Month: January 2007

The War on Laundry™

Let’s see:

  • Not a finite thing that can be destroyed, nor group which can be defeated.
  • No one qualified to declare surrender for it.
  • There are better and worse ways to deal with it, none of which are able to completely eliminate it.
  • No matter how much you fight it, there will always be more soon.
  • No one really likes it, but the only way to avoid it is to change your lifestyle so profoundly that the alternative is worse.

Hmm, sounds about right.

Any relation to other Wars on Nouns is completely intentional.

The day I got a lot smarter

One sign of intelligence is the ability to learn from your mistakes. An even better sign is the ability to learn from someone else’s mistakes. Unfortunately, we don’t always have the luxury of watching someone else learn a valuable lesson, and we have to do it ourselves. But if we pay attention, sometimes we get to learn multiple lessons from one mistake. (Lucky us.)

Case in point: Dealing with a crisis. I was managing a group of web developers, and the project lead on an integration with our largest client was going on vacation. He assured me his backup was fully trained, and would be able to deal with any issues. He left on Friday, and we deployed some new code on Monday. Everything looked good.

Time passes …

On Wednesday at about 4 p.m., we got a call asking about an order. We couldn’t find it in our system. From what we could tell, the branch that placed the order wasn’t set up to use our system yet, so we shouldn’t have the order. At 5 I let the backup go home for the day while I worked on writing up what we’d found. I sent an internal email explaining what I believed had happened. I said that I would call the client and explain why we didn’t have the order, and that they should check their old system.

While double-checking the deployment plan, I discovered that the new branch actually was on our new system … as of that Monday. That’s part of what was included in the new code. That’s when I got the shiver down my spine. By that time the backup, whose house was conveniently in a patch of bad cell coverage, was gone. The lead was on vacation. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ve seen most of this code, in fact I’ve written a good bit of it. I can figure this out.”

Stop laughing. It sounded good at the time.

To make a long story short (Too late!) we hadn’t been accepting orders for three days from several branches, but had been returning confirmations for them. It was somewhere around 3 a.m. when I finally thought I knew exactly how many orders we had dropped, though I hadn’t found the actual bug in the code yet. I created a spreadsheet with the list of affected orders. At one point I used Excel’s drag-to-copy feature to fill a range of cells with the branch number for a set of orders.

Did you know Excel will automatically increment a number if you drag to copy? Yes, I know it too. At 11:30 in the morning today I know it. At 3 a.m. that night I apparently didn’t know that. So I sent it to the client with non-existent branch numbers that I didn’t double-check. “Oops” apparently doesn’t quite cover it.

The reveal

The next morning on a conference call with the client, my boss, his boss, and several other people, we were going over the spreadsheet when someone noticed the problem. To me, it seemed obvious that it was a simple cut-and-paste error on the spreadsheet. But someone — a co-worker, believe it or not — decided to ask, “Are you sure? Because I don’t see those other two branches on here either.” After dumbly admitting that I didn’t know anything about any other two branches, I ended the call so I could go figure out what was happening.

Now I had apparently demonstrated that I didn’t actually know what was wrong, that I had no idea of the scope of it, and that I was trying to cover it up. Yay me. We called in the lead (whose vacation was at home doing renovations) and started going through the code. I finally found the cause of the error, and it caused exactly the list of errors that I had sent out early that morning, except for the cut-and-paste error. The “other two branches” turned out to be from the previous night’s email, where I had specifically said those branches were not affected by the problem.

Within two hours, we had the code fixed and all the orders recovered. So everyone’s happy, right? If you think so, then you haven’t yet learned the lessons I did that day.

  1. No matter how urgently someone says they need an answer, the wrong answer won’t help.
  2. If it looks like the wrong answer, it might as well be the wrong answer. This doesn’t mean counter-intuitive answers can’t be right. It means that presentation and the ability to support your conclusion count.
  3. If you didn’t create the problem, always give the person who did the first chance to fix it.
  4. If someone knows more about a topic than you do, have them check your work.
  5. Don’t make important decisions on too little sleep.
  6. Before making a presentation to a client, review the materials with your co-workers.
  7. Don’t make important changes when key people are unavailable.

Looking at that list, I realize I already knew several of those lessons. So why did it take that incident to “learn” them? Because there’s a difference between knowing something, and believing it.

When design is not design

“How is software production like the car industry?”

Oh no, not again. Yeah, well, most people are getting it wrong. So here’s another shot at it.

There are aspects of car design that strictly deal with measurable quality: performance of the electrical system, horsepower, fuel economy, reliability. But the shape and style of the car are much more loosely coupled to hard-and-fast measurements. That facet of the design — the way it looks, the demographic it will appeal to — is not amenable to Six Sigma processes.

Granted, there are some cars that are strictly (or nearly so) utilitarian. Some people only care about efficiency and reliability. They buy Corollas by the boatload. But the FJ Cruiser is not the result of a logical, statistical analysis, with high conformance to the mean and low variation of anything.

I think what I’m trying to say is that marketing design is building the right thing, while production design is building the thing right. The auto industry is mature enough that you need both. Success in the software industry still relies more on building the right thing.

There are no IT projects … mostly

Whenever someone says something I’ve been thinking or saying for a while, it’s clear evidence of how smart they are. (Don’t laugh, you think so too.) So when Bob Lewis published the KJR Manifesto – Core Principles, he confirmed his intelligence when he wrote:

There are no IT projects. Projects are about changing and improving the business or what’s the point?

The variation that I’ve been telling people for years is that people don’t want software, they want the things they do with the software. So if you’re working on an IT project and can’t explain the benefits in terms that matter to the business, you probably shouldn’t be doing the project. Then in the middle of making this point to someone, I realized it’s not always true.

One case I thought of was a steel manufacturer that I interviewed with. While the factory was computer-controlled, the people who worked on those systems were in Engineering. The non-production computer system — email, financials, advertising, etc. — was IT. In that case, IT really was a support function, no more important to the company than telecom.

That doesn’t mean it was unimportant. They could no more survive without their back-office system than they could do without phones. But that system really had no bearing on how they ran their business. It was something that was expected to Just Workâ„¢, like the electricity or plumbing.

The thing I don’t know is if this is the exception that proves the rule, or if it’s more common than I thought to find a place where IT really isn’t a strategic partner in the business.

Maybe I’m the one missing something

Magicians make a living at misdirection, getting you to look at their right hand while they’re hiding the ball with their left hand. You’d think journalists would want to be a little more direct than that. But Neil McAllister did a whopper of a slight-of-hand recently, using more than half his column to summarize a Joel Spolsky post before jumping to a completely unrelated conclusion.

Joel’s point, and the first more-than-half of Neil’s summary, was shooting down the idea beloved of suits that programming can be reduced to a set of building blocks that can be snapped together by a non-programmer. (For a hysterically painful example of how wrong this is, and how far people will go to try to do it anyway, see The Customer-Friendly System at The Daily WTF.)

Joel covered the ground pretty well, so I was wondering where Neil was going with this. Once I got to it, I had to re-read the segue three times to see what connection I was missing:

Don’t you believe it. If, as Brooks wrote, the hard part of software development is the initial design, then no amount of radical workflows or agile development methods will get a struggling project out the door, any more than the latest GUI rapid-development toolkit will.

And neither will open source. Too often, commercial software companies decide to turn over their orphaned software to “the community” — if such a thing exists — in the naïve belief that open source will be a miracle cure to get a flagging project back on track. This is just another fallacy, as history demonstrates.

If there’s a fundamental connection between open source and “Lego programming” I don’t know about it. Maybe Neil makes the connection for us:

As Jamie Zawinski recounts, the resulting decision to rewrite [Netscape’s] rendering engine from scratch derailed the project anywhere from six to ten months.

Which, as far as I can see, has nothing to do with the fact that it was open source. In fact it seems more like what Lotus did when they delayed 1-2-3 for 16 months while they rewrote it to fit in 640k, by which time Microsoft had taken the market with Excel. Actually that’s another point that Joel made, sooner and better.

Is Neil trying to say that Lego programming assumes that code can be interchangeable, and man-month scheduling assumes that programmers are interchangeable? Maybe, and that’s even an interesting idea. But that’s not what he said, and if I flesh out the idea it won’t be in the context of a critique of someone else’s work.

Or maybe it was an opportunity to take a shot at the idea of “the community”. Although in his very next column he talks about the year ahead for the open source community, negative community reaction to the Novell/Microsoft deal, and praise from the community for Sun open-sourcing Java. Does he really dispute the existence of a community, or was it hit bait?

Okay, so where did I start? Right, with misdirection. So the formula seems to be: quote a better columnist making a point that I like, completely change the subject with the word “therefore”, summarize another author making my second point, and send it to InfoWorld. Am I ready to be a “real” pundit yet?