Software Development as an Emergent System
blinkingcaret.com
blinkingcaret.com
Of course, having a measurement might help shine a spotlight on how things are getting worse, but I've never actually seen this happen. Perhaps others have a different experience?
You are making a good point about people not being around long term. In my company there are departments with high turnover and they tend to go for quick victories that are often costly in the long term. At the time this becomes clear the manager who made the previous has already been promoted somewhere else and the next guy will make another quick decision to fix the previous problem. Then this guy gets promoted too and the cycle continues.
Technical debt is really only a problem if you think long term.
Refactoring is quite literally the same thing as re-filing and reorganizing physical files. Under the academic definition of refactoring, the "contents" (the functionality) is not changing. Only the organization is changing.
This was effective. Except that management saw him as fast and so he kept getting more work, and completing it. But the quality wasn't there because no one went in behind him to keep it clean and tidy. Management never really saw the issue, they just thought the rest of us were bad programmers because we were so slow. We were slow because: 1) some of us (like me) work slowly; 2) the fast guy introduced a lot of technical debt (or we introduced it because we weren't given the cleanup time I used to have).
He's still a good programmer (in general), but without the support structure his products are far less useful than they same at first glance (due to the introduced technical debt).
But management loves their heroes, so the people with high tolerance for complexity get promoted, and all the people I trust keep leaving...
I worked for two years at a big corporation (mostly as an experiment, but also to prove that I could) on a huge and somewhat important internal project (meaning that we're were never going to be killed because we represented a thing that would save millions of dollars when it finally worked AND we had no external users that could abandon us, ours was a captive audience.)
> At the time this becomes clear the manager who made the previous has already been promoted somewhere else and the next guy will make another quick decision to fix the previous problem. Then this guy gets promoted too and the cycle continues.
Not only did I see that happen two or three times while I was there, but the project itself had been crapped out by some cowboy coder who stood up a demo, got some traction for it, and moved on to greater things. He had a rep as a Rockstar because of this project but if you actually looked at what he did (as I had to every day) it was a rickety un-designed P.O.S. that could barely function. It was a glorified spreadsheet basically, but of course not implemented on top of the in-house spreadsheet product. We rolled our own TableView... It also crashed on importing more than 25K (not M, K) records, which was one of the main reasons it had been started in the first place: the existing system it was meant to replace was slow on large ("large") datasets. The new system wasn't slow, it just crashed. This was progress.
But the money was good. Food too.
-----
edit, I started getting flashbacks to that job after writing the above. Hoo boy was that ever a shocking place to work. I feel like I was kidnapped by aliens for two years.
The software was a textbook case of the "Lava Flow" anti-pattern: http://antipatterns.com/lavaflow.htm It had at least five distinct waves of rewrites, all of which were left petrified in the code.
At one point the dispatch system was rewritten in this weird not-OOP, not-Aspect, not-Actor, style, during a wave of the "composition-not-inheritance" fad that comes and goes. I remember opening up one of the affect modules and thinking, "This is like Romulan code." It was so strange.
After two years working on the new well tested, well written product, no one wanted the new .Net product, they stopped working on it and put everyone on the old PHP based product where there was a demand. Within 6 months after people’s vesting period elapsed, everyone (14+) developers left because no one wanted to do PHP.
Also, when he was a young hungry startup, he didn’t worry about “good practices”, but now that he was flush with cash and didn’t have to worry about going out of business, he could do things by the book.
I learned a few lessons over the years after that product and seeing how things really work - especially at smaller VC funded companies. No one cares about code quality, just growing features, acquiring customers, and the exit strategy.
It worked for Twitter....
You can keep velocity high on a badly run project for a couple years, but if your roadmap or business plan is long term, you will find that 5ings calcify before you’re ready for them. I always try to remind people that this is about the long term.
It’s also easier to grow and shrink a team when the code is Clean. But some of your coworkers won’t like the idea that they can be gotten rid of so easily. At the heart of its that’s the struggle. One or two experts on the system is enough to keep those people and their bosses fat and happy for quite a while.
In other words, what's the lesson here? Speed at all costs because you quickly figure out if the product is wanted? Or speed at all costs because bugs just don't matter?
The lesson, for new markers that aren’t heavily regulated and the cost of bugs isn’t high (like healthcare and banking) is speed at all cost, and then once you have penetration, then start worrying about technical debt.
Sounds like wisdom. I've been thinking along those lines myself.
I wonder what this means for correctness-focused languages (functional, with static and strong typing). Personally I'm a fan of these, but it could be that they're just not desirable in most industries. I'm assuming that these languages slow you down, but I hope they don't all do that.
Other projects not so much, especially in this day and age where rapid delivery and throwaway is actually an accepted form of SW development.
The fact that Agile and its ilk sprung up and mostly failed to address these issues shows how hard a problem this is.
There's also a fairly high bar for what gets marked as "Done", so the rework is a bit lower. I've been on stories where we spent as much time dealing with the architectural consequences of a new feature as we did on the visible bits.
Sometimes it can be hard. Especially in the anchorship role. I've once had to tie up an entire track of work to fix the tech debt equivalent of a toxic spill for weeks and weeks. It sucked, there was zero user-visible value gained, but it simply had to be done or we would suffer more and more.
I dunno if that's considered agile or not. At some level it doesn't bother me.
Programmers and our employers exhibit flocking behavior. See how Ruby on Rails brought so many people to the Ruby language. How Python had a similar surge earlier in the 00s, and later with the explosion of use (numpy and similar) in data science applications. Additionally, things like Ruby on Rails helped make the web application commonplace. See JavaScript and AJAX for that as well.
Perl established an effective code repository (CPAN) that enabled their userbase to grow via a similar flocking mechanism. Go has no central repository but has an easy to use mechanism for adding dependencies based on git repositories. That ease of access to published modules allows people to adopt the technology once a peer (someone working in a similar domain) publishes something. And it encourages people to contribute back in some fashion (publish new modules or update the existing ones). In Perl's case you saw a lot of people from outside IT making use of it (the same is now true for Python with data science) because the heavy lifting was done and they could focus on gluing things together.
Exploiting this flocking behavior, then, becomes important to anyone wanting to push a new technology out. Even if it's the best thing and would produce the best software ever, it won't always succeed on its own merits.
(random thoughts, no real thesis here)
Take an urn with green and red balls (or blue and orange, if you're colour-blind).
Pick out a ball. If it is red, put it back and replace a green ball with another red ball. If green, put it back and replace a red ball with a green.
Even starting with a perfect 50:50, and choosing completely randomly, a Polya process will eventually show that your probability of picking one colour becomes more or less certain. The urn "locks" into a particular path. While in theory it could return to 50:50 or swing back to the other colour, the odds of doing so rapidly become astronomical.
John Sterman's Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World has a really excellent discussion. Worth looking for.
That particular model is interesting for what I described. Essentially, if someone wants to program they'll be drawn to one of the projects/people already out there which are already using some language. They'll then use the same language and become a person or produce a project that the next person may be drawn to. The original thing that drew them to the language is still there, and they're another point to draw someone else to the same language.
Thanks.
Sterman's is the best all-round book on systems thinking I've read. Not too hand-wavy, not swimming in calculus, plenty of interesting case studies and practical advice that show deep experience. It's in a sweet spot for me.
Edit: as a note, it always seems to be substantially cheaper on Book Depository than on Amazon. I suspect that bots are, hilariously, in a feedback loop bidding up a book about feedback loops.
I've also been reading Weinberg's General Systems Thinking (bundle with it and some other books at Leanpub[1]). I can't say I've seen anything new in it yet, but it (like many books) is connecting dots for me that I hadn't connected before. Reading through it, I wish I'd seen some of its content when I was younger, it could've made some things easier over the years.
[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-87...