SCNA 2009 - Observations from an Old Warhorse: Fred George

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40 years of experience in 60 languages. And a good speaker to boot!

Technology Choices

Q. SOA or Objects?
A. Yes. Not conflicting.

Application size has increased by an order of magnitude every ten years.

The following have helped us get by (reduce efforts) over the years:

• HLL (High Level Languages)
• Relational DB
• OO
• Rules Engine
• Agile
• SOA
• DSL

The common elements are:

• Simplify
• No duplication

Discard to Make Languages Robust

Example: goto

From the Tektronix School of Objects (Ward Cunningham):

• "if" is suspicious
• "else" is almost always wrong

(Rails - TDD) => Productive VB

• VB productive for prototyping, building discardable apps
• If a complete application required one page of code, would you:
  • Write a test?
  • Pair?

(He does test; the determining questions are how long the program is going to be around and how long it is.)

Feedback => Quality

1. Frequent releases
2. Iterations
3. Stand-up meetings - anybody stuck? (See them after meeting)
4. Tasking cycle (if Kanban is user story level, this is task level)
5. Pair programming

Lean: Identify and Eliminate Waste

1. What are you making?
2. How do you make it faster?

• Story is fundamental unit of work
• Overall time to get through Story Life Cycle
• Do you need the intermediate deliverables?
• Minimize idle time
• Finger Charts
  • Fat is bad (bulges)
  • Can do in Excel, Mingle

Iterations Are Dead

• From Scrum's couple of months
• To XP's 2-3 weeks
• To ThoughtWorks' 1 week
• To daily (part of stand-up) - figure out most important thing

Continuous Deployment (Holy Grail)

• From long lead times; upgrading is dangerous
• To short lead times; safe upgrades

Source control branching is not necessarily a good thing.

Miscellaneous

• He does use a Kanban board; a visual wall is important
• He does do retrospectives when necessary (as needed)
• Story size - 2 days is nice, but varying is OK
• His company doesn't employ testers - developers write acceptance tests
• Why write a bug down? Fix it! Eliminates waste.