The road is paved with good intentions

There's an interesting discussion going on at Chad Meyers' blog about quality in both design and execution. Chad argues there is such a thing as Good Design, that knowledgeable observers can reliably discern its presence, and that "but it works!" is not a defense or justification for bad design choices.

The bad design characteristics Chad spotlights prevent teams from responding effectively to demands on the application. With each release the team is less and less able to respond until they are locked in to long projects that deliver little incremental value. How do teams start down the path that leads there?

Chad's post hinted at an important consideration that doesn't seem to get enough attention. Too often people make fast delivery of finished features the top priority, then define everything else as speeding up or slowing down delivery. The problem is that driving to "finished features" (where finished = fully realized) prevents the team from engaging in "fast fail, fast feedback" cycles. If there is also a stated desire to work in an "agile" fashion the team might try to marry the "finished feature" driver with a short-timebox approach with disastrous results. On a large project few fully-realized features can be started and delivered in a single 2-4 week period.

The Agile team will look for a way to decompose the desired end feature into meaningful chunks and distribute the work across the team such that each 2-4 week period delivers a coherent, complete piece of functionality. The wish-we-were-agile team calls on the team to keep the feature "simple," not to "gold-plate" it. Once headed down this path all kinds of things become gold-plating - error handling, usability, even the goal of working software can be set aside under the banner of producing "good enough" software quickly.

Of course there is nothing wrong with "simple," "good enough," or "rapid delivery." Problems arise when the team identifies "simple" feature realization and "simple" process with undesigned, untested and incomplete. The team might find itself choosing to hack up a feature, not because it's a justifiable approach given the business needs but because their inability to decompose the feature and plan across iterations has created an artificial pressure to cross the feature off the project plan. That team can report that features are "done" but pays the price later when the customer doesn't accept the feature or the market demands more.

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Done-ness, Denial, and Golf

Totally Test-driven Scrum Delivers Better Objectivity In Measuring Real Progress - Agile Software Process Improvement

Progress is measured entirely in terms of story points collected for tests passed. There is no "A for Effort" in my way of doing things. It's either testably delivered or it's not.

The analogy I use - and, yes, it's a golfing analogy - is to differentiate by measuring the completeness of a hole by whether or not the players took the shots they planned to vs. whether or not the ball actually finished up in the hole.

Jason Gorman puts his finger squarely on one of the keys to software development success. Performing tasks only matters if they result in complete and correct work product.

Jason's golf metaphor conveniently illustrates a couple of related antipatterns, "close enough" and "pick it up after 10 strokes."

In "close enough," someone makes a decision that whatever is currently implemented seems pretty done, so the developer should move on and try to get something else implemented. This is like finding yourself on the green putting for double bogey, and deciding to stop and move on to the next tee. You cover all 18 holes in 4 hours, but you can't post a score because you haven't really played the round.

In "pick it up after 10" the team concedes its inability to bring a feature to testable completion. Just like a course policy to keep people moving around the course, the software team decides that they have spent all the time they can on a feature and must move on. Like the 10-stroke golf hole, they've used more time than they expected and didn't achieve the required result, but they figure they've done all the can in the time allowed. If the customer is lucky, the 10th stroke will be on the green close to the hole. If not, the 10th stroke will fail to clear the edge of the bunker and trickle back into the sand.

I am still learning about Agile methods, but I have to believe the Agile team would have a couple of responses. "Close enough" is essentially a quality issue; the team thinks it's implemented something acceptable even if not what was asked for or agreed to. If the product owner accepts the close enough solution, just like in the cartoons the hole can slide over under the ball so it can drop in. Voila! No longer close enough, the feature is now done.

"Pick it up after 10" seems like a reasonable strategy on the surface. It's the golf equivalent of timeboxing. Teams get into trouble only if they mark the feature done and check it off the list. Seems to me the Agile team might talk it over with the customer and decide they're only go to play the front nine today. Playing the hole to completion will mean they can't finish the back nine, and the customer just can't accept the ball-in-the-bunker solution. Teams create problems for themselves when they pick it up and move on to the next hole, card a 10, and don't tell anyone about the feature's unfinished business.

Closely related to "pick up after 10" is the mulligan. In some respects mulligans are necessary, even a mark of good practice, in software development. You learn from the failed attempt, and try again. Just as in golf, though, mulligans don't show up on the score card. The proud player strides off the 18th green tallying up his 90-something score, but everyone in the group knows Mr. Mulligan couldn't have broken 100. On software projects there's a lot more at stake than who buys the first round. Unreported mulligans eat up time, and worse, keep the team from assessing its own likely performance on future efforts. Mulligans often lead inevitably to "close enough" and "10-stroke limit" situations.

Ah, golf. You can fool yourself if you like, but the rattle of the ball in the cup is what the game is all about.

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