Coding Is Like Cooking

Scandinavian Developer Conference will be held in Göteborg in April, and last week we launched the detailed programme on the website. I’ve been involved with the conference ever since the first event in 2009, but this year I’ve taken on increased responsibilities, acting as Programme Chair.

When P-A Freiholtz, the Managing Director at Apper Systems*, (the company behind the conference), approached me about taking this role, I jumped at the chance. My business is all about professional development for software developers, and a conference in Göteborg is a really good opportunity for a lot of local people to hear about what’s going on in the world outside. Many of the developers I meet in my work don’t often get away from their desks, spending the majority of their time caught up in the intrigues and deadlines of a single project and company environment. SDC2012 will be a chance for a lot of local people to broaden their horizons without it costing their boss a fortune, or disrupting their usual schedule too much.

I wrote an editorial on the front page of the conference website which explains more about what’s on the programme and who should come. Everyone involved in software development, basically 🙂

These days, we compete in a global marketplace for software development. I’m hopeful about the future, I’m enthusiastic about Swedish working culture, and I think Scandinavian Developer Conference is helping Göteborg grow as a center of competence. Please do join us at the conference.

* formerly named Iptor – now under new ownership.

I’m speaking next week at ScanDev on Tour in Stockholm on the subject of “Software Development Craftsmanship”, and as part of my research I read both “The Clean Coder” by Robert C. Martin and “Apprenticeship Patterns” by Dave Hoover & Adewale Oshineye. These are very different books, but both aimed at less experienced software developers who want to learn about what it means to be a professional in the field. In this article I’d like to review them side by side. First some text from each preface on what the authors think the books are about:

Apprenticeship Patterns

“This book should help you through the tough decisions you face as a newcomer to the field of professional software development. “ (preface xi)

The Clean Coder

“This book is about software professionalism. It contains a lot of pragmatic advice” (preface xxii)

The Content
Both books contain a lot of personal stories and anecdotes from the authors’ careers, and begin with a short autobiography. Some of the advice is also similar. Both advise you to practice with “Kata” exercises, to read widely and to find suitable mentors. I think that’s mostly where the similarities end though.

Dave and Ade don’t say much about how to handle unreasonable managers imposing impossible deadlines. Bob Martin devotes a several chapters to this kind of issue, handling pressure, time management, estimation, making committments etc.

Dave and Ade talk more about how to get yourself into situations optimized for learning and progress in your career. They advise you to “Be the worst”, “Find mentors”, seek “Kindred Spirits”. In other words, join a team where you’re the least skilled but you’ll be taught, look for mentors in many places, and get involved in the community.

Bob talks about a lot of specific practices and has detailed advice. He mentions “… pairing is the most efficient way to solve a problem” (p164) Later in the chapter he suggests the optimal composition of job roles in a gelled team. (p169) He also has some advice about how to successfully argue with your boss and go over their head when necessary (p35).

The Advice
Those few example perhaps illustrate that these two books are miles apart when it comes to writing style, approach and world view. Dave&Ade have clearly spent a lot of time talking with other professionals about their material, acting on feedback and testing their ideas for validity in real situations. The book is highly collaborative and while full of advice, is not prescriptive.

Bob Martin on the other hand loves to be specific, provocative and extreme in his advice. “QA should find nothing.”(p114) “You should plan on working 60 hours per week.” (p16) “Avoid the Zone.” (p62) “The jury is in! … TDD works” (p79) These are some of his more suprising pieces of advice, which I think are actually fairly doubtful propositions when taken to extremes like this. Mixed in are more reasonable statements. “You do not have to attend every meeting to which you are invited” (p123) “The professional developer is calm and decisive under pressure”. (p150)

The way everything is presented as black-and-white, do-or-do-not-there-is-no-try is actually pretty wearing after a while. He does it to try to make you think, as a rhetorical device, to promote healthy discussion. I think it all too easily leads the reader to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I can’t accept one of his recommendations, so I throw them all out.

Some of Dave&Ade’s advice is actually just as hard to put into practice. Each of their patterns is followed by a call to action. Things like re-implementing a program you’ve written in an imperative language in a functional language (p21). Join or start a user group (p65). Solve the same coding exercise once a week for the next four weeks (p79). None of these things is particularly easy to do, but they seem to me to be interesting and useful challenges.


Collaboration
Bob has also clearly not collaborated very widely when preparing his material. One part that particularly sticks out for me is a footnote on page 75:

“I had a wonderful conversation with @desi (Desi McAdam, founder of DevChix) about what motivates women programmers. I told her that when I got a program working, it was like slaying the great beast. She told me that for her and other women she had spoken to, the act of writing code was an act of nurturing creation.” (footnote, p75)

Has he ever actually run his “programming is slaying a great beast” thing past any other male programmers? Let me qualify that – non-fantasy-role-playing male programmers? Thought not. This is in enormous contrast to Dave&Ade, whose book is full of stories from other people backing up their claims.

Stories
Bob’s book is full of stories from his own career, and he is very honest and open about his failures. This is a very brave thing to do, and I have a great deal of respect for him for doing so. It’s also really interesting to hear about the history of what life was like when computers filled a room and people used punch cards to program them. Dave&Ades stories are less compelling and not always as well written.

Bob’s book is not just about his professional life, he shares his likes and dislikes. He reccommends cycling or walking to recharge your energy, or “focus-manna” as he calls it, (p127). Reading science fiction as a cure for writer’s block. (p66) Listening to “The Wall” while coding could be bad for your design. (p63) When describing “Master” programmers he likens them to Scotty from Star Trek. (p182)

All this is very cute and gives you a more rounded picture of what software professionalism is about. Maybe. Actually it really puts me off the idea. I know a lot of software developers like science fiction and fantasy role playing, but it really isn’t mandatory. He usually says that you may have other preferences, and you don’t have to do like he does, but I just don’t think it helps all that much. The rest of the book is highly dogmatic about what you should and shouldn’t do, and it kind of rubs off.

Conclusions
The bottom line is, I wouldn’t reccommend “The Clean Coder” to any young inexperienced software developer, particularly not if she were a woman. There is too much of it written from a foreign culture, in a demanding tone, propounding overly extreme behaviour. The interesting stories and good pieces of advice are drowned out.

On the other hand, I would recommend “Apprenticeship Patterns”. I think it is humbly written and anchored in real experience from a range of people. I agree with them when they say you need to read it twice to understand it. The first time to get an overview, the second time to understand how the patterns connect. It’s not as easy to read as it might be. But still, I think the content is interesting, and it gives a good introduction to what being a professional software craftsman is about, and how to get there.

As I mentioned in my last post I’ve recently taught a course in automated testing to a bunch of students at KYH. Before the course I spent some time looking for good course books for them. I looked at a few options and eventually decided on “The art of Unit Testing with examples in .Net” by Roy Osherove, and “The RSpec Book” by Chelimsky et al.

I chose the unit testing book because Roy does a good job of describing the basics of test driven development, including simple mocks and stubs. The book is very practical and is full of insight from experience and code examples.

I also looked at “Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit” by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. I’m a big fan of their book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, so I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately I was rather disappointed with it. It talks about what good unit tests should look like, but not much about how you use Test Driven Development to create them.

I chose the RSpec Book because it has quite a bit of material about Cucumber and how it fits in to a Behaviour Driven Development process. I think the published literature on automated testing focuses too much on unit level tools, and there is not enough written about feature level tests and how to use them as part of the whole agile process.

I also looked at “Bridging the Communication Gap” by Gojko Adzic, which I think is an excellent introduction to how to use feature level tests as part of the agile process, but it is largely tool agnostic. There is a short chapter introducing some tools, including JBehave, a forerunner to Cucumber, Selenium and TextTest too. It’s a little out of date now though, and for this course I wanted something with more detail.

I hope these short book reviews are useful.

I’ve just spent 3 weeks teaching a class of 11 students about automated testing, as part of a one year course in software testing. The course is organized by the local “Kvalificerade Yrkes Högskolan”, KYH. (loosely translated: Skilled Trade University). The students come from all kinds of job backgrounds, from sitting in a supermarket checkout to driving trams to gardening, and most of them had never written a computer program before the course started.

The KYH tries to design their courses so that students will be competent enough to get a job by the end of them, so they work closely with local employers to set the curriculum and find teachers for the courses.

I was pleased to be asked to do this teaching job, since automated testing is one of my main areas of expertise, but at the same time I was quite daunted by the prospect. I’ve never taught non-programmers before, and I’ve certainly never had to set an exam or hand out grades. Before I agreed to do it, I spent some time talking to a friend of mine who has previously taught a different KYH course, and his story actually wasn’t all that encouraging. It’s hard work preparing the teaching materials, and some of the students will find it very difficult and need a lot of help and coaching. I decided it could be worth doing, anyway. I had some teaching materials prepared already, and I wanted the chance to invent more, try out some new ideas, and broaden my horizons.

Now that I’ve done the course I can attest that it really is hard work preparing lessons and exercises, and some of the students do need a lot of help. It is very rewarding though when they start to understand. I got a real kick out of going round the classroom seeing them all starting to write tests with Selenium and Cucumber, and answering their questions about Ruby and Page Objects and how to name tests and what to assert, and where to put the code and which parts to write tests for…

I think by teaching this course I’ve learnt a lot myself about things like how to communicate ideas, give feedback and encouragement, and to set boundaries and manage expectations. I found marking their work much more interesting than I expected, too. What kinds of mistakes do inexperienced programmers make when doing TDD? Do they find it easier to write good tests with Selenium or Cucumber? Is there any correlation between testing skill and programming skill? (short answers – they don’t refactor enough, Cucumber is way easier, and no, the correlation seems pretty weak)

So do I recommend getting involved? Absolutely! I think the IT industry in general needs more people in it from diverse backgrounds, and this is the kind of course that brings them in. If my experience is anything to go by, you’ll work hard but you’ll learn a lot from the students too. Networking with the other employers in the course Industry Reference Group is useful, and if I was looking to hire a junior tester I’d now know exactly who to ask first. Actually, who knows, in a few years some of my students might even be in a position to give me a job.

Don’t just complain that it’s hard to hire qualified people and/or people from diverse backgrounds. Get down to your local KYH equivalent and help them set up a course! I think that being a good software developer or tester is not restricted to only those with a degree in Computer Science. A course at a trade school where local employers get involved is good value for everyone.

I travelled to Oslo last weekend, to take part in Agile Coach Camp Norway. This was an open space conference organized by some enthusiasts, not for profit. I became interested in going to the conference when I heard some other agile coaches tweeting about it. I’ve just started my career as a kind of agile coach, and I’ve always enjoyed the open space parts of other conferences I’ve attended. I hesitated though, since I have quite a technical focus. What clinched it was when Johannes Brodwall signed up – an excellent programmer who shares my interest in using Code Kata for teaching and learning Test Driven Development.

I was surprised to see Bob Martin in the hotel reception when I arrived – he had come on a whim since he was in Oslo that day. He spent some time on the first evening telling the story of how the agile manifesto came about, and his involvement. He’s an impressive speaker, even when improvising. Bob didn’t stick around for the rest of the conference, and he missed out on some really good discussions.

We began the main part of the conference with a “coaching dojo”, which Rachel Davies invented by analogy with a coding dojo. It was fun practicing coaching one another, and getting feedback from people who are used to giving good feedback. It really set the tone for the whole weekend.

After lunch, we had the open space opening session, and loads of sessions were proposed. I suggested 4, and ended up being very pleased I’d done them. I got some great feedback about a short coding dojo I ran – being coached in my facilitation skills was very valuable for me, and the participants seemed to appreciate learning more about the coding dojo format I use.

It turned out that Johannes and I weren’t the only technically-focused people there, and we shared lots of ideas about code katas and teaching TDD. Everyone agreed that success with agile needs developers to change the way they work, and most struggle with TDD. “Parachuting” a trainer in for a couple of days might help developers understand they could work differently, but getting them to actually make changes is much harder. I’m hoping for some success with repeated regular coding dojo sessions with a team. I’ll have to report back when I have more experience of actually doing this.

Another highlight was discussing using games for teaching agile, and in particular teaching agile engineering practices. Jon Jagger has his “cyber-dojo” collaborative programming game that he has released open source, and a “Kanban 1’s game” which he uses for teaching teams about limiting work in progress, and keeping work items small. We talked about the fact that many games are released under the creative commons attribution license, and coaches share them with each other. The games in themselves may take time and effort to create, but Jon and many of the other coaches there felt they don’t lose by sharing them, quite the opposite. They get feedback from others and help to improve the games. I wondered if they were worried about losing business to cheaper rivals who just took their materials, but people seemed confident that the skill of the facilitator is so crucial in the success of a game in achieving learning goals for the participants, that they would not lose out.

It was an intense weekend, with a couple of lovely walks in the snow, and good food together with interesting company. I learnt a lot about coaching and made new friends. I’ll be looking out for similar conferences in future 🙂