Philly ETE Day 1: Fantastic
A slide from Say Yes or Say No? What to Do When Faced with the Impossible
The first day of the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference was great. Molly Holzschlag‘s Keynote gave us some peace, love, and understanding, at least as far as web standards are concerned (she even made references to the Age of Aquarius…). After that, it was a challenge to choose from among the simultaneous sessions throughout the day. I’m there not just for me, but also for my team at SOMIS. They have a variety of interests, so I made sure to attend at least one session on each major theme of the conference (Agile, mobile design, management, languages, and infrastructure).
I’ll focus on my favorite talk, by Chet Hendrickson and Ron Jeffries, who years ago helped define many Agile practices. They presented A Retrospective Rant: 15 Years in the “Agile” Business. They’re both pleased that Agile has become a success and has gone mainstream, but also unnerved that it’s so mainstream that the stodgy Project Management Institute is going to offer scrum certifications (imagine Emperor Palpatine realizing the rebels actually aren’t so bad, and joining forces). Their presentation was very lively, and at times reminded me of Abbot and Costello, as they constantly played off each other. They focused on the most common failings they’ve seen in teams that are trying, but not fully succeeding, with Agile:
- No shippable product increment at the end of an iteration. Chet’s advise: think of every sprint as if it were the last one (not in the sense of stress, but in the sense of focusing on developing complete, functioning, tested features). The idea is that, if you had to go live, you could do so at the end of any sprint (you wouldn’t have the complete feature set, but every feature that you’ve worked on is complete).
- Too many defects: these are “negative features” that handicap the product owner’s ability to plan. They argued for a defect count of no greater than 1. They gave a couple real-life examples of (non-Agile) companies with backlogs of as many as 1,000 defects. Even after stopping all other work for months to fix the defects, after they fixed the 1,000, they had discovered almost 1,000 more.
- Failure to integrate: individual features are not integrated into a functioning set of features before the sprint ends
- System designs that degrade over time: architecture requires constant adjustment as the system evolves
- Partitioned teams: when team members handoff to each other instead of working together, misunderstandings and mistakes proliferate
- Failure to prioritize: saying yes to every project leads to multi-tasking, which leads to frequent context switching for the team, which results in everything taking longer and more mistakes. Work on as few projects as possible at the same time – ideally one.
The other talks I attended were all very good:
- Say Yes or Say No? What to Do When Faced with the Impossible. This took Jeffries and Hendrickson’s point about failing to prioritize projects, and went in-depth on its terrible consequences, and what you can do to prevent it.
- Building Native Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: a great hands-on presentation about developing for mobile applications. We saw working examples and code for CSS 3 transformations, transitions, and animations, jQTouch, Phonegap, and weinre
- Are You Satisfied With Your Tests? This was a great talk on what I’d call “code smells” for tests – that is, bad habits in testing that you should kick: slow tests, blase attitude towards failing tests, over-mocking, unnecessary complex object builds, gratuitous use of the database, overly “meta” tests, and testing private methods. Here are another attendee’s complete notes.
- Polyglot persistence for Java developers – moving out of the relational comfort zone: the first half of the talk was a comparison of 3 major noSQL databases: Redis, Cassandra, and MongoDB. The last half focused on using them with Java Spring, and assumed a knowledge of Spring that I didn’t have, so I cut out early, but the first part was very informative.
I’m looking forward to Day 2!