March 30, 2010

Tomek's tray notes on Scrum

As Nigel Baker was giving his speach titled "10 tips that ScrumMasters should know, (but probably don't!)" at Winter Agile Tuning, Tomasz Przybysz was taking notes on a paper tray. I've heard the talk was pretty good and a few people were trying to copy his tray. Since the original presentation is not yet available, I thought I'll help with putting my own photo (phone quality) on-line.

Maybe Tomek will take a while to put some insight into his notes? What say you, Tomasz?

Click on the image to get the full (readable) size version.

March 29, 2010

4Developers 2010 Review

I've been to 4Developers in 2009 in Cracow, together with Tomasz Przybysz and we had very nice impressions, no wonder then I wanted to signed up for 2010 edition in Poznań as well. Tomasz was sick, but Jakub Kurlenda decided to come with me. This time our company was sponsoring the conference so I had a stand-up banner to carry.

Getting up at 4am is annoying, and you need to get up so early to get to Poznań by car. Thanks god it was  Friday, I could be dangerous if woken up at this hour on Saturday.

After arrival we were invited by high-heels hostesses. Now I'll be a bit stereotypical programmer for a while: what on earth are so lovely hostesses doing on an IT conference? Yeah, sure they look nice, but hey, I thought I'm paying my money for the knowledge. If I wanted to go for good looking girls, I'd visit a local Salsa club. The best high-heels can do is distract me. And I'd rather you spend my bucks on better food, more speakers or just lower the price instead of this.

Unless, of course, these were local IT students helping for free. I strongly doubt if Poznań has so many female IT students all together in all its higher education facilities, but if that is the case, I'm starting to regret I've not moved to Poznań.

While I am at the organizational part, lets say that the rest was quite flawless, with tasty sandwiches, drinks, cookies and console games in between lectures. Two exceptions were: a bad lunch, served at Orbis Polonez hotel (and a total rip-off at 50zł) and no place to sit down while outside of conference rooms.

Not that we had any time, mind you. All the presentations had a tendency to take more than scheduled, and while it's quite fine with me (it actually means there are people who'd rather listen than go for a cookie and coffee), the host didn't seem to like it much. I think there should be more buffer time for breaks or maybe even an open space in between, to make everyone happy.

Fighting for live

Let's get back to the lectures. The conference had four tracks, and I've started with 'Fighting for live – derivatives and successors of Java are taking over the world' by Michael Hunger. That was a big disappointment. Michael was way too theoretical. I'm afraid nothing from his speech would be useful to anyone in the room. And he didn't give us much more than what we can actually find on wikipedia: just a brief list of some from 400+ languages running on JVM. The only interesting parts were actually played from youtube. I've not been waking up at 4am to watch youtube in Poznań. I can do it back home, you know.  As I said, a total disappointment.

Microsoft Cloud: Windows Azure

Angry and sad at the same time, I've decided to switch rooms to see Maarten Balliauw talking about Windows Azure. I've been thinking about using Google App Engine for my next project, so I wanted to know what Microsoft has to offer in terms of cloud computing. And boy, they do have stuff in there.

Maarten gave us a quick overview of a few projects surrounding the M$ cloud, and after that showed us how to move a simple ASP.NET application to Azure. Jakub Kurlenda, who I believe never had a chance to work with .NET, was amazed. `It can't be that simple` – he said – `There's got to be a lot of problems with complex solutions`. Well my friend, remember that M$ has inherited all the good stuff from Borland togethere with Anders Hejlsberg. Sure it sometimes doesn't work perfectly, but still their tools are quite sexy. And way easier than anything you can find in Java world.

The Microsoft Azure does look very interesting. You get an MS SQL, Storage Service for unstructured data, front end web servers, back end servers and a AppFabric Service Bus to connect different services in a via-VPN-like manner. You even get an information marketplace Codename "Dallas", to sell and buy services and data. Now this sound like an App Store of cloud computing, doesn't it?

I think the war between cloud computing providers is going to be quite a show soon. And no matter whoever wins, I think that Microsoft won't lose.

Not so Funky It Management

For the third lecture I've visited the `IT Management` track, where Peter Horsten, a guy who moved from Netherlands to Poland to create his company (Goyello) in Gdańsk, gave a speech about `Funky It Management`, but after half an hour I've returned to Java track uninspired. Peter is a great speaker, but for the first thirty minutes I heard nothing I could actually use or didn't know already, so I wasn't going to risk the rest of the time.

TopLink Grid and Oracle Coherence

That made me see only half of presentation from Waldemar Kot about TopLink Grid and Oracle Coherence, and I really regret that. Waldi, as he is sometimes called by friends (and notoriously by Jacek Laskowski) works for BEA... errr... Oracle, and while I do not know whether he is only consulting or also building systems for his clients, he is sharp as a Gillette, precise as a laser and full of knowledge. I really enjoyed his talk, there was a nice mix of theory and practice, and finally, some stuff I could actually use at work. Thanks Waldi.

Flex 4 and iPhone news

After a horrible lunch, Piotr Walczyszyn gave us a tutorial in using Flex 4. Years ago, I had a chance to use AMF to communicate between a heavy Flash frontend and a PHP backend, and it worked quite well. I have to note that especially debugging was nice, something I wouldn't expect from a binary and proprietary format. For the last two years, I've been hearing about how easy it is to have a Java backend and Flex rich frontend. A lot of people I've met at the last year's GeeCON conference actually worked that way. I was very interested in the topic and after the show I can tell you this, Flex is a way to go if you want to have a rich (heavy?) Intranet client. I think though, that its use for public/Internet services should be considered carefully. Too much bells and whistles and you are going down on frontend complexity and throughput. But you already know that, don't you?

If using Java, I'd go for Flex 4 if Wicket is not `rich` enough for the solution. If Wicket is fine, I'd stay away from anything more complex (and difficult to test). I don't have a lot of love for GWT, after what I've seen at work. But that could be a GXT fault, not a Google failure.

One of the most interesting news Piotr spread, was that Flex is being implemented on Android and... wait for it... iPhone! How's that possible, you ask? We all know Apple doesn't want to loose its AppStore market to on-line flash applications. Well, they are building a native Flex to Objective-C compiler, that's how. If they manage to implement a runtime on Symbian and Windows Mobile, it may be the only truly portable technology. Unless you call HTML 5 a programming language, of course.

Java SE 7

After that Marcin Katas was talking about Java SE 7, which is scheduled for the end of this year. There was a lot about new Garbage Collector, that I don't really care about, a few thing about OSGi-like solutions to dependency hell,  support for dynamic languages, new concurrency classes, closures and  Project Coin (small changes/additions to the language).

The only thing I can say is: why so late? And why so little?

Especially for Project Coin.  This is actually quite sad. Java as a language is being left behind its competitors. Really, Automatic Resource Management is a concept implemented YEARS ago with `using` in C#. Come on people, I'd at least expect stuff like .NET LINQ in new version of JDK, not even mentioning some long needed fixes for stuff like collections and generics. It's been four long years since Java SE 6, there should be a Java SE 8 already.

I really think they should release a new version in a fixed interval of time, like Ubuntu is doing, like it was before Java SE 6. And forget about the hardcore backward compatibility, like with fu...-up generics. Banks that are still using J2SE 1.4 are not updating anyway.

Sobótka on Craftsmanship

And finally, I've been waiting for this one, Sławomir Sobótka, owner of Bottega, guy whose blog I'm actively reading, shared his thoughts about software craftsmanship.

That was by far the best presentation at the conference. Absolutely brilliant. I would not be able to put more meaningful information in such a short time and accessible way even had I tried for months. And to be honest, that was also the most important subject, useful to everyone, touching the work of every software developer in the room (and in the other .NET room as well). Kudos to you Sławek.

Too bad, there wasn't anything new to me then. But maybe I should be actually glad, maybe it means I'm keeping up with the front line. Maybe, or maybe we are just reading the same books, groups and feeds (or I'm reading his blog actually). Anyway, I'm very happy about this lecture. What a beautiful world would it be if everyone was as passionate for craftsmanship and quality as  Sławek is.

I didn't make it for OSGi speech from Jacek Laskowski. Sorry Jacek, but waking up at 4am doesn't leave you a lot of strength for the last lecture. I've seen Jacek in action a few times, and it's always a pleasure as he is a great showman (in a positive sense). I hope I'll see you again at Warsaw's JUG meetings, but now I'd rather get back to bed before midnight than get sick after the conference like all my friends did. Yeah, I've heard that Jakub Kurlenda got down just like Tomasz Przybysz a week ago, after the Winter Agile Tunning.

The price of knowledge has always been high, I guess.

Alltogether it was a very interesting conference and definitely worth the money.

Reviews (in Polish) from others can be seen here and here and here and here.

March 28, 2010

Winter Agile Tuning Review

I've found Winter Agile Tuning conference purely by accident, reading someone's blog. I have to admit that I've never heard about it before event though it was a second edition already. As I had ma chance to talk with, Jakub Dziwisz, one of the organizers, I understood why. Jakub didn't think about it as a country wide conference, more like an way to animate local Agile society. Well Jakub, I've counted at least four people from Warsaw and quite a bunch of speakers from abroad, so I believe you'll do well with changing your target audience expectations for the next edition.

Having an Agile conference somewhere nearby (I consider Cracow nearby as it's 3h by train from Warsaw) in a suitable time, is a good enough reason to go. After  I'd checked the website I knew, I cannot let it pass by. The program was interesting, with some well known names (i.e. Szczepan Faber, guy who wrote Mockito, the best mocking library in Java world), it was practically free of charge (50zł) and it was starting at 2pm on Saturday.

2PM! Do you know what that means? It means that you do not have to get up at 5am to catch a train or at 4am to get there by car. You don't have to be totally exhausted, intoxicating yourself with gallons of energy drinks. You don't have to get there a day before, wasting a perfectly sweet Friday night. It means that you get up at 8am, like normal people, you have enough time to eat lunch, and after the conference it's exactly the right moment to go to an afterparty.

I wish all the conferences would start at at least at noon.

Back to the event. I went there with a friend of mine, Tomasz Przybysz, one of not so many programmers I've met, that actually cares about the quality of his work, and as there were two tracks and two of us, we've decided to split and exchange the knowledge during breaks.

I've chosen the 'Craft' track while Tomasz went for the 'People'. That was a pretty good choice of mine and I only wish I could be on '10 tips that ScrumMasters should know...' by Nigel Baker. But let's start from the beginning.

Sweetest acceptance tests

The first lecture was given by Bartosz Bankowski and Szczepan Faber. At the last moment, they've changed the topic of the presentation from an enigmatic 'Be a VIP and rid your WIP' to 'Sweetest acceptance tests'. Can't say I was disappointed.  They took us through an example of working with Sweetest which is a sort of a plugin to a wiki that allows for a very fluid and direct translation between a wiki-defined set of acceptance requirements and automatic (junit) acceptance tests.

How does it work exactly? It's quite simple: you talk with your client, you both write his requirements in a wiki, the tool creates junit automatic acceptance tests for you. Here's a demo.

It fits very well with a TDD/BDD approach and allows you to have a bit more contact with the client, as the client can see on the wiki what his own acceptance requirements are and which are already implemented.

Lately, we've spent two days creating acceptance test scenarios for my client in doc format, which could allow him to formally say 'yes'. We've been doing it by checking his requirements (again), checking whether we have implemented them right, and writing all down.  The thing is, that since we do TDD/BDD, we already have all the tests that tell me whether his requirements are met, because we start implementing a new feature by writing a test for it. The main failure of the situation was that we've been writing those scenarios AFTER the whole project was implemented. Had we had them written down BEFORE, maybe even had them connected to unit tests, we'd be done before we've started.

That's what Sweetest is for.

Not that it's something totally new. If you're doing TDD you are already implementing client's requirements as tests (or at least you should start every feature with a single test for it, and then go down the implementation and Red-Green-Refactor line up to the point when it's fully working and is fully covered), but everything that helps with communication, well.. helps. And as in my example, can save you a few days writing docs.

I've been to another conference in Cracow last year where Szczepan was presenting Mockito framework. Just like the last time, his presentation was vivid, fluent, interesting and straight to the point. That's what makes a happy Panda.

Let them speak in their own language

Next was Konrad Pawlus 'Let them speak in their own language. How we enabled domain experts to build acceptances tests - case study'. Konrad shared his experience with developing Test Driven software for financial market. The clue was to allow domain experts, guys used to Excel, to verify software in a way that was familiar to them.

To do that Konrad (or his team) created a Visual Basic tool, that could convert xls files with example calculation to a scripting language, and then fire up this scripting language in a similar manner to junit tests. At the end, domain expert could verify everything down to the last number (and knowing that Excel actually creates a lot of errors with rounding that is very important), create new tests to check scenarios they never thought about before.

This is quite a cool way to bring customer into testing and have a robust feedback right away instead of getting a lot of bugs and change requests at the end. It's not something new as well, there are frameworks like FitNesse by Robert C. Martin that accomplish this, the thing was that for some clients/projects you need to have an exact Excel equivalence in calculations, which means simulating Excel's errors as well. Even those, the customer is not aware of. That's where it's nice to actually verify everything back with Excel.

Estimation of software complexity in Agile projects

After that came Jarosław Swierczek with his 'Estimation of software complexity in Agile projects'. Now that was quite cool and controversial lecture. Jarosław stated that SCRUM's poker planning is nothing more than an expert estimation, something that have also occurred to me some time before.

Don't be fooled by the 'expert' part, expert estimation is nothing more than calculations based on intuition, something which may work for experienced people and repeating projects, but often end up with pulling numbers out of your ass. Sure, the poker thing helps a lot, having other people verify your 'out-of-ass' calculations helps as well, but it's still intuition. We would wish that it's at least heavy wizardry but it's not. It's not science at all.

Jarosław Swierczek stated that according to some statistics a bit more than 70% of expert estimation is wrong, when wrong means more than 30% difference. Unfortunately I had no chance to ask him where did he have this percent from and I believe that this may not be true for poker planning (does intuition work better for a group?), so it all stays as anecdotal evidence.

Anyway, he was able to show us a nice, scientific formula for estimating complexity and time-cost. Things that were especially interesting:

- You need at least two years of historical data (estimations of complexity and time + the actual results) to be able to do anything more than 'pull numbers out of your ass'.

- You need to choose a formal method of calculating complexity and stick with it (event the Functional Point method is not that bad)

- Complexity has got NOTHING to do with the time it takes to finish something

- How much time it takes, depends your team's performance, which should be calculated from sprint to sprint, which is depending on stuff like technology/experience/distractions, and can actually be calculated by expert method ('my intuition tells me I'm gonna be super fast/slow because I have a lot/little experience in this technology')

Jarosław has got his own consulting company Aion www.aion.com.pl where they help other companies with estimating complex projects, so of course you should be wary about marketing bullshit, but what he presented made a lot of sense to me.

Journey through tests and prototypes

The fourth lecture was given by Piotr Trochim, a game developer (his current linked-in profile shows CD Projekt RED, the company behind 'The Witcher'). Piotr was talking about TDD in game development, a situation which is quite different to typical enterprise/b2b/Internet development in that you create a hell lot of prototypes of different ideas before actually deciding what you are going to put into the trunk of your repository.

Well, we (Internet/intranet software developers) actually create a few prototypes too, especially when changing the technology, so it applies as well to us.

Since creating well written prototype does not pay off in the long run and only slows down the prototyping, Piotr suggested this change is TDD cycle:

- First create a working prototype or a few prototypes (max 4h) if you need to have to choose between something. Don't worry about tests, do it as simple and fast as possible.

- Decide whether the idea/technology is fine to be used on production

- DELETE the prototype(s) completely (never commit the prototype as it is very badly written)

- Now write the solution again, using TDD and best practices

- When you're finished, create a tool to help monitor/debug the solution. This could be anything from stuff as simple as logging annotation (so you can turn logging into debug mode and see what happens), to state visualizers.

For me the most important part was to NEVER commit the prototype and always delete it completely. This is something I've seen way too often, when programmers commit a completely chaotic prototype just because it works and try to extend it later with very poor results. It usually ends in refactoring bigger/longer than actually writing the same stuff the proper way.

It was also interesting to note, that while Piotr is using C++ for development, he creates most of the prototypes in C#, as it's simply easier.

Yeah, I wouldn't like to return to C++. The expressiveness of this language simply sucks.

BDD and Ruby On Rails using Cucumber and Rspec

Last lecture was from Pawel Wilkosz about BDD and Ruby On Rails using Cucumber and Rspec. Frankly speaking I was tired, I don't work with Ruby and using TDD for more than last 4 years I didn't have much to learn in here.  That's where I'd rather be on 'People' track, where all the guests were having an Open Space kind of discussion.

And then there was an afterparty, but that's a completely different story.

You can find official pictures from the conference in here.
All pictures by Krzysztof Dorosz.