80 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?summer10

60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?spring10

60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?winter09

The five most popular open source tools in the directory are:
* IceScrum – agile project management
* ERmodeller – a CASE tool for data modeling
* ArgoUML – UML modeling with Java code generation
* StarUML – UML modeling tool
* Arbiter – requirements gathering and acceptance testing tool

This has been the same for Agile, the latest approach on the block, even if the words of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (“while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”) try to avoid this “forget the past” situation. Most agile coaches agree also that it is more important to make choices according to the context than to apply a prescriptive checklist, but for some people it is easier to follow blindly a model than to absorb a philosophy. You know the proverb: “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever”. It is however easier to learn how to work with JUnit than to create efficient unit testing cases. Pure agilists quickly fond their “enemy”: the Waterfall, a dinosaur of software process that should be lead to extinction, buried with fossilized Cobol programs in the mainframic stratum of the history of software development. Those with a little bit more of a software process culture will try to fight RUP or the CMMI, which are to Waterfall what tyrannosaurs are to dinosaurs: a more dangerous and ferocious evolution that kill entire forests to produce piles of project documentation.

The last issue of Methods & Tools contains an interesting article from an organization that mixes CMMI and Scrum. Is this an heretic position for adopters of both approaches? Maybe. Do this article tells us that everybody has to do the same things? No. It is just what the company thought is the best for their software development projects in their own context. Does it seem to be a successful approach for them? Yes. So, this is my eleventh commandment of software development: forget the first ten! If you could summarize software development definitively in a small number of rules, Methods & Tools would not exist. You should read everything you can about every approach with a critical but open mind and choose the good tools for your specific context. Nobody detains THE truth valid for all software development projects. We all make mistakes, which is good because you can learn from them.

75 PDF pages of software development knowledge that you, your colleagues and friends can download freely from
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http://www.tvagile.com/

After James Gosling the previous day, the Wednesday keynote was given by Danny Coward, Chief Architect of Sun’s Client Software, which means Java SE, Java ME and JavaFX. The topic of his talk was the top five points of both JDK 7 and JavaFX 1.2.  For the upcoming JDK 7, the main improvement will be on modularity; multiple languages (Groovy, JRuby) performance support on the virtual machine; some language addition like multiple exception handling; more I/O API; a new garbage collector. For the new version 1.2 of JavaFX released in June, the top five points are: release on new platforms like Linux and some mobile phones; more UI components; layouts; improvement of performance; better ways to use data with RSS/atom feed support and a simple asynchronous framework. He announced that another release of JavaFX is scheduled for the end of the year. The keynote was completed with some nice demonstrations of the JavaFX capabilities.

Refactoring of Large Software Systems

My first choice in the technical session was ” Refactoring of Large Software Systems” by Sibylle Peter and Sven Ehrke of Canoo Engineering . The talk presented the refactoring of the architecture for an investment banking system. After four years, the system architecture had become decayed, the original developers were no longer around and there were only few automated functional tests available. Important evolutions were postponed, as modifications often created bad side effects. However the application was very important for the bank and they wanted to keep using it for some more years. The first activity was to analyze the 1800 Java classes and their dependencies. The strategy was then to restructure the class content to separate clearly the services and the presentation functions using a service oriented architecture. The project, that has already consumed 10 men/years and is still on going, is run on an agile mode. Pair programming was an essential tool to ensure that refactoring practices where consistent across the team. The main customer engineer served as a “product owner”. This was fundamental for the Canoo team, as they needed somebody able to take decisions and knowing also the impact of the existing application on other systems. Another important success factor was doing the refactoring without modifying the functionalities. This allowed running tests comparing the results of the refactored application with the original system. Trust is an essential component of the project, as the users have to let an external team restructure their critical system… without breaking it. However as refactoring progressed, a team of the bank was also able to start evolving the system again. When release dates were different between the two team, a “branch and merge” configuration management solution was adopted. Some other lessons learned during the first phase were to have a large investment in automated testing and continuous integration, have an increased communication between the external refactoring team and the bank developers to synchronize architecture vision and transfer knowledge. It is also important not to underestimate the time needed to learn the system functionalities (where do you functionally test your technical refactoring) and test the final results. After the presentation, I talked with Sibylle and Sven to transform their presentation in an article for Methods & Tools. They agree on the principle, so stay tuned to get a comprehensive written presentation of their experience.

The Power of Value – Domain Driven Design and Value Objects

The next presentation was ” The Power of Value – Domain Driven Design and Value Objects” by Dan Bergh Johnsson of Omegapoint. Although I was initially a little bit afraid that this presentation contains too much code, Dan truly achieved its goal: showing how to refactor code to make it more understandable, even for domain experts without programming knowledge…. and doing it in a lively and funny way, which is important when you get up early to assist to a conference and the caffeine effect starts to diminish. His definition of a value object is “an object with data and behavior that has conceptual value”. His conclusions are that value objects help to decrease complexity (and compound value objects are even better), that entities relieved complexity and value objects add extensibility, testability and evolution. In the second part of the talk, he took the example of a part of code dedicated to charging a credit card and completely refactored it according the principles presented previously.

JavaServer Faces

The last presentation I saw was ” A complete Tour of JSF 2.0″ by Ed Burns of Sun and Martin Marinschek of IRIAN Solutions. They presented of the new release of JavaServer Faces that had its specifications approved at the end of May. Ed Burns recognized the criticism of the first version of JSF and announced that they have adopted a lot of innovations created in the community to integrate them in version 2.0. The new release is not a revolution, but a strong evolution. Among the improvement, he cited composite components; AJAX support, either declarative or programmatic; partial state saving that will improve performance; more system events; better resources management: full “library” concept, support for versioning and internationalization; the replacement of JSP by Facelets; the possibility to have bookmarkable pages. For the presenters, JSF is a real open source project (that is not a “just Sun” project) with a lot of different contributors. The new version is more much easier to use and well worth a second look. To complete this presentation, I talked with Micha Kiener of mimmacom which distributes IceFaces in Europe. Micha is also a committer to JavaServer Faces and his point of view is interesting, even if he suggested that it could be biased due to his position ;o) He also thinks that the community around JSF is strong and that the technology would continue to evolve even in the case where Oracle, that just bought Sun, decided to withdraw its financial support. He doesn’t see JavaFX as a direct competitor to JSF. His view on the market is that some products (JavaFX, Flex, Silverlight) target more the mashup, media, gaming or mobile market. On the other hand, JSF, GWT and their Ajax frameworks competitors are more used to develop applications with a “traditional” user interface, like on-line banking for instance. That is how JSF is used by some major Swiss corporations. He made also interesting remarks on the open source market and the commercial companies that try to monetize these technologies. He sees some products, like user interface or programming frameworks, more as “contributors” to the software development infrastructure. You can make some money in training and support as companies adopt them, but this stops when the company has its own competencies. Other technologies, like databases or web servers, are applications that run the everyday software infrastructure. In this case it is easier to sign long term support contracts.

I also had the chance met some of the Jazoon organizers, Christian Frei and Andreas Knobel, of Keynode. They were very kind with me and happy with the fact that the conference audience was higher than last year. There registered this year 1000 participants, around 50% of them coming from outside Switzerland. Videos of some of the conference talks should be available in July on Parleys the excellent conferences video web site. You can also stay tuned on our Java videos and tutorial directory where the will be listed.

This long introduction is there because in the Summer 2009 issue of Methods & Tools, I have three articles about Agile… and they are all written by women. As Methods & Tools had already received contributions from Agile women, I was wondering if, even if the manifesto first signatories are all men, Agile values were more on the “woman” side of the human being? I noticed also that you can find 6 women out of 13 members on the Agile Alliance Board. Women are a minority in software development. Checking if the relative importance of women was linked to Agile, I saw that the Project Management Institute board has also 6 women out of 15 members. This situation could then be more related to the project management aspect of software development than to Agile. Trying to find evidences of this difference of women/men proportion between project management and development, I checked the speakers’ list of major developer conferences like Jazoon or RailsConf. There I found a situation that was more inline with my experience in software development organizations: a lot of men and (very) few women.

The situation of women in software development organizations is not an easy one. They are a minority, have different values than their male colleagues and give more importance to their family life, this last point being in opposition with the overtime often required in badly managed software development project. The lack of women is also observed in the domain of open source development. Cultural bias could change in countries “new to IT”. A Swiss IT company with an outsourcing office in Vietnam reported that a majority of its employees there were women. The ratio of women in IT seems also higher in India. I know that men/women comparison is a “touchy” subject as gender behavior is a cultural topic with a lot of differences around the world. I am also not convinced that the Mars/Venus approach brings an answer to every question. It is generally accepted that men are more individualist and, especially in the IT field, introvert. Women are more caring and extravert, thus they should be more at ease with interactions and collaboration.

I don’t think however that the Agile approach has a “woman” side only for its coaching part. Agile has also practices that encourage open work context (pair programming, retrospectives) and individual responsibility for quality (test driven development). These activities require the capacity of being able to call itself into question, which is a women quality that men will call “lack of confidence”. Have you never omitted to test some code, thinking: “this is only a small change and I don’t need to run tests again”, just to discover later that maybe the apparent simplicity could have lead to a lack of concentration? ;o)

By putting back the focus on people in the software development process, Agile can bring a different perspective on the human qualities of project participants. Whether you are a developer, a tester or a project manager, you can however not be just defined by your preference for Mars, Snickers or Bounty. It is important to know yourself, accept your own limits and work with your team to build better software.

References

Agile manifesto

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus — Brain and Behavior of the Sexes

Agile Alliance Board Of Directors

Software Engineering: Report of a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee

PMI Board of Directors

Women’s contribution to FOSS development : discussion notes, slides and recording from my speech at Oekonux Conf

Software development gender gap pondered

Ratio of women in IT industry rising steadily

The Work Situation in Software Development

* Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects
* Agile Coding and Testing
* How to Quantify Quality: Finding Scales of Measure
* Scrum Product Owner Guide
* TDD, FDD and BDD Compared
* Open-Source Messaging Servers

60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?summer09

* Better Software Conference & Expo, June 8-12 2009, Las Vegas, USA

* Code Generation 2009, June 16-18 2009, Cambridge, UK

* Integrating Agile Conference, June 18 2009, Hoofddorp, The Netherlands

* International SPICE Days, June 22-24 2009, Stuttgart, Germany

* Jazoon’09, June 22-25 2009, Zurich, Switzerland

* Eclipse Time 2009, June 23-24 2009, Toulouse, France

* ProjectWorld & World Congress for Business Analysts, June 24-26 2009, Baltimore, USA

* Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST 2009), July 13-16 2009, Colorado Springs, USA

* Agile 2009, August 24-28 2009, Chicago, USA

 * Software & Systems Quality Conference, September 14, Zurich, Switzerland

Find an expanded list of software development conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

* How to Build Articulate Class Models and get Real Benefits from UML
* When Good Architecture Goes Bad
* Finding a Partner to Trust: The Agile RFP
* Database Locking: What it is, Why it Matters and What to do About it
* Code Generation for Dummies

80 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?spring09

Participants: 392

Ending date: January 2009

Many software development concept of the 80s and 90s have left the spotlights of the professional press and the blogging world, either because they are soooooo obvious, as in “of course everybody is doing object oriented programming today…”, or because they didn’t meet the expected success, as the object oriented database that were supposed to replace this old relational SQL technology of the 70s….

CMMI is the successor of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or Software CMM. The CMM was developed from November 1986 until 1997 as part of the software process maturity framework project. Then the CMMI, where “I” stands for Integration, replaced the CMM. This is certainly not currently a hyped concept. You will find no CMMI category on dzone.com or infoq.com and the CMMI channel on reddit.com has two subscribers. I was therefore surprised to see that the adoption, ignorance or rejection rates for the CMMI were very close to the results achieved by a similar survey on Agile approaches ended at the beginning of 2008.

I didn’t find any former statistics about the CMMI adoption, so it is difficult to compare the results of this survey with other numbers. These survey results are telling us that formal process adoption is growing in software development organization. The importance of CMMI numbers can be explained by the geographical diversity of Methods & Tools readership: an important percentage is coming from Asia where the CMMI label is important to sell outsourcing services.

Knowing that CMMI adoption rate is close to the Agile rates, I wonder also if there were some overlap, thinking that there are many companies without a formal process. I found a survey on Dr Dobb’s with some numbers on companies doing both CMMI and Agile. According to this survey, the rates of success of Agile and CMMI projects are very close, just above 50%. You could interpret the results as whatever the process, as long as you have one, you improve your success rate, which would mean that some discipline bring rewards. These numbers also tell that you have still close to 50% chances of failure, which could mean that discipline is not easy to achieve in the software development world. Please note that the Version One Agile survey seems to indicate a higher rate of success for projects, even if the type of questions makes direct comparison difficult.

Although there are some evidences that CMMI and Agile can coexist, the overall impression of people dealing with process improvement is that there are still important cultural differences between the two communities. Even if the non-prescriptive nature of the CMMI is recognized by agile developers, the overall impression is that this approach are still leaning heavily on plan-oriented and documentation processes, thus conflicting with the lightweight aspects of Agile. To contradict this culture incompatibility, there is the example Systematic, where a CMM level 5 company has added Scrum on top of their process, gaining a 50% cost reduction. This maybe not so astonishing if you realize that CMMI and Agile both try to achieve process improvement and both require discipline. Managing one week Scrum iteration with daily meetings should provide a strict control of project progress. Therefore organizations that followed the CMMI way for a good reason, that is not just for having a label to sell their services, should be naturally attracted by the process improvement tools contained in Agile. Other organizations than Systematic have also added agile practices above CMMI, but the opposite doesn’t seem obvious.

Maybe the software development world would be better if people could see approaches like the CMMI or Agile as toolboxes and not cult-like concepts that should be embraced with a blind faith… and a tendency to see other movements as “heresies” that can only be condemned. As Chris O’Brien (Software Capabilities Manager at Gen-i) says “So CMMI and Agile are complementary, but the use of either should to be based on business needs. I believe both have an immense amount to offer and co-existence will make sense for many organizations – particularly those that are capable of applying learnings from their industry with intelligence and care, to achieve results.”

References

CMMI Main page at SEI

Software and systems firms embrace CMMI – India Trends – Express Computer India

CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both!

Dr Dobb’s article: Agile CMMI?

Mature Agile with a twist of CMMI

Scrum and CMMI Level 5: The Magic Potion for Code Warriors

Systematic Gains Chart

Methods & Tools Agile Survey

CMMI articles list in SoftDevArticles.com

(r) Capability Maturity Model, CMM, and CMMI are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.
(sm) CMM Integration is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University.

REConf 2009, March 9-12, Munich, Germany

Practical Software Quality and Testing Conference West, April 27 – May 1 2009, Las Vegas, USA

Software & Systems Quality Conference Germany, May 26-29, Dusseldorf, Germany

More software conferences information and archives on http://www.softdevconferences.com/

* Fingers in the Air: a Gentle Introduction to Software Estimation

* Behavior Driven Database Design

* Optimizing the Contribution of Testing to Project Success

* Service Components and Compositions

45 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?winter08