Jason Gorman @[email protected]
@jasongorman
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Of @codemanship . I train and mentor software developers in... well... software development, come to think of it.
London, UK
Joined January 2009
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1998: "You should build systems out of single-purpose loosely-coupled components
2008: "You should build systems out of single-purpose loosely-coupled components"
2018: "You should build systems out of single-purpose loosely-coupled components"
Technology changes so fast!
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Universities, stop teaching UML. Take it from me. I've had over 2 million downloads of my UML tutorials. You're wasting your students' time. Teach them unit testing, version control and basic software design principles.
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After twelvety years in software development, I've come to the conclusion that the fastest way to deliver the right software is to deliver the wrong software sooner.
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Before you write a null check in your core logic, ask yourself how a null made it that far. And then fix *that*.
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2 things programmers tend to underestimate:
1. How long things take
2. How long our code will be around
3. How many things we underestimate
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Pair programming isn't 2 people doing the work of one. It's 2 people avoiding the rework of 7.
Pair programming is one of the most underrated practices.
Two heads are better than one.
By practicing it we end up doing fewer coding mistakes, having better quality, and doing continuous knowledge sharing.
It is highly beneficial both for the code and for the team.
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Don't think of pair programming as 2 people doing the work of one. Think of it as 2 people avoiding the rework of 7.
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Things that won't reduce delivery cycle times:
1. Daily stand-up meetings
2. Product backlogs
3. Burn-down charts
4. Jira
Things that *will* reduce delivery cycle times:
1. Smaller releases
2. Closer customer involvement
3. More frequent check-ins
3. Faster build & test cycles
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The year is 2023, and I still have to explain to software development managers that when the schedule is slipping, hiring more developers and cutting corners on testing will make the schedule slip even more. This has been development management 101 for nigh-on 50 years.
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One of the hardest things I find to persuade developers about is that they should take their time. They often feel under pressure to rush things and "hustle". The organisational culture often undermines that message. But it's true. Wanna go faster? Take your time.
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For my whole career as a software developer, I've never understood the logic of hiring one group of people to understand your problem, another group of people to solve it, and yet another group of people to check that the people solving the problem actually understood it
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It's quite staggering what 4 good software developers can achieve in a year if you let them, compared to what 400 can achieve in 5 years. Still amazes me when managers choose the latter.
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I rarely use the term "agile" these days. If I mean "responsive to change" or "adaptive", I just say those words. If I mean "self-organising", I say it. If I mean "lightweight", I say that. If I mean "cynically exploiting a trend to sell certifications", I say that
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What was your first real IDE? (Mine was Turbo Pascal).
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When a manager tells me they want 100% utilisation of their dev teams, I ask the "Who's living in your house right now? Who's driving your car while we're talking? Is it okay if my friend uses your idle phone?"
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If all your microservices need all your other microservices to work, I heartily recommend consolidating them all back into a single ball of mud. Because that's what you've got there.
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Software architecture isn't about the boxes, it's about the arrows.
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"We do unit testing with external dependencies"
"We do Continuous Integration using feature branches"
"We do TDD, but we write the tests after"
"We do BDD, but we write the specs ourselves"
"We do refactoring... sorry, what does that word mean again?"
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Hot take: some programming languages dating back more than 50 years had pretty much all the ingredients you need to write reliable, testable, readable, modular code. We've just been very good at finding reasons not to, and a new language won't fix that.
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I wish devs would defend things like working directly with their customers as passionately as they defend their favourite programming languages.
You'll be working in Java" "Over my dead body!!!"
"You won't get to talk to the customer" "Whatevs"
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A. Because we start with the punchline
Q. Why can't Test-Driven Developers tell jokes?
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"Our manager won't let us write automated tests. What should we do?"
If you need them, write them anyway. And next time, don't ask.
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"I want to be a software architect"
Cool, you'll need to learn about design principles, design patterns, ways of visualising design, analysing code, giving feedback, mentoring about design etc.
"No, I don't want to learn any of that."
Fine. Be one of *those* architects then.
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Software development is easy. Just ask anyone who's never done it.
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Sometimes people complain about the trivial nature of TDD katas. It's not like real production code, they say. Real code is complicated. I reply that if their code was composed out of simple, loosely coupled parts, it would essentially be a sequence of trivial katas:)
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Never underestimate a C programmer's ability to write C code in any language you give them
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Abandon your hopes of getting it right first time. It's a fool's errand. Optimise for rapid, sustained iterations of working software with close and continuous customer collaboration.
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It's depressing how many "agile" teams are effectively trapped in "incremental Waterfall" processes where the UI design's been done up-front - typically without the involvement of them or of end users - and it isn't allowed to change.
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I've learned a lot about using GPT-4 in software development over the last couple of weeks. The way I see it, the irony of LLMs in programming is that developers who can tell if the output's correct probably don't need them, and developers who can't should stay away from them.
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"Your example is too simple. Real code is messy and full of dependencies and very hard to test, and TDD won't work on that." Weirdly, when I TDD it, real code ends up being simple and modular and very easy to test.
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If your code is hard to change, then all your stand-up meetings and sprints and burn-down charts and retrospectives are just Agility Theatre
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We should think ourselves very lucky that Alan Turing didn't patent "a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence"
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8 qualities of maintainable code:
1. Can be (re-)tested quickly
2. Is easy to understand
3. Low duplication
4. Made of simple parts...
5. That do one job...
6. And barely know each other...
7. With swappable dependencies...
8. And client-specific interfaces
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We typically cite "improved code quality" as a ratonale for pair programming, but what I see every week is devs learning from each other when they pair. Teams that pair a lot tend to learn faster. And by that route, maybe, better code happens.
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When I was contracting, I learned that some factors in software development are a red flag. These were my deal breakers:
1. Large teams. > 12 people was a harbinger of doom.
2. No direct interaction with biz stakeholders, especially end users.
3. Majority of junior devs
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In the interview: "Can you write a Java implementation of an O(log(n)) binary tree search on that whiteboard?"
On the job: "Can you change the font for the shopping basket total?"
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A Scrum Master isn't a manager. A Product Owner isn't a manager. They're not in charge of the development team. How many times do we have to say this?
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You know that developer who joins a team years into the product's lifecycle and automatically assumes every decision made up to that point was bad because he didn't make it...
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Agility is when a programmer can go out and buy a new 40" monitor and they don't have to ask anyone's permission to buy it or to leave the office for an hour. Yeah, I'm looking at you, every single self-proclaimed "agile organisation" ever.
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Here's a handy graphic.
"The hard thing about building software is deciding what one wants to say, not saying it. No facilitation of expression can give more than marginal gains."
The author of The Mythical Man-Month explains in 1987 why coding isn't the bottleneck.
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If your job title is "Senior Software Engineer" and you think testing is someone else's job, I have news for you...
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The problem with Test-Driven Development is that you have to think a little about what you want the code to do before you write it. And that ruins the surprise.
Here's the truth about TDD (Test Driven Development).
It's a broken practice. It's always been broken. It's broken by the definition of it. Its biggest merit is the encouragement of testing but that's about where it ends.
TDD implies writing tests before writing the code. So,
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Why use a team of 8 developers when when you can get half as much done in twice the time with 16?
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Here's my take on what happened to Agile Software Development: to make the medicine more palatable to executives, they took the active ingredients out.
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"But how can we write tests first if we don't know what the code's supposed to do?" isn't the slam-dunk argument against TDD you think it is
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"Ah, but what if the senior developers have been writing code that mostly isn't unit-testable?"
Those aren't senior developers. They're just older.
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"We do Continuous Integration, but on feature branches"
"We do TDD, but we write the tests after"
"We do BDD, but we write the customer tests ourselves"
And I'm agreeing with you, even though it looks like I'm actually shaking my head
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Lots of people asking about Evil FizzBuzz. So here are the instructions: (1/)
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My reply to someone promoting the use of Copilot and GPT-4 as the cure for all our software engineering bottlenecks.
#CodingIsNotTheBottleneck
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"If I don't do TDD, I can get my code into production faster". And if you don't cook the burgers, you can get your food to the diners sooner.
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Your regular reminder that Agile Software Development doesn't produce working software faster, it produces it SOONER.
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DEPENDENCY INJECTION DOES NOT REQUIRE A FRAMEWORK. (Indeed, your code will likely be better off without one.)
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if(condition) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
You'd be amazed how often I still see this in production code
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"I don't see any need to separate logic from the UI" say teams who are on their fourth JS framework in 10 years.
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Devs: "Software development's all about communication"
Also devs: "To improve my productivity, I need to block out time when nobody can communicate with me"
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The average cost of hiring a software developer (recruitment costs + productivity loss while searching - not to mention opportunity loss to your business waiting) is so high that it amazes me that training them is so rarely considered as an option
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Addressing 5 common misconceptions about Agile Software Development:
1. It delivers releases faster -> actually, it delivers *sooner* by making releases *smaller*
2. There's an "Agile methodology" -> Agile's a set of values & principles that can be applied to many methodologies
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My three ingredients for successful software development:
* Small teams working directly with customers
* Working backwards from testable outcomes
* Frequent deliveries of working software to end users
You can keep the rest, because it makes very little difference
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If someone describes themselves as a "full stack developer", I ask them to design a website using only NAND gates
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The purpose of junior developers is to grow into senior developers. Replacing them with "A.I." is like replacing all your unripened tomatoes with pasta sauce. There'll be a shortage of ripe tomatoes - and pasta sauce - come next season.
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We spend ~10x as much time reading code as we do writing it. A tool or technique that makes you twice as "productive" at writing code *at best* makes you 5% more productive over all. Making your code easier to understand will have 10x the impact. But that doesn't sell tools.
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"TDD only works if the requirements are clearly defined." Let's flip that on its head: TDD clearly defines the requirements.
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Before you delete those temporary debugging print statements from your code*, ask yourself what you put them in there to check, and consider whether that should be an automated test. (1/3)
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Far too many making the career transition from "never been a software developer" to "telling software teams how to do their job"
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After decades of studies covering thousands of projects, 2 things we *know* almost certainly won't help you meet that software delivery deadline:
1. Cutting corners on quality
2. Hiring more developers
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I've been in software development for 3 decades and I still have no idea what a "delivery manager" does. And that's after observing them first hand.
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Most orgs greatly under-invest in that side of Agile. I often see armies of Agile coaches brought in, but 70% have never written a line of code, and a further 20% haven't written code for many years. Who's helping teams with the technical side? 9/10 times the answer is: nobody
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The year is 2022, and I still come across managers who respond to slipping schedules by hiring more developers, making teams work longer hours, and throwing testing out of the window. All 3 of those are going to make you deliver even later.
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Contrary to what you may have read in the Agile literature, the key to agility is the ability to change code quickly and safely. And the key to that is the ability to re-test code quickly and effectively. Fast-running automated tests ("unit tests") are the key to agility.
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Things I'd expect *any* software developer to be able to do:
* program (Yup. Oh, you'd be amazed!)
* use version control
* write automated tests
* spot basic maintainability issues (readability, complexity, duplication, coupling)
* basic refactoring to fix the above
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If I had a database that was handling 90% reads and 10% writes, I'd optimise it for reads. On a totally unrelated note, software developers spend 10x as much time reading code as they do writing it.
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I can type ~30 words per minute. My average line of code is ~10 words. The average developer delivers 10-40 lines of working code a day, depending on which study you look at. At 30 wpm, that's 3-12 minutes of typing code a day. TYPING CODE IS NOT THE BOTTLENECK.
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"OO design principles don't apply in FP." Really? How many jobs should a function do (Single Responsibiity)? How much should modules know about each other (Encapsulation)? Can we pass functions as parameters (Dependency Inversion), and do they have contracts (Liskov)?
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The 3 things almost every team does to meet deadlines that make things worse:
1. Hire more developers
2. Cut corners
3. Work long hours
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Computer programming's the art of explaining to a computer precisely what you want it to do. In the future, though, we won't need programmers. Instead, we'll just need people to explain to an A.I. precisely what they want it to tell the computer to do.
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Whenever I see commented-out code, it's time to have the talk about version control
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"Our tests take 3 hours to run. So we're only 3 hours from being able to ship." No, you're 3 hours from finding out what will need fixing before you can ship. And then you'll be another 3 hours from finding out how your bug fixes broke other stuff. And then... etc.
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Developers who think you have nothing to learn from devs over 40... well, good luck with that.
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I think perhaps the problem is with Bloomberg, not Java
My goodness. I hope i will never ever touch java again.
The java development practices are cursed.
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"TDD makes it harder to write complex code." That sounds like a benefit to me.
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When you argue giving equality to someone else infringes your "rights", that's how you know your rights are in fact privileges
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"Things change so fast in tech. It's impossible to keep up."
JavaScript is 25 years old. Java is 25 years old. C# is 21 years old. Python is 30 years old.
Those are the four most widely-used programming languages in 2021.
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I see Functional Programming and Object-Oriented Programming as complimentary. Anyone claiming that one is superior to the other, in my experience, has failed to understand either.
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"Pair programming's a waste of money. 2 developers doing the work of one?!" I have bad news for you about your team of 50 junior developers...
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Most software architecture discussions these days sound like me asking the estate agent "And what if I want to throw a dinner party for 50,000,000 close friends?"
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"We want to do TDD, but our manager won't let us." Classic dev mistake. You asked for permission.
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Programming is hard. It's also the easiest part of software development.
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Liberal arts majors: "A.I. will make science and engineering degrees obsolete"
STEM majors: "A.I. Will make liberal arts degrees obsolete"
Plumbers: "First hour is £150, then every hour after that is £90"
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Failed before it even started. 160 developers is easily 10x too many (probably 20x), and pretty much guaranteed to fail because of the massive team size. This was an exercise in maximising billable hours, and nothing more. The managers who commissioned this are incompetent.
Detailed FT investigation into failed UK attempt to develop homegrown track/trace app, using 160 coders & £11m
one nugget about a British territory that did launch its app this month, having spent £0.1m, after using Ireland’s open source code - Gibraltar
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By far the the most valuable lesson I've learned in 3 decades as a software developer is to walk away from a problem that I just can't seem to crack. Take a stroll, watch a movie, have a glass of wine, sleep on it. I'm much smarter when I'm not thinking, it turns out.
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Managers: the software teams you applaud for putting out fires usually started them in the first place
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You might think, as our profession expands exponentially, that the highest priority would be to keep the most experienced devs at the code face to mentor the ever-growing numbers of people entering the industry...
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My new software development methodology is called Actually Doing The Thing. Not "Getting A Certification In The Thing" or "Talking About The Thing In Meetings". Actually. Doing. The. Thing.
Teams who practice Actually Doing The Thing at the very least know if The Thing works.
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I see a lot of orgs where the most senior developers are considered too valuable to "waste" mentoring junior developers. IMO, that's the most value a senior developer can bring.
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Founder: "I'm going to get ChatGPT to write the software and save $millions"
Me, a software developer: "Good for you! Here's my card, just in case anything goes wrong. What's that? Yes, it is a very high daily rate, isn't it."
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I keep hearing that working remotely will ruin a junior dev's career because they'll miss important learning without those "water cooler moments" and I can't help feeling that any profession which relies on random social interactions to instill the foundations has bigger problems
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Software architecture happens whether you like it or not
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Fun fact: every time someone told me "This is going to completely transform the software industry", it didn't.
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Always amazes me how few businesses see high-performing dev teams as assets. "Thanks John, Paul, George, Ringo. That 1st album sold gangbusters. Time to split you up."
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