the package.

This post just scratched the surface of the terms programmers (and computer people) love to throw around.  If you know of a term that you want a little help with, add it down in the comments and I’ll try to reshape it into something that hopefully makes more sense.  I’ve been known to use puppets with clients before, so anything’s possible

photo attributed to Foxtongue

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What were they expecting?

the-conversationSucceed at managing your customers expectation and you can never fail.  Fail to manage your customers expectations and you can never succeed. ~ me

This is one of my all time favorite universal lessons I have gleaned from business.  There isn’t really any part of my life that involves other people which doesn’t benefit from the practiced art of managing the expectations of those I’m interacting with.  When another human knows exactly what they can expect from you, on your terms, and when you consistently meet or beat that expectation on their terms, you have set the stage for a powerful ally in business; trust.

The reason this is so important is because people on a whole are very self-referential, which means they see their own perceptions and actions within the conversations and interactions they have with other people.   Imagine two people talking business over lunch.  The speaker could say ‘it will be a short project that we can deliver with limited resources and for a reasonable amount of money’.  The listener will build context around the statements with their own assumptions, drawn from their own experiences of what is short, limited and reasonable, that will ultimately create very different picture than the speaker meant to convey.  At that moment, an expectation was set in the mind of the client that may or may not be ironed out in the contract negotiations but will greatly influence the customers satisfaction when the project is completed.

I worked with a fantastic colleague on the team that had a very bad habit of responding to challenging technical requests with an automatic ‘Not sure yet, but that should be doable’.  What he meant to deliver was ‘It SHOULD be doable, but of course I won’t know until I work on it” and what the customer heard was “That WILL be EASY and there is no reason it won’t be done on time”.  So when said colleague moved heaven and earth to deliver on what turned out to be a very difficult task, the customer was unimpressed.  They had already expected it to be done without effort and was maybe a little disappointed that the colleague didn’t work on some of the other, less important features.  This is what I would call a ‘Technical win and an Expectation fail‘

Here are some tools and tricks I use when working with other people to help set the expectation

  • Pictures and mockups.  When you are working in the web industry, their really isn’t an excuse to not mockup what you are seeing in your mind for the customer.  A tool I like to use is Balsamiq, which is a Flash based web mockup framework that is quick and easy to use
  • Agile Development.  The agile process focuses on rapid delivery of code, typically every two weeks, that gives the customer something to wrap their head around.  I think Ill do a full post on agile tomorrow
  • Closing summaries.  When I talk with customers, I have developed a technique of always closing out a conversation by saying ‘So, what I understand you want is…’ and just re-summing everything you’ve been talking about.  Etiquette might frown on dragging on a conversation past what the listener wants to endure, but I almost always find mismatching expectations in the closing summaries.

What do you do to manage someone’s expectations?

photo attributed to polandeze

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JSON and the Argonauts

greek-statueThe Greeks sure were fond of super-hero team titles.  There was Jason, commander of the Argo and her crew of the best of the best, pitted against irresistible forces beyond moral man’s endurance.   What does this have to do with JSON, the JavaScript Object Notation standard used by the web 2.0’s best of the best of overcome an accent foe called Same Origin Policy?  Can’t think of a thing, I just really liked the title.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Mashup. I’m sure someone somewhere, maybe even here, told you that RSS feeds were going to revolutionize the way we distribute information.  We were all so right in so many ways because RSS, or ATOM if you prefer, has opened up the world to the unimagined possibilities available online.  Think of some way that you want to consume information.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.  Ok, you are all right you can consume information that way. Oh, heh, I mean almost all of you are right.  That guy in the back with the Helvetica shirt in Metalica font, I’m sorry but we can’t help you with your idea.  Thing is, as much as you may want to have a single page that can then pull and update XML based RSS feeds from any site in the world from within the browser without refreshing, you’re not allowed.  It is for your own protection actually.  We call it the Same Origin Policy.

Here is the idea.  When your web browser pulls down a web page’s code from a modern site, it is usually pulling down a collection of HTML, Stylesheets, Javascript.  That HTML tells the page what content goes where and what images to place by the content.  The Stylesheet (CSS) tells the browser how to make that content look and how to make it act on the page.  Then the Javascript is there to give the page life, make it interact with events, make it do impressive things that we have come to love and cherrish.  In the AJAX world, those impressive things involve grabbing information from the server and updating the page without screen refresh.  Javascript is nye omnipotent in the browser, and yet there are some quantum limitations built into the works.  Beyond the sandboxing of JS, there is one little design decision from Netscape 2.0 that has totally altered the web 2.0 landscape.  Netscape decided that a browser would only allow scripts to interact with domains that the page came from.  If a page is loaded from www.bobsdiscountlasers.com then AJAX calls are limited to bobsdiscountlasers.com.  The grand illumination of mashups, where data flows from many different locations onto one page in a relevant way, almost never happened because of this.

Web browsers weren’t designed with mashups in mind, and ‘the warts have been there from day one’, [David Boloker, cofounder of the OpenAjax Alliance and IBM’s CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies] says. Browsers contain a security feature called the same-origin policy that’s meant to keep malicious code hosted on one site from grabbing data, such as stored credentials, off another site. The same-origin policy prevents websites from one domain from requesting data belonging to another domain. ~ Security services and Mashups

But, of course, Mashups do exist.  We see Google Maps on thousands of pages not under the google.com domain.  How is it done?  We’ll get to the hero of the day in a second, for now lets look at other popular workarounds

  • Mashup at the Server Side:  Since the JS limitation is browser based, you could do all of your mashups at the server.  The server could serve as the collector of the different sources of information, combine them intellegently and cache the results.  At best this idea is inconvenient because it adds layers where they need not normally be.  At worst this does not scale when you have a single location for distributed information
  • Flash/Flex:  The Flash VM doesn’t have the Cross Domain limitation that plagues JavaScript.  A file on the server gives a list of permitted sites that the Flex app can pull data from.  I have talked with Adobe Evangalists about this option and they seemed to hint that this design decision was intented to hit javascript where it was weakest.
  • AJAX Proxy.  Similar to the first method, a proxy allows the client to pull the information through it.  It isn’t stored on the proxy, though it can be cached, and no combination is done.  Again, this is a scaling issue

Stop passing code, start passing data. What all of these work arounds do is bypass the security concern with Same Origin Policy (SOP).  SOP was originally intended to combat early attempts at Cross Site Scripting (XSS).  Modern XSS has a nasty list of exploits that I don’t have time for here, but one way to think about it is this:  If you let Javascript pull code from untrustworthy places you are inviting problems.  One possible approach to this issue was to stop the push and pull of code but to allow the pushing and pulling raw data.  That is what JSON is, a way to encode data to be pushed and pulled using AJAX calls.  Though the X in AJAX stands for XML, AJAX really is more often using JSON because SOP will allow it to be used cross-domain.  So with JSON you can pull in Google Maps and that list of Micro Brewerys right in the browser, Mash them up using Javascript, and asyncroniously keep the data refreshed, the app reactive, and your buzz in good spirits (You are walking to these pubs, right?)

My prediction; RSS feeds are going to move away from XML and on to JSON in the future.  Or at minimum, support both.  John Resig, the creator of jQuery, even has a converter to get us all started.

Photo attributed to jasonr611

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