Processes upon processes: the JIRA trap

It is fashionable to hate on JIRA for software developers. Project Management made spaghetti. It has its faults, but the biggest issue is what it allows. It’s not opinionated, so any user can define any process to follow. It’s a perfect machine for generating red tape, or paper clips.

Because every time something goes wrong, the natural instinct is to add a new process, a new safety net, to make sure it doesn’t happen again [see Agile is Dead blog post]. And once added, they’re very difficult to remove.

So we get processes upon processes, the simple rhythm of a ticket lifecycle or of a sprint adorned with Deferents and Epicycles as we try and tame ever-increasing complexity with more text boxes and more statuses.

Complexity cannot fix complexity. But who has time for simplicity? This is the fundamental paradox of enterprise that Agile, and every “new big thing” is meant to resolve: complexity is added to reduce risk, but the complexity itself creates risk, and makes the risk harder to name, harder to spot, and harder to recover from if it is realised.

We have the 5 whys, the blameless retrospectives. And whilst the intention is sound – blame the system, not the individual – the solution is often to add new trinkets around the edges of the system. And reinforce that the system is the only way. They mistakenly put process at the centre, and ask the people to support the process, whereas the process should support the people.

But of course, this creates the shadow IT departments and the “non-compliant” centres. One place I worked had a strict policy that no one has admin rights because that fixed a problem lost to the mists of time. I understand the benefit of the policy, but at the time all our developers were working on IIS and couldn’t develop the websites we were paid for without having admin access on our machines. And so we had dispensations and workarounds until ASP.net core fixed the underlying issue of requiring admin access to serve web content.

Some companies stack procedure on top of procedure because the project is the centre of their universe rather than business value. And every company is in danger of falling into that trap as they treat risk management as risk elimination, instead of mitigation or recovery. They condemn every project to the tarpit of success, sinking below the crushing weight of process where sunlight cannot penetrate.

You will never have a process that prevents the next failure. You need a process to detect and recover, and you need to remove 99% of the “just in case” procedures from your process.

You don’t need to double-check the prime DVD copy before sending it for distribution, because no one has a DVD drive on their servers. You don’t need to change the admin passwords when someone leaves because there should not be an admin account that isn’t attached to a user. Eliminate the process, because every process you have is a process someone can forget. The best process is one you don’t need because the risk it mitigates cannot be represented by the system.

Either accept that you are not the centre of the universe and rewrite your rules to understand that you merely orbit the sun like so many others, or live out the fantasy that you are special, that your problems are unique, and add deferents on top of epicycles when the universe tries to disabuse you of that notion.

You can’t control the universe, only how you react to it. So don’t use JIRA to enforce pi to be 3.2.

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Journaling for technologists

I encountered a question online recently about building context quickly, and whilst I thought of the bootstrapping post I made before, I also wanted to take a chance to explore how that plays into continuous practice. I started journaling as a researcher to remind me of all the dead ends and configurations I’d tried. Although I’ve not been entirely consistent in journalling (or sometimes blogging) each day and each new discovery, I think it’s a good practice for technologists to develop. Think out loud, even if it’s to yourself.

When building context on a new project, for example, I often find it useful, as part of discovery, to note what the client (or in very rare circumstances the written requirements) says it does, as well as what it actually does.

And always, always, journal everything. How to get it running locally, how to release, who knows what, who has the admin rights,… Anything that takes more than 2 minutes to figure out.

Sometimes that journal will take the form of shared content to help the next person join the project (and like all good scouts we should leave a place better than we found it), but the important bit is to write it for yourself. 80% of the time future you won’t need it, but that 20% makes the time absolutely worth it.

2022 reflections

2022 seems to have been a strange year for a lot of people. There’s a lot of bloggers I follow whose output dropped a lot this year, myself included. Some of that I’m sure is a seeming loss of community, with changes to Twitter and Facebook, and I’m sure Google’s AMP as well, there’s been less drive-through traffic and less engagement.

I also think online discourse in many places is following the lines we see in politics where subtlety and nuance are increasingly punished and every platform is pushing shorter form content. We’re not giving ourselves time to digest and reflect.

And we should.

The pandemic is still here, but we’re adjusting, working from home is a natural state for many of us in tech, although that’s not an arrangement that plays to everyone’s strengths, so let’s make space for different companies with different cultures. There’s new ways of working to explore (hello the UK 4 day week experiment), people have moved jobs to take advantage of the change and create more family time.

But we can’t escape the world outside tech, and many of us are burning mental cycles on disease, on the massive weather events from climate change, on war, on the continued assaults by the far right, and watching inflation tickling upwards. It’s not an environment that leads us to our best work. It’s not an environment that helps us be in the moment.

Through 2016-2021 the world stared into the abyss of the rise of the far right, and the dismantling of certainties, before we were all thrown into lockdown. We were hoping for a turning point this year, but our leaders were lackluster in improvements, pulled us further to the right or were just plain incompetent. Instead of hope to counter the dispair, we got indifference at best Rather than turning away from the abyss, we collectively chose to build a car park next to it.

The greatest minds of our generation are building pipelines for ads for things we don’t need and can’t afford, whilst the AI engineers are building complex transformations that churn out uncanny valley versions of code, of mansplaining and of other people’s art. But of course the AI is built on a corpus of our own creations, and I don’t think we like the reflection looking back at us.

Ethics in technology isn’t just about accurately reflecting the world as it is, or how the law pretends it is (or seeks to adjust what is), STEM at its most important shows us the world as it could be. An airplane isn’t just a human pretending to be a bird. A car isn’t just a steel horse.

Yes, these advances in AI are cool parlor tricks, and they will lead to great things, but just like drum machines didn’t replace drummers, we need to get past the wave of novelty to see what’s really behind the wizard’s mask.

AI is dangerous. Look at how machine learning projected racial predictions on zip codes based on historical arrest data. Look at how many corrections Tesla’s “Self-Driving Mode” requires. Look how easily ChatGPT can be manipulated to return answers it’s been programmed not to. But, with the right oversight AI encompasses some very useful tools.

Let’s get out of the car park and look away from the abyss. What does the world AI can’t predict look like? After years of despair, what does a world of hope look like? What does the world you want for your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews look like?

Land on your own moon. What’s your 10 year plan to change your world?

Dear technical lead

I don’t know how you got your promotion, but I hope you’re a little scared. If you’re not, there’s a good chance that your arrogance will be your downfall.

If you got the job because you want what’s best for the team and the project, then congratulations and welcome to your new challenge.

Your job is still to produce the best product you can, but your toolkit has expanded. It’s no longer just about the code you write, it’s about helping the team produce the best product. It’s about developing processes, building a framework for everyone to work in, whether technical, social, procedural, ethical, anything that’s required.

You’re not doing it alone. You need a good relationship with your PM, your product owner, whatever role your company has.

Relationships are key to your new role. One-to-many when discussing the strategy for the project to the team, and one-to-one discussions with the developers and the stakeholders. Those relationships are the key to your expanding toolkit.

Learn about your team, what are their motivators, strengths and weaknesses. Give them autonomy to work, but be aware of what choices walk the trade-off between upskilling the team and delivering the best product sooner, because upskilling the team helps you deliver vNext, so your horizon has to be beyond this sprint.

Be a mentor.

Be decisive, even if others disagree. And stand by your decision until a better one emerges.

The next project you work on is likely to be the best learning experience you’ve ever had. Enjoy the opportunity. Seek and take advice.

Listen.

You got this.

In the beginning… was the conversation

The history of computing has been an evolution of conversation between us and machines. Single-purpose machines were built to be talked about, not communicated with. Even a hoax like the mechanical Turk.

But then the punched cards of the loom and Ada Lovelace’s ideas of a general-purpose computer started to become real, and we needed a language. At first, it was a language based on mathematics, the language of log tables, the language of angles, and then the language of letter frequencies. But soon we got more advanced, we got to the language of logic. Decision making, and computers, were open to working on anything.

And that’s where software engineers, programmers and developers enter the story. The medium of communication between the world of humans and the world of logic (because there has been no greater fallacy in human endeavour than to assume there is a complete overlap between the two, despite how many Nobel prize winners in economics have tried to prove otherwise).

The story of computers since then has been the story of building layers upon layers on top of machine logic to bring machines closer to humans. The command line, high-level languages (when C was considered a high-level language), graphical user interfaces, and the emerging field of voice and text conversation epitomised by Alexa and but Google and Facebook bots, but also the first line at the call centre, the first responder on live chat.

There has always been a conversation, and there’s always been a mismatch between our words and our intent.

As developers, our job is to derive intent from those words and the actions. Traditionally, offline in workshops and focus groups, but increasingly in real-time, teaching the machines to understand users and adapting conversions, websites, and apps, as we detect errors and confusion, as our data tells us users are unable to complete their goals.

There has always been a conversation. But this new conversation is with the users, and the machines, and the stakeholders, in real-time. With incomplete and biased data.

Be forgiving in your conversations. No one knows what this global conversation is like. But we know from social media and the news that not everyone in the conservation is pursuing truth and simplicity. But that is the only logical route, and behind all the facades is whatever truth you’ve built into the system. Are they the truths you can stand behind? Are those the truths that help and empower people?

Communicate your truths clearly and without favour, because this conversation is never pure or simple, and we have unearned power to control and shape that conversation. I don’t know if anyone would have chosen to give power to the developers and make us responsible for the truth, but in an information economy, that’s where we are. All these conversations are our conversations.

Tech is not neutral.

Speak your truth and recognise your responsibility.

Further reading

Neal Stephenson – in the beginning… was the command line

Conversation is the command line of tomorrow

Don’t be a speed shaver

CW: description of blood.

There’s a deadline looming, and your estimates show the project coming in late. Very late.

You need to claw it back. Drop the ballast and become a lean mean coding machine.

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You have a plane to catch. You look at your watch and you’re going to be late. Very late.

You need to cut corners. Shave as you shower. No time for shaving foam in the mirror.

The first cut is annoying. Your cheek stings in the heat, but you keep going.

A second cut, right on the chin. That one hurt. And it’s dripping rather than seeping.

But you need to finish. You don’t have time for this. Keep going.

Missed a bit, back under the chin.

4 cuts. 3 seeping and one dripping.

And the heat keeps them open.

So you patch it over with tissue once you’re out of the shower, try and clean it up to see what you’ve missed. And then you have to go back in and finish the job with cold skin, so more nicks, and more time is taken.

Aftershave to help seal and clean. That’s sore. That’ll sting until you get on the plane.

More tissues, and then plasters. Trying to get dressed without getting any blood stains, so that’s slower too.

---

Every shortcut you take has consequences. Technical debt pays interest, and sometimes it’s eye-watering. The debt exceeds the functionality and the project takes longer, and even longer than that. And so you have to make more cuts and ensure more pain. And still, your clients can see it’s held together with plasters that are already starting to peel.

Don’t be a speed shaver. You don’t have enough time to do it quickly.

No one thinks like you

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re the smartest person in the room. You might be the most knowledgeable about your specialist subject, but being a good boolean whisperer does not automatically make you an expert on public transportation, psychology, poverty, history, finance, or any other industry.

I’ve had the privilege of being disabused of that notion very early on in my career, surrounded by statisticians, linguists, psychologists, designers and vets. I do what I do, and let my curiosity take care of the rest.

But there’s a lot of arrogant arseholes in this industry who think they know best. Those who will talk instead of listening, who belittle, interrupt and condescend. They know their domain very well and are quick to criticise others who don’t understand.

But we all have our own models of how the world works, our own coordinates on the axes that describe the world as controlled by us vs controlled by others, whether money or relationships are more important, whether people matter more than animals, whether humanities can survive without science or science without humanities, visual thinkers or verbal thinkers or lingual thinker or kinetic thinkers. We don’t perceive or act in this world in a way quite like anyone else. We all bring unique experiences and perspectives to the table, and we all know something that others can learn from.

So sit and listen in silence. Take in what you can, and when you’re ready, ask questions. Listen to understand, not to respond, not merely to be polite, but because you are interested and you want to learn.

If we could see how others see us? They’re talking. All you need to do is listen.

Managing across distances

As the government is starting to ease lockdown and put together timescales for allowing a return to the office, I thought it was worth revisiting some of the ideas I discussed in cross-country coding to see what applies to the upcoming hybrid world, where we know we’re capable of working remotely.

Obviously there will be done time to adjust as we inevitably feel with the mental health consequences of the anxiety of returning to the office as well as the adjustments we’ll need to add or undo to deal with family life, all the new pets and babies that have joined since the start of lockdown, and the mental space we’ve held for new hobbies, for home schooling, for the new health rules.

So take this as a waypoint on some future journey.

I’m not qualified to talk about the mental distress or whatever changes you need to accommodate in your life, but I want to think about how your employer and the technology may need to work in this brave new world.

• Face to face matters. If you’ve seen someone out breaks down barriers to talking to them. Video beats phone, in person beats video.
• Trusted insiders are very useful, when there’s multiple offices, or a team you need to check in with that you’re not in all the meetings for. There’s always small things that are missed when you’re just looking through the window.
• Invest in video. It needs to be good quality. Get better broadband. Get better webcams. Get better microphones.
• But try and be asynchronous. As soon as there’s friction to synchronous communication, collaboration plummets.
• Reminder that in open offices, people prefer electronic communication. “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences”
• Set expectations. Emergent behaviours only happen through observation and feedback, and distance dampens both dramatically

How to make mistakes

Nobody is perfect. If you tell me you’ve never made a mistake in your career, not only will I not believe you, I won’t be able to trust you.

In a safe and functioning team, we can accept our mistakes, discuss them openly, learn the lessons, improve our system, and move on.

Without that, we’re trapped not by our mistakes but by our fear of making them and our fear of the consequences when our mistakes are inevitably surfaced. And “our” mistakes quickly become “your” mistake. Not a failure of the team, not a failure of the system – the processes, the automation, the communication, and the rest – but a fault of the most vulnerable and the most exposed. “It’s always the intern.”

No one makes the intern pilot responsible for a jet plane. They start in small props and in simulators. They are supported and mentored. They are given space to practice, and to fail. Because what really makes the difference isn’t avoiding mistakes, it’s recovering from them.

Build for failure

Test-first, red-green-refactor: every new feature starts with a failing test which we then fix. Make failures part of the process, small and recoverable. Expected.

Build for backup, rollback, recovery. Test for failure continually. And recover automatically if you can.

Plan for failure

Be agile. Try new things for a day, or a week, or a year. Decide in advance what success and failure look like and monitor them. Adjust course if things aren’t working. Celebrate what you learn either way..

Move fast and bend stuff, don’t break it. Do and succeed, or do, fail and recover.

The longer a decision takes, and the more you invest in it, the harder it will be to change it, and the bigger a mistake it will become. So make it quick and don’t make it permanent.

Lead for failure

A leader needs to set a clear direction. To resolve conflicts by stating strong opinions and sticking to them. It makes conflicts easier to resolve. Until those opinions need to change. Maybe the mistake is yours, maybe it’s wrong because other things have moved on. It’s ok to change your mind, so long as you can explain it.

And then go read about why Cognitive Dissonance makes all of this so hard, by reading “Mistakes Were Made”

Ideas for a second coding project

You’ve done the tutorial, what to build next?

Maybe one of the following:

• To-do app
• Shopping cart (up to the point of collecting payments)
• Bouncing balls

Don’t worry about building something unique. If you’re building something with lots of examples, you’ll have something to refer to when you get stuck.

Find something you know. Something where you can write down 5 requirements now without research because it’s something you use or an itch you have. And then you can work back from those requirements to the features you need to build. That’s the heart of programming. Not writing for the computer, but translating from human to machine, breaking things down and formalising them into simple rules.

And that’s when you realise programming usually doesn’t involve maths. It’s about thinking logically. What are the mechanics of the feature?

It’s not: I want list of tasks. It’s:

• When I open my tasks, then I can add a new one or mark an existing one as complete.
• When I type in a text box and hit Enter, then a new task is added to the list.
• When I click the checkbox next to the task, then the task is removed from the list.

There’s an action and a reaction that the machine understands. There’s choices of actions that the user can make.

Use what you learned in the tutorial to translate those actions into simple functions, and to translate the choices into a user interface, whether web, native, command line or API. Then look at it, and make it easier, faster, more secure, or add more features.

The goal here isn’t to learn a specific language, although it will help you do that, it’s to think about how to take an idea, or a requirement, and translate it into something the computer will understand. I think this is the hardest part of the journey, but it’s the most important. I’d also recommend trying programming challenges such as Advent of Code or Project Euler to get practice of writing and thinking.

Good luck on the next, biggest, step of your programming journey.