April 2008


In any team work a certain level of discipline is necessary to achieve organized progress. In creative work, however, too much discipline can hinder both the progress and the quality of the results delivered by the team. It has long been known that software development attracts a certain kind of individuals. Usually above-average intelligence comes with an above-average ego plus (usually) some weird interests and kinks. And a certain obsession with tools combined with the love for the art and craft of building software.

For those reasons managing developers has been jokingly compared to herding cats. The manager has to strike a balance, constantly, between the discipline and freedom. This requires discerning what is crucial and has to be monitored closely from what is incidental and can be left for the team to decide or do.

Agile methods make this much easier because they focus on what is really important and really needed for orderly progress. For example Scrum calls for a Daily Scrum each day and besides that it is left for the team to decide how they will work to achieve the goals they committed to during the Sprint Planning. Also, technical level methods like XP or TDD focus more on how the code being built should look like or how should it be built rather than with what, when etc. The rest is and should be left for the people to decide. Some of this deciding will take place on the team level, some will be up to individual developers.

I believe that this is indeed the right way forward and this is how we work at Code Sprinters. We maintain a very disciplined process coupled with lots of freedom in the choice of tools and a very relaxed, informal atmosphere.

One of the things we don’t force on our developers is the choice of tools. They can use Windows or Linux if they want (I wish we could afford to give everyone a Mac as an option too, but this is not possible yet) – and whatever distribution of Linux they want. They can use a company laptop or their own. They can use an IDE like Eclipse or they can use traditional but powerful tools like VI or Emacs. It is so because for the good quality of the end product – software – the developer has to feel comfortable with the tools he uses. Forcing them to use the same “standard” tools would be as wise as forcing them to wear the same size of shoes. I’ve seen comments that “lack of unity in tools” is a bad thing – I strongly disagree with that. I think diversity in the tools used is a sign of a good, creative team.

Of course, there is a minimal set of tools everyone has to have and use, but all are independent of the OS/platform used. Everyone has to use our Banana Scrum tool to manage their tasks and update on progress, do planning it, register impediments etc. Everyone has to have Skype running on their laptop to stay in touch with others and the clients. Everyone has to use Google’s Calendar, our SVN repositories, project wikis etc.

We also don’t strictly enforce working hours. What is enforced is presence on the Daily Scrums – everyone on the given team has to be there – and there are penalties for being late. Besides that it is just said that being in the office is expected and encouraged, but there are no set hours. So we have people running in just before the Daily Scrum and people who sit in the office from early morning. Surprisingly, even without a card-clock etc. most of the time whole teams sit together in our “war room”. It turns out making it both enjoyable and palpably productive to be here works much better than enforcing presence.

Finally, there are certain standards re. the coding style, the test coverage, the way repository is to be used (what is acceptable as commit and what is not), a procedure for starting a new project etc. They are applied universally and teams working on a given projects may (and frequently do) add on top of that additional standards that for their particular project. Good example is the release procedure which looks different in each project and ranges from just tagging the release in the repository to working with the client’s server(s) to actually put the new release in production.

This approach – enforce strictly few key things, be relaxed on others – has worked extremely well for us. I’m not going to say everyone should do it exactly like we (it might be for example a tad difficult with larger teams from the logistics point of view) but I think the general principle is sound and should be part of good practice in any agile team.

I’ve just spent (I wouldn’t say wasted) half an hour browsing through a collection of old photographs made available by the Library of Congress on Flickr. Images of a world long gone, so old that even children depicted on those frames are most probably long dead. And a thought came back to me that I had years ago when first really reading up on the history of late 19th century: how easy it was, in a sense, to live one’s life then. The society’s values and roles were very clear then. No doubt as to what was wrong and what was right – everyone was believing in the general set of values based on the ten commandments and moral teachings of Christianity. Not everyone followed them – liars, murderers, thieves, deviants and the like were with us always – but no one questioned them. Most of insanity we see every day on the news now, including all possible perversions, was not thinkable or – at the vert least – was limited to single cases on the fringes of the society. No question then why general decency prevailed – no one posited immorality as a norm.

It very well might be that while we have much developed since then technologically as a culture we – Europeans – have rather declined. The turn of the 19th and 20th century was, I think, the golden age of our culture – even though the first seeds of the catastrophic 20th century were there already. Good that at least we have those images to remind us of times when right meant right and wrong meant wrong.

Bad things are happening on the markets, as everybody knows. One can read (and view talks) about all kinds or problems in the US economy, including imminent predicted collapse of the US dollar and some grim political theories behind it.

Putting the political dimension aside those predictions seem to be based on solid economical theories. In fact, opponents of the Keynesian economy have predicted exactly this kind of thing to happen for years. Just no one believed it will really happen, because said opponents (Hayek, Friedman, von Mises) have been saying that for such a long time people got used to it. But maybe the mechanisms involved required a long time to produce results we are about to see.

And here comes the startling analogy that occurred to me today: same thing happened with “real communism” in the Soviet Union – no one really believed it can fall apart within our lifetime, especially leading sovietologists. May it be so that Western-style socialism will collapse like communism – just a few decades later, because it is – after all – more efficient then communism?

I just realized today why I like going to conferences so much. It allows me to think.

This is so because usually getting to a conference involves travel and traveling has always induced high quality thinking in my brain. I don’t know why, but I find the whole experience of moving very inspiring. No matter if this is by plane, train or car my mental gears spin faster. This is a creative time also because this is usually a when I can’t use my computer, I’m not answering phone calls and generally I have less distractions.

In any case I’m finding out, that without a few hours of travel every month I’m deprived of some of my quality thinking time I used to have.

But the conference experience doesn’t end there – it also gives me time to actually listen to people talking about subjects of interest with full concentration. And ask them questions. Not possible with some interesting lectures available on Google Video and other sites. First, because it is surprisingly hard to find a free hour within a day to listen to them. Second, because there is no interaction.

Finally, on a conference I get usually a few hours of very good work on my computer in the evening. Again, precisely for the reason outlined above – less distractions.

Seems like I have to cut down distractions to move faster, the problem is that Internet is just one huge distraction. And with a laptop and Wi-Fi it is almost everywhere now.