Posts Tagged ‘Code Quality’
Forthcoming Technical Debt Events
In just about a week I will be sharing the latest and greatest in technical debt techniques through a Cutter webinar in which colleague John Heintz and I will be speaking . In a little over a month a special issue of the Cutter IT Journal [CITJ] on technical debt will be published. And, in a couple of months Jim Highsmith and I will deliver a workshop on the subject in the Cutter Summit.
Shifting from the process to its output (i.e. the code) is the common thread that runs through the three events. Rigorous that your implementation of the software process is, the proof of the pudding is the quality of the code your teams produce. The technical debt accrued in the code is the ultimate acid test for your success with the Agile roll-out and/or with any other software method you might be using.
Another important thread in all three events is a single source of truth. The technical debt data seen by the developer in the trenches, his/her project leader, the mid-level manager on the project, the vice president of engineering and the CFO/CEO represents different views of the realities of the code. Each level sees a different aggregation of data – all the way from a blocking violation at a specific line of code to the aggregate $$ amount required to “pay back” the debt. But, there is no distortion between the five levels of the technical debt data – all draw upon the code itself as the single source of truth.
Here is the announcement of the first event – the Reining in Technical Debt webinar scheduled for August 19, 12:00PM EDT:
Do you really govern the software development process in your IT organization or do its uncertainty and unpredictability leave you aghast? Do you manage to bake in quality in every build? Can you assess the quality of your software in a way that quantifies the risk?
Recent developments in software engineering and in software governance enable you to tie quality, cost, and value together to form a simple and effective governance framework for software. This webinar will provide you with a preliminary understanding of how to assess quality through technical debt techniques, will familiarize you with state-of-the-art tools for measuring technical debt, and will demonstrate the effect on value delivery when technical debt is not “paid back” promptly.
Israel and John will also introduce a governance framework that ensures you can rigorously manage your software development process from a business perspective. This framework reduces a large number of complex technical considerations to a common denominator that is easily understood by both technical and non-technical people — dollars.
Get Your Questions Answered
Don’t miss your chance to get specific advice from Cutter’s experts on technical debt and toxic code. Join us on Thursday, August 19 at 12:00 EDT (see your local time here) to learn how both your software development process(es) and the corresponding governance process can be transformed in a manner that will make a big difference to your software developers and testers, to key stakeholders in your company, and to your firm’s customers.
Register Now!
Register to attend so you’ll have the opportunity to have your specific questions answered. We’ll send you the login instructions a day prior to the webinar.
As always, this Cutter Webinar is not vendor sponsored, and is available to Cutter clients and our guests at no charge. Register here.
Pass this invitation along!
Be sure to extend our invitation to your CIO, CFO and the other senior business-IT leaders and trainers in your organization who you think could benefit from this discussion.
If you have any questions prior to the program, please contact Kim Leonard at kleonard@cutter.com or call her directly at +1 781 648 8700.
Can’t Make the Live Event?
You won’t miss out — the recording will be added to the webinarsonline resource center for client access, along with the rest of these past events.
A Devops Case Study
An outline of my forthcoming Agile 2010 workshop was given in the post “A Recipe for Handling Cultural Conflicts in Devops and Beyond” earlier this week. Here is the case study around which the workshop is structured:
NotHere, Inc. Case Study
NotHere, Inc. is a $500M company based in Jerusalem, Israel. The company developed an eCommerce platform for small to medium retailers. Through a combination of this platform and its hosting data center, NotHere provides online store fronts, shopping carts, order processing, inventory, billing and marketing services to tens of thousands of retailers in a broad spectrum of verticals. For these retailers, NotHere is a one-stop “shopping” for all their online needs. In particular, instead of partnering with multiple companies like Amazon, Ebay, PayPal and Shopzilla, a retailer merely needs to partner with NotHere (who partners with these four companies and many others).
The small to medium retailers that use the good services of NotHere are critically dependent on the availability of its data center. For all practical purposes retailers are (temporarily) dead when the NotHere data center is not available. In recognition of the criticality of this aspect of its IT operations, NotHere invested a lot of effort in maturing its ITIL[i] processes. Its IT department successfully implements the ITIL service support and service delivery functions depicted in the figure below. From an operational perspective, an overall availability level of four nines is consistently attained. The company advertises this availability level as a major market differentiator.
In response to the accelerating pace in its marketplace, NotHere has been quite aggressive and successful in transitioning to Agile in product management, dev and test. Code quality, productivity and time-to-producing-code have been much improved over the past couple of years. The company measures those three metrics (quality, productivity, time-to-producing-code) regularly. The metrics feed into whole-hearted continuous improvement programs in product management, dev and test. They also serve as major components in evaluating the performance of the CTO and of the EVP of marketing.
NotHere has recently been struggling to reconcile velocity in development with availability in IT operations. Numerous attempts to turn speedy code development into fast service delivery have not been successful on two accounts:
- Technical: Early attempts to turn Continuous Integration into Continuous Deployment created numerous “hiccups” in both availability and audit.
- Cultural: Dev is a competence culture; ops is a control culture.
A lot of tension has arisen between dev and ops as a result of the cultural differences compounding the technical differences. The situation deteriorated big time when the “lagging behind” picture below leaked from dev circles to ops.
The CEO of the company is of the opinion NotHere must reach the stage of Delivery over Development. She is not too interested in departmental metrics like the time it takes to develop code or the time it takes to deploy it. From her perspective, overall time-to-delivery (of service to the retailers) is the only meaningful business metric.
To accomplish Delivery over Development, the CEO launched a “Making Cats Work with Dogs[ii]” project. She gave the picture above to the CTO and CIO, making it crystal clear that the picture represents the end-point with respect to the relationship she expects the two of them and their departments to reach. Specifically, the CEO asked the CTO and the CIO to convene their staffs so that each department will:
- Document its Outmodel (in the sense explored in the “How We Do Things Around Here In Order to Succeed” workshop) of the other department.
- Compile a list of requirements it would like to put on the other group “to get its act together.”
The CEO also indicated she will convene and chair a meeting between the two departments. In this meeting she would like each department to present its two deliverables (world view of the other department & and the requirements to be put on it) and listen carefully to reflections and reactions from the other department. She expects the meeting will be the first step toward a mutual agreement between the two departments how to speed up overall service delivery.
[i] “Information Technology Infrastructure library – a set of concepts and practices for Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), Information Technology (IT) development and IT operations” [Wikipedia].[ii] I am indebted to Patrick DeBois for suggesting this title.
© Copyright 2010 Israel Gat
Should You Ship This Code Before Reducing Technical Debt?!
Source: JulesH, Wikipedia, A control flow graph of a simple function
Technical debt is usually perceived as a measure of expediency. You borrow a little (time) with the intent of paying it back as soon as possible. To quote Ward Cunnigham:
Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… I thought that rushing software out the door to get some experience with it was a good idea, but that of course, you would eventually go back and as you learned things about that software you would repay that loan by refactoring the program to reflect your experience as you acquired it.
As is often the case with financial debt, technical debt accrues with compound interest. Once it reaches a certain level (e.g. $1 per line of code) you stare at a difficult question:
Should I ship this code before reducing the accrued technical debt?!
The Figure below, taken from An Objective Measure of Code Quality by Mark Dixon, answers the question with respect to one important component of technical debt – cyclomatic complexity. Once complexity per source code file exceeds 74, the file is for most practical purposes guaranteed to contain errors. Some of the errors in such a file might be trivial. However, a 2007 study by Capers Jones indicates about a third of the errors found in released code are likely to be serious enough to stop an application from running or create erroneous outputs.
To answer the question cited above – Should You Ship This Software Before Reducing Technical Debt?! – examine both cost and risk for the number of error-prone files you are about to unleash:
- The economics of defect removal clearly favor early defect removal over late defect removal. The cost of removal grows exponentially as function of time.
- Brand risk should be first and foremost on your mind. If complexity figures higher than 74 per file are more of the norm than the exception, you are quite likely to tarnish your image due to poor quality.
If you decide to postpone the release date until the technical debt has been reduced, you can apply yourself to technical debt reduction in a biggest-bang-for-the-buck manner. The analysis of complexity can identify the hot spots in your code, giving you a de-facto roadmap you would be wise to follow.
Conversely, if you opt to ship the code without reducing technical debt, you might lose this degree of freedom to prioritize your “fix it” work. Customer situations and pressures might force you to attend to fixing modules that do not necessarily provide as much bang for the buck.
Postscript: Please note that the discussion in this post is strictly limited to intrinsic quality. It does not address at all extrinsic quality. In other words, reducing/eliminating technical debt does not guarantee that the customer will find the code valuable. I would suggest reading Beyond Scope, Schedule and Cost: Measuring Agile Performance in the Cutter Blog for a more detailed analysis of the distinction between the two.
Erratum: The figure above is actually taken from a blog post on the Mark Dixon paper cited in my post. See McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity: the proof is in the pudding. My apology for the error.
The Agile Executive 