Thoughts in the Wilderness

Well today we had our first retrospective, a day before the end of our first sprint.  I used the tried & true format of “What went well” followed by “what went not as well”.  We scheduled an hour for the meeting.

As usual, people had a lot of trouble coming up with positive things to say, and not much trouble coming up with negative   One person refused to write anything positive!

It came together pretty easily that the topic that concerned the most people was “requirements”, or rather the lack of them.  There was a fair bit of conversation, which could easily have got out of hand.  In fact, it did for a little bit when one person tried to hijack the meeting for a topic other than the one we agreed to talk about.  I redirected that to another 1-on-1 meeting between the 2 of us later.

I tried to keep it in front of everyone that we wanted to come up with concrete actions that could be used to address the problems.  This worked ok to keep the conversation on topic, but no-one really suggested any actions except for our manager.  Being that she is the manager, no-one was seemed ready to contradict her suggestions.  They were good enough action items though, so I went with the flow.

The organization is very document-centric, which bothers me.  Rather than talk about ways that the developers could *pull* requirements through 1-on-1 conversations, there were a lot of suggestions on how we could better use email and documents on SharePoint.  Ugh.  I’ll have to live with the document-centric viewpoint for a while I think.  The best I can probably hope for, short term, is to find ways to make the documents useful to the team.

In the end, we finished on time and came out with some actions that we are taking to address our requirements-concerns.  Nobody was insulted or put off, and the team is fairly positive.  I’m pretty happy with those results.

For me, 2007 was mostly about learning the best way to run a development team in a way that adds the best value to the business.

I became convinced that it is not enough to optimize development locally – to achieve the best value, we must treat development as part of a manufacturing-like process. In doing so, we can understand that requirements are like inventory – they go stale and lose value if they sit around. We also can understand that we need to link the day-to-day tasks we do to business value. Finally, how we define “done” is one of the fundamental questions for any development team.

I already was using Scrum, but began experimenting with Kanban Boards. This showed me that sometimes planning meetings are wasted time. Estimating has value only as much as it assists in release-planning. My newly-won experience is invaluable in knowing how much planning and estimating is appropriate for a given situation. I feel like I could easily fulfill the role of ScrumMaster on any team, or else introduce existing teams to more optimal ways of doing things.

One of the lessons I have learned from being a Software Architect is that you cannot always dictate architecture, but you can guide it by providing simple and effective ways to do things. There are some very strong strategies that can be applied to achieve good long-term viability of software. To this end, I registered a new domain (perfectapi.com), and put up a website on that domain. I did not find the time I needed to do it justice though.

My idea was to try and apply my own hard-learned lessons of software development in a way that improved the architecture for others. This is not a pipe-dream – it has been done before, most recently with Ruby-on-Rails. If you can find the correct paradigms, you can quickly create a community that can be very effective at developing new applications.

In 2005, I had decided not to work on web applications anymore. ASP.NET was just too complex, too barebones to develop seriously on. Ruby on Rails is probably ok, but it has a Unix-like learning curve (I’ve grown used to Intellisense). In 2007, Silverlight was introduced. I have not worked with Silverlight yet, but the feeling I get is that it will change the paradigm enough away from the horrible POST-RESPONSE loop of web development.

Personally, it has been a difficult year. My lone-wolf tendencies have hurt family life, and I find myself with too few friends. I have put on weight. Work was all-consuming at times. It is not that I work long hours – it is just that the hours I work are very intense and stressful. Plus, there is just too much to know – it is a truly exciting period in software development.

I will find a new job in 2008. I hope that it will allow me the freedom to relax more with family and friends.