Robby on Rails

Several months ago, a few of your colleagues decided to join forces with you as you had come up with a concept for an innovative web application, shared the ideas with your friends and relatives, and began developing a business plan. After a few months of performing some initial market research, working on your pitch, and raising some initial funding, you decided to bootstrap the project and start designing and developing the product.

During your research phase, you came across several articles about this exciting new technology called, Ruby on Rails. You were impressed with many of the sites that were being developed on this new framework as well as the community that surrounded it. Your team decided that it would be a great idea to follow this trend and use Rails as the platform for your new product.

At this point, you began soliciting freelance developers and/or firms to hire for the design and implementation of your project. Eventually, you make a decision and break ground on building the product.

Let’s jump forward to the present day.

You’ve been in heavy development for quite some time. Your product has gone through a series of design changes and you’ve recently begun to allow other people to begin testing the application. You’re receiving a lot of bug reports as people use the system. Your development team quickly fixes them as they appear, but you’re noticing a trend in the development process.

The speed of implementing new features is drastically slowing down as your development team is spending most of their time fixing bugs. Along with that, they are becoming frustrated by the project because they can’t keep up with your new feature requests while trying to keep up with your growing number of bug reports. You’re becoming concerned about the stability of the product and are slightly suspicious that your developer(s) might not be as good as they suggested they were.

Did you hire a bad development team? Chances are, you may not be able to tell. You’re not a developer, so reviewing their code would almost be a waste of time. How would you know if they were doing a good or bad job? Your developers reassure you that things are going to work out in the end, but it’s going to take longer then originally planned. Along with this, your partners and investors are anxiously waiting for you to launch the product, but something feels wrong. You’re worried that launching it too soon could be the quick death of the entire project if it all comes to a screeching halt due to unforeseen bugs and problems with the application. This wasn’t how you pictured the launch of your exciting new product and you feel a lack of confidence in the entire process.

What can you do?

Before I get into that, let’s discuss some of the possible causes for this situation.

• Your development team may have grossly underestimated this project.
• You might have pushed too many features into the initial release of the product and your development team might not have done a good job of helping you determine what you need, not just what you want.
• Your development team might not emphasize testing enough in their process.
• Your development team may have begun to take a lot of short cuts in an effort to hit your launch date(s)
• Perhaps you asked for quick turnarounds on new features before an investor meeting… maybe this happened on several occasions.
• Your development team might not be very good with Ruby on Rails, maybe this was their first Rails project.
• ...and so on.

At this point, the big question is… what’s the problem?

Can you answer this question yourself? Can your development team answer it? If not, what do you do? How can you get an accurate understanding of how stable the code base of your application is?

Answer: An independent code audit and review

Why is this a good idea? Well, when you have an independent team review your code, you get the benefit of having a fresh perspective.. and often times, an independent team can be much more critical and provide an honest assessment in a very short period of time. This is especially true if they have a lot of experience with the technology. For example, PLANET ARGON has been conducting code audits on existing projects for over two years. We’ve designed a process for checking existing code bases for mistakes that we’ve either made ourselves in the past or found in other projects that we’ve reviewed.

In fact, our process currently walks us through the following areas of your Rails application.

• Security of the application
• Privacy of users’ personal data
• Adherence to the conventions of the Ruby on Rails framework
• Scalability of the application
• Performance of the application and data model
• Testing framework and process
• User interaction (when applicable)
• Information Architecture
• Model-View-Controller (MVC) implementation and organization

Not only does this process provide you with our analysis, but we also provide you with our advice as to where your development team should focus their attention next. If your team is lacking experience in the areas that we recommend they focus on, we’re also here to help them through this with our consulting services. We’re currently assisting several Rails development teams with their testing process, refactoring, user interaction design, optimizing their site, improving their deployment strategy, and plan the implementation of new features.

In general, most freelancers and firms could/should provide you this service, but it should not be performed by your existing development team. They have a bias towards their process and this is your chance to get a second (or third) opinion on the work that you’ve been paying them for. If you’re spending several tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars into this product, an independent review of your investment should be something to seriously consider.

There are several different scenarios that could lead you to deciding to have an independent firm perform a code audit. In fact, I’d encourage you to always get an outside perspective of your team’s work.

To learn more about the Code Audit and Review process that we provide, call us at +1 877 55 ARGON or contact us online.

InformationWeek has a short story titled, Poor Communications, Unrealistic Scheduling Lead To IT Project Failure.

“Communications failures top the list of reasons IT projects fail, according to poll results from the Computing Technology Industry Association.

About 28% of 1,000 respondents identified poor communications as the main cause of project failure, according to CompTIA, which offers project management training.”

So, while we’re all spending so much of our time focused on improving our technical skills, are we also investing our time into becoming communication superstars?

If you look back at the following posts, you’ll see some links to some excellent books on this topic.

• Project Enlightenment with d3
• The Technology of Dialogue
• Those that Tend the Store need Dialogue

I’m not sure how I missed this recent post on Martin Fowler’s bliki last week on Customer Affinity. In this post he references when the term “agile” first came about and mentioned that, “one of Kent’s suggested names for ‘Agile’ was conversational software development – the point being that it’s a two way communication. “

Conversational Software Development.

This doesn’t sound so different than what Brian Ford and I are calling, Dialogue-Driven Development. ;-)

Fowler goes on to say, “This isn’t something like a telecoms protocol that you can define, but the back and forth discussions about how software can enhance the business are where the real value lives. Much of this conversation is of half-baked ideas, some of which grow into valuable features – often ones that aren’t things that the customer originally thought of.”

If you didn’t follow the thread of comments on my recent post on Dialogue-Driven Development, you might not know that this name came up during Martin Fowler’s keynote at RailsConf when Brian and I were sitting next to each other and Martin kept reusing the word “dialogue.” Brian and I can’t seem to agree if I said, “Dialogue-Driven Development” out loud or if he wrote it down on a piece of paper first… so we’re going to have to share the credit. What made this so fascinating at the time was that for the entire trip from Portland to Chicago on the Argon Express, Brian and I had been discussing a lot of what we’re planning to change and define with our approach to Client/Project/Development Collaboration & Management… and in the end… we left Chicago with DDD d3.

Thank you, Martin for being part of this process.

Like all things, this approach is open to discussion dialogue.

UPDATE

Brian has written an article called, It’s all about the dialogue. (digg.it)

Just a few months ago, I wrote a short article called, The Art of Delivery, which outlined how we at PLANET ARGON approach iterative development and how it relates to quicker release cycles. I wanted to follow up with this and add some more thoughts to that and what we’ve been trying and learning since that point in time.

With iterative development cycles, we’re able to focus our attention on very specific and well-defined goals while we work with the client to organize the other goals that they’d like us to help develop solutions for.

An End to the Product Backlog

While everyone at PLANET ARGON has been doing some research on modern Agile-related methodologies, we’ve been throwing a lot of ideas back and forth… and often times we end up cherry-picking individual practices and throwing it into our evolving processes.

The problem that we’ve seen with most examples of using a standard Scrum Product Backlog is that it focuses too much on tasks rather than providing solutions for goals that are central to the success of the project. It also requires that someone maintain, on a regular basis, a well-defined list of tasks, which often times the client (Product Owner) dictates. We’ve seen many situations where a client has more feature requests than is necessary in order to attain the goal that was originally set. If we had a nickel for every time we heard someone say, “wouldn’t it be cool if it did this?”

I’ve personally worked on many projects that fell into this routine too early in the development cycle. Most clients that we work with are trying to provide a solution for their users and aren’t always the best Domain Expert. Taking the whole less is more approach, it’s vital that the earlier you can get your users in front of your application, the sooner you can get them to generate feedback, which aids in you making educated decisions about what to add to the project later on.

Features are Expensive

Aside from the monetary costs of adding new features and functionality, it is important to remember that as you add new code to an application you increase the maintainability and overall scope of the project. With each new feature, the requirements change, complexity increases, and as far as your users are concerned, they are now being exposed to something new, which may or may not be what they want or need. For example, I was in a sales meeting yesterday and our potential client mentioned that at a former job during the dot-com era, their web team added e-Cards to their web site and it had nothing to do with their business model. The users did however use this new feature but they later went out of business. Perhaps they should have been an e-Card business instead. Imagine if BaseCamp added a local weather feature… I might use it… but it doesn’t help me manage our projects any better.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to interact with the readers of my blog in a segment that I call… The Art of Delivery.

As a professional developer, my experience with working in development environments has been fairly unique each time. Up until PLANET ARGON, I had very little say in how we structured the very process that I was expected to follow. Granted, there is is a benefit to having leaders who have some good experience to help guide a team throughout the life span of a project, but a leader should also posses a sense of humility and stay agile in their processes. You cannot succeed in an environment where an old dog can’t learn new tricks. This sort of thinking reminds me of managers who feel that their sole responsibility is to manage people. People manage themselves, a leaders helps facilitate self-management. I’ll be the first to admit that I have much to learn in both areas. :-)

Earlier this year, the PLANET ARGON Core Team met to outline new processes. One hot topic was project communication and delivery. One of the areas that we all insist that we excel at is building better estimates and managing project delivery more efficiently. Every one on our team has their own ideas of how best to coordinate projects and we wanted to find a way to invent our own pattern… but what we realized is that we were borrowing a lot of ideas from books we’ve read as well as the lessons learned in previous environments. One of the things that we realized is that while we weren’t horrible at building estimates for a six month project… it was that we knew that the requirements of (almost) any project would change scope within six months. How could we accommodate new ideas in a project without disrupting the budget and the agreed timeline? We wanted to rethink this process and push ourselves to follow an iterative approach.

Focus on the now and then the then

Since then we have begun to define and redefine what each stage of a project looks like. How do we communicate stages of a project with our clients in a meaningful and clear way?

I’m now about to give away how we do business at PLANET ARGON.

Project(s), Release(s), Iteration(s), Task(s)

It’s not rocket science… and it shouldn’t be!

• A project has many releases
• A release has many iterations
• An iteration has many tasks

What we do is isolate an iteration by collecting a set of goals to be accomplished that the client and we agree on as being of high value to the success of the project at this point in time. Tasks are essentially the individual steps needed to achieve those goals and we don’t go out of our way to list each one of those during an estimate process as some tasks take less time than it takes to generate an estimate for them. We include our developers in our estimate and specification process as they often have many great questions to send to the client to get further clarification. Often, much of this clarification process happens during a first iteration, which some call Iteration Zero... as no code is developed during this iteration. Prototypes, estimates, mockups, and Q&A is what iteration 1/zero consists of. This is that important design phase that people talk so much about. :-)

Let’s get back to thinking about delivery… and we’ll make the assumption that you’ve already worked out your estimates and are now ready to work on your (next) iteration.

Open Question: As developers, project managers, and curious readers… how do you proceed?

...to be continued

In a previous post, I outlined how the PLANET ARGON team handles their communication of day-to-day work with the daily stand-up. Several people posted comments about similar processes and some suggestions were made to keep them from getting too stagnant. I wanted to highlight a few of those comments.

Aslak Hellesoy suggests, “Use a token – a rubber ball or something – for each person giving status. Only the person holding the token is allowed to talk.”

Florian Weber said, “Everybody standing up makes meetings go faster and more focus…”

However, not everybody is convinced…

Doug said, “I hate meetings, why on Earth would you punish your employees on a daily basis?”

Perhaps Doug has worked in environments that encourage too many bad meetings. A client recently said, “meetings are expensive” when we agreed to not have too many meetings throughout the project. Less meetings that are well-focused are much more valuable and productive. :-)

The one that caught my attention was the comment made by Aslak Hellesoy… he goes on to say, _“When a speaker is done, throw the token to a random person instead of just handing it to the left or right. This forces everyone to stay more alert, as noone knows who’s next.”

This got me thinking about how we had made it a ritual to stand in similar positions and I would start off the meeting. The team wasn’t too keen on throwing a ball around the room as we often hold coffee in our hand… so I came up with the following solution…. which reunites us with our little friends, the index cards!

Basically, all I did was take a stack of index cards and write a number on each one. Then at 9:15am PST, we all walk into the meeting room and take one. Whoever got #1 goes first and we work our way up from there. We’ve done this three times so far and most of the team seems cool with it. I’ll keep you posted as we solidify our approach to The Daily Stand-up.

...and of course… this comment also reaffirmed our decisions to do daily stand-ups…

Kevin Rutherford said, “Cool. And by “inventing” the idea yourselves, I guess you have much greater buy-in too?”

Related Posts

• The Daily Stand-up
• Agile development begins within