You’ve been patient. Some of you have been patient. Last week on Thursday night, I presented Legacy Dependency Kata v2.2 at the SLC .NET User Group Meetup. You’ll notice the name change since then.
But wait– don’t know what a code kata is? Start here.
I’d like to give a quick thank you to the crowd that night and the one the day before at HealthEquity during one of our Lunch Learning sessions. You all are fantastic. Thanks for the great feedback!
What’s different? Not much, to be honest. Also, in some ways, a lot. But what I realized as I was going through the slides one final time, was this: this IS a major revision. I just didn’t realize it while going through all the multiple iterative changes.
What hasn’t changed? Legacy Code Kata 3.0 is still a code kata about dealing with dependencies in legacy code and getting it ready for unit testing. It still uses the same seed code as previous versions, and you can find that here on GitHub.
Changelog
So, what makes this version so great? Let me lay it out for you:
Lost the lame presentation theme. I thought I accomplished this with v2.0. NOPE. You’re welcome.
The intro slides have been honed down to only those 100% essential, and they were also prettied up, and some new notes added.
Added the Kata Barometer (patent pending (not actually (maybe))). At any time you always know what state your tests and build should be in.
Broke up quite a few slides that were too complicated and/or the font was too small to read effectively. Much more Kata Cup friendly now. What’s a Kata Cup? Maybe in a future post. Stop changing the subject!
If you want to see for yourself why this version is so much better, check out the old versions: Version 1.0 or Version 2.0.
I previously wrote about how I worked on an agile team as a tech lead. The article focused on the things I recommend. Today, I’m going to take the opposite approach and share what to avoid: the misuse of authority including mistaking an influencing role for an authoritative one.
On agile teams, a Tech Lead is far more like a Software Architect or an Agile Coach or a Product Owner or an Engineer than a Manager, Director, or another role with people reporting directly to them. You don’t have AUTHORITY as a Tech Lead, your weapon of choice is INFLUENCE. Of course, even people with authority should rely on influence as much as they possibly can. Authority is a tool in the toolbelt of some roles, and those people must use it sparingly. Autonomy is too important to take away from creative workers (and Engineers are indeed creative).
At times authority must be used by people in what I like to call “dark side” roles. Managers, Directors, Veeps, etc. must at times use the stick instead of the carrot. Usually, this is reserved for extreme cases when a team member is refusing to follow company policy or is threatening or endangering someone. In a positive culture, these things should seldom IF EVER happen.
One of the things I love about the organization at my current company, HealthEquity, is the culture of influence. Influence is the currency of the day at all levels of leadership, and it’s used efficiently and effectively.
What Does Misuse Of Authority Look Like?
Some key things to look out for: body language, word choices, and the audience. Watch for words like these coming from your mouthhole:
But, I’m the Architect/Manager/Director/Scrum Master/Tech Lead/etc…
…you have to do this.
…this is the only option.
…because I said so.
…it’s my way or the highway.
…eat crap and die.
Absolutes and personal attacks/insults are not going to work. They may sometimes achieve the immediate effect you wanted, but it’s going to come back to bite you in the end.
Avoid negative feedback in a group setting at all costs. If you MUST provide negative feedback (and yes, sometimes we must) always, ALWAYS, do so in a private 1:1 situation. Involve your people leader if you aren’t comfortable one-on-one.
Instead, look for ways to encourage, build-up, support, and assist people in doing what you believe should be done.
Shameful Anecdote Time
Once, in an earlier decade of my life, I was an inexperienced young team lead. I had responsibility for a developer who was undertaking a critical task. The task wasn’t moving along the way my manager and my manager’s leader hoped it would. There was some time sensitivity involved, and I was asked to research the issue and get things moving along. I did some investigation and found that the developer was spending a lot of time (over 50%) not engaged in his work.
I’ll admit it; I was frustrated.
Instead of following the advice I’m giving in this article, I decided to walk right up to this person’s cubicle and ask how the work was progressing. Nothing particularly wrong with the approach, although in hindsight, I should have known the discussion was likely to become sensitive. I should have invited the developer to a private location to discuss one-on-one.
Anyway, when we spoke, the developer told me how well it was going and how hard he was working and how he’d have this already late project completed just as soon as he could, but not for at least a few more days. When describing the work remaining, I felt it was completely trivial. It could have been completed THE NEXT MORNING.
I won’t go into detail, but I lost my cool. I felt pressured and I let the pressure rule my emotions. My voice rose high enough for at least neighboring cubicles to hear, if not more. I told this developer that he would finish this work by the end of the next day or there would be hell to pay.
I’ve never seen someone’s face go from zero to pure unadulterated hatred so quickly.
The developer finished the required work on my timeline, but I had ruined a relationship and completely demotivated my co-worker. As kind, cheerful, and pleasant as I could be, it never made up for my error. The individual became a habitual underperformer, and eventually was let go by our manager.
I’ve always wondered how the situation might have gone if I knew then what I know now. Would I have pulled this individual aside privately? Would I have offered my help or another’s on the team to push through the last bit of work? Would I have asked more about the situation and sought to understand why he was underperforming in the first place?
I’d like to think I would have. I’d like to think I’d have given less weight to some of the authoritarian “truths” I’d been exposed to growing up.
Avoid False Truisms Of Authoritarians
Avoid being taken in by the truisms of autocratic leaders like Bonaparte and Hitchcock. Do not let their philosophies influence your leadership style.
“Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self-interest.” -Napoleon Bonaparte
“If an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ‘It’s in the script.’ If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?’ I say, ‘Your salary.’” – Alfred Hitchcock
The work we are doing in any creative or thought-related organization requires 100% of the team’s buy-in, commitment, and enthusiasm to be as effective as possible.
Leaders don’t and can’t have all the best ideas. Create psychological safety for people you work with to aid their growth and contributions.
Authoritarian leadership styles have little or no place in Agile organizations.
In closing: I recommend avoiding the “command and control” mentality in favor of “inspire and innovate”. Tech leads (and technology leaders in general) aren’t running military operations; we are engaged in creative endeavors.
Well, well, well. Look what the samurai dragged in. An updated version of my Legacy Dependency Kata. I’ll have to update the Coding Kata Resources page.
I’m not proud to admit that there even was a v1.0 at the moment. Let me explain.
Just over two years ago, I was experimenting with writing katas, presenting at code conventions, and running a coding dojo. It turns out. I wasn’t super fantastic at any of these things. Nevertheless, I wrote a kata, ran it a few times with the kind folks in my dojo, and proceeded to share it with the delightful folks at Utah Code Camp 2014. Reviews were mixed, but overall I felt good about it.
Fast forward to the present. While planning the lunchtime learning schedule for our recent SAFe Program Increment, there was an opening, and I, ever so graciously, decided to run my Legacy Dependency Kata for folks who may not have had the chance to see it before. Upon thoroughly embarrassing myself with some of the crappiest kata slides in existence (slides even I couldn’t completely fathom), I recognized that my life would be forfeit if folks were forced to do the kata again with the same slides the following day.
I dashed to revise the slides and spent many hours on the task. When I presented the kata on the second day, it was a much more successful attempt. I’d go so far as to call it a version 1.7. I spent some more time and enlisted the advice of the ever-gracious and capable Kaleb Pedersen in finalizing v2.0. The source code is still the same. Legacy code problems from 2 years ago are still very similar to what they are today.
coughnounittestabilitycough
I think the new slides do their job. Could this kata still be better? Without a doubt. Please submit your recommendations in the comments or feel free to yell at me on Twitter. I’m sure I deserve it for something.
Without further adieu, I give you Legacy Dependency Kata Version Two.
Ok, I’m going to share this like no one has ever thought of it before.
The other day, I was giving a lightning talk at Utah Software Craftsmanship about how I run bi-weekly team meetings with Lean Coffee. In short, I highly recommend the practice. It helps keep our meetings quick and on-task. Succinct really.
People seem to like it because we discuss the most important things, and we usually finish early.
If you aren’t allowing your meetings to end on time or early– use this opportunity to rethink your life. You don’t want to sell anyone death-sticks.
Back to the lightning talk. I spoke for about three of my five allotted minutes and opened up the floor for questions. There were a few, but the most interesting question by far (paraphrased) was this:
How do you get people to arrive at desisions when running a meeting with Lean Coffee?
The query took me by surprise.
For a moment, I considered decisions that came out of our meetings. Granted, there weren’t a ton. Often these sessions are more informational. Sometimes they result in questions I don’t have an answer to, so I take to-do items and communicate back to the team later.
However, we did reach decisions. We planned a team party, for example. For these types of situations, I looked for a majority consensus. Often, we found ourselves using a technique I will now dub “Lean Teatime”.
Lean Teatime
Lean Teatime is a subset of Lean Coffee. It can be run either in the middle of a lean coffee session, or completely separate from it. The gist is simple:
Set expectations by making clear the intent of the Lean Tea session (e.g. selecting a venue for a team party).
Make sure everyone has access to Post-It notes and Sharpies (the tools of any agile facilitator).
Set a timer (2-5 minutes) and have the group come up with as many ideas as possible. They will write each thought on an individual Post-It.
Organize similar items into groups and stick them to a desk (or wall for bigger groups).
Give everyone groups/3 dot votes and turn them loose to place dots on the item groups they prefer. Allow one dot per group or multiple, your choice (I prefer 1 per).
Order the results from most votes to least. In the event of a tie for first, vote one more time with the two tied items only.
I like to do a fist of five at this point to see if anyone just hates the thing that ended up on top. In this case, I’ll ask the group to offer mitigation suggestions.
All of this only takes a few minutes and usually has a positive result.
So there you have it. The “genesis” of Lean Teatime. I hope you find it useful.
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Recently I read Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Roveli. True to its title, the book is brief, and clocks in at a scant eighty-one pages. Its beauty is in the nearly poetic brevity and the expressive nature of the word choices the author (and translators) use. Unlike massive scientific tomes on particle physics I once attempted to read as a 12-year-old boy, Roveli’s book is written in a way I could have understood even as a young boy.
The book brought me a remembrance of the elasticity of young minds with its references to young physicists like Einstein, and his solving massive problems with simple solutions at a very young age. The book inspired me to write, and this is the result.
Anecdote Time
When I was a first-grade elementary school student, I recall having a tough time memorizing multiplication tables as students were taught to do at the time. Ever precocious, I wanted there to be some rhyme or reason, a pattern even, to the way we determined the values of these simple mathematical expressions. No, I was told, you just have to add the number you are multiplying by to itself the number of times the multiplier expresses.
For a young, and frankly lazy, Willy Munn, this was an annoyance at best for a number like one, two, and three; and completely unbearable for the silly number nine. You see, not being able to use a calculator or a multiplication table, and being required to show my work meant writing out nine addition problems just to “show my work” and get an acceptable grade.
My young brain started looking for a better way. It wanted to enable the laziness my heart so desired. It wanted to find a way for me to skip writing out these problems and allow me to go back to reading or playing with Lego blocks or watching the Superman movies I taped onto VHS from TV. I WANTED some rule as simple as “1 times anything is the number being multiplied” or “10 times anything is the number being multiplied with a 0 tacked onto the end”. I started to see patterns (we are talking about math after all, which is nothing without patterns). A solution for the ridiculously tedious number nine came first.
Looking at the following multiplication table, I unconsciously looked for patterns I could exploit. What patterns do you see?
I noticed the following in this approximate order:
Reversed Pairs of Numbers as Results
This was the first thing I noticed. 18 and 81, 27 and 72, and 36 and 63 all the results on opposite ends of the table form numeric palindromes. Even 09 and 90 technically work.
Everything Adds Up to Nine
Next, I realized that the first and second digit of every result always add up to 9. This seemed like something exploitable, and I saved the knowledge for later use.
First Digit Is The Number Being Multiplied By Minus One.
Eureka! I had a formula (even if I didn’t know that’s what it was called). I could take any number one through ten and subtract one from it for the first digit. Then I could subtract that number from nine to get the second digit. Simplicity itself!
I took my solution to Mrs. D, my first-grade teacher, for confirmation. I just knew she would be so happy and proud that I had found a better way to do multiplication by nines.
My youthful supposition couldn’t have been farther from the truth.
Mrs. D. assured me that this was not the proper way to do the math and that I must write our all of my answers as she had taught. Needless to say, if young Willy Munn was a thing besides lazy, he was stubborn. I dug in my heels, so to speak. I refused to do this work stating that I would sooner die than do unnecessary work after I had found a better solution. Predictably, Mrs. D marched me right down to the principal’s office and demanded that he deal with my insubordination. She suggested corporal punishment if necessary.
The principal of my elementary school, Mr. F looked at me with kind, wise eyes, mostly gray hair, and just a quirk of a smile on the edge of his lips, and asked me to explain my method to him. I was nervous. I didn’t know what this corporal punishment was, but it sounded serious. With sweaty little palms and a mildly shaky voice, I explained my idea for the number nine. Mr. F asked some thoughtful questions and proved my hypothesis on the blackboard in his office. Then, to the joy of my young heart, he said the words I had so desired to hear from Mrs. D, “Willy, it looks like you’ve come up with a better way to solve this problem. At least for you.” Then the golden words of freedom, “Mrs. D, since this proves out, it shouldn’t be necessary for Willy to write out all of his multiplication solutions should it?” Mrs. D grudgingly agreed with her boss, although I’m fairly sure she held a cold, dark place in her heart for me for the rest of the year. In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have challenged her so directly, but I was 6 and thought the world revolved around me.
Mrs. D grudgingly agreed with her boss, although I’m fairly sure she held a cold, dark place in her heart for me for the rest of the year. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have challenged her the way I did, but I was six and thought the world revolved around me.
I went on to “discover” patterns for other simple multiplication problems that saved me a bit of time over the years, and even eventually memorized all the basic times tables. For several years, I got away with doing all of my math problems in my head and never showing my work. This irritated my teachers to no end and probably is what made learning manual Calculus feel like one of the most tedious tasks I’ve ever undertaken.
Many years later, while attending Southern Utah University, I learned additional math practices in my Discrete Mathematics class that used similar patterns and approaches to my early experimentation. Fun realization, that.
The Point (There Is One)
I knew, even as a youth, I had spent more time working on this solution than it would have taken just to write out the problems as I had been asked.
Today, I recognize my solution as less simple from the Mrs. D’s viewpoint. She was giving students one tried and true way of solving all multiplication problems. While it wasn’t easier for me to achieve my work, it was certainly simpler to teach. Just because there is a pattern or formula, doesn’t make a solution better based on that merit alone.
A fractal bacteria colony may BE simple once you understand it, but at first glance, it seems strange and complex.
Fractal Bacteria Colony
All anecdotes aside, the pursuit of better, simpler solutions is one that I’ve been chasing from a young age. It is the same pursuit of any scientist including the computer scientist. Let’s not forget this as we write code. Our ultimate goal should be the simpler solution because it will lead to better, more maintainable code. It will save time overall even if there is an opportunity cost up front.
We must remember that what is simpler from our particular point of view may not make sense from another’s perspective. A simple solution is only as good as our colleagues’ ability to grasp it.
