The Agile Executive

Mapping the Agile thinking, theory and practices to the realities of the target company is a tricky part of making Agile happen in a sustainable manner. HubOne’s Nick Beaugeard, known to readers of this blog from his post Enterprise Product: $50,000 and 8 months – You Must be Kidding, shares with us his recipe for so doing in a start-up environment. He manages to weave the pragmatic details with the core principles behind software development in general and Agile methods in particular. For example, consider the following insight provided by Nick:

In fact, when developing an API, the unit tests are your clients!

Readers of this blog might want to compare and contrast the thoughts Nick expresses in this post with those of:

1. Ryan Martens on prescriptive versus adaptive rollout of Agile (click here).
2. Eric Ries on iterating on the problem definition and developing the customer base in parallel with iterating on the solution (Click here).

Here is Nick:

After my last post, where I discussed the concept of implementing the tools and process before you get people on board, I though it appropriate to provide some prescriptive guidance on how we achieved the process. This post is primarily aimed at start-ups where you have total control over your infrastructure, computers, network and internet connection. If there is enough interest, I’ll produce another post of how to perform the same, but in a corporate environment.

I believe, and my experience has shown, that preparing your work environment, tools and process before the team starts coding helps eliminate costly and lengthy discussions about tools and process. In fact, in my experience, most developers are pleasantly surprised to find the environment ready and working and slip into the processes extremely quickly.

So, please find below my ten steps. Following this process really helped us get up and running quickly. Whilst we used Microsoft Development tools, this equally applies to their open source equivalents, so feel free to substitute specific tools, just not the requirements and process.

1. Authentication, Network and VPN. Setting up the core of your environment is critical. As you are more than likely working on secret software at the outset, you need good, auditable mechanisms for authentication and logon. In addition, we don’t want our developers to have to do anything except start their PC or laptop and login, and we really want them to be able to work remotely. If you don’t feel qualified or able to complete the steps below, any good local IT Pro should be able to set this all up for you. To perform this, we implemented the following:
   1. Network Connection – we are in Australia so our networks are not fantastic. We subscribed to a good ADSL 2+ plan (24Mb) with a 80Gb limit. We implemented a modern ADSLwireless modem/router and configured it correctly. This gave us acceptable internet connectivity.
   2. Domain – We implemented a domain controller running on Windows Server 2008. This gave us corporate authentication, auditing and identification. The domain controller was hosted on our private network (see 1.c)
   3. Routing and VPN –our internal development network needed to be protected from internet connectivity so we implemented a Windows Server 2008 machine with two network cards (called multihomed). One card was connected to the router and one connected to an Ethernet switch. We used a private IP subnetfor our development Local Area Network (LAN) and enabled Microsoft Routing and Remote Access. This gave us the ability to authenticate domain users to VPN into the private network for remote working. We then configured our router to allow access to the server for VPN Access.
   4. DNS –one of the issues you face with ADSL is that your Internet IP Address changes often. The solution for this was to use a solution from DYNDNS (www.dyndns.com) which allowed us to register a host name, coupled with a client application which ensured our host name for VPN always pointed at the correct IP Address.
   5. DHCP –it’s a real pain, especially when using VPN when your client machines are configured for static IP addresses. We used Microsoft Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) to ensure every machine had a unique IP Address and that our networking became just “plug-and-play”
2. Version Control and issue tracking – in my experience, there are four critical systems needed for any software development team. These are:
   1. Version Control – Also known as source repositories, these systems allow control over check-in, check-out and versioning of source files. I cannot recall the number of times we backed out an individual source file to a previous “working version”. Without this in place, I can guarantee you’re going to struggle maintaining a good code base!
   2. Bill of Materials– the way I use these is to highlight each of the key deliverables in a project. When building Enterprise Profile Management, our BOM had 345 separate items, everything from the corporate website, to graphic design, to core components of the API. The Bill of materials is a way to track the overall progress of the project. Each item in the Bill of Materials should have at a minimum a title, description, owner, due date, % complete and %tested. We also use the bill of materials to determine our release criteria (more on this later).
   3. Build System – the biggest mistake a development manager can make is to not build the software regularly. We build our software system every time there is a new check-in (called continuous integration). Even with a very small team, the ripple effect of changes could go un-noticed for ages without building regularly. As an aside, we also have a Nabaztag (www.nabaztag.com) bunny which tells us whenever there is a build, whose check-in caused it and whether it succeeded or failed. While this is really annoying, it focuses the developers on good check-ins. We might also make the person who broke the builds buy us a round of beer, but that’s a secret!
   4. Issue Management – More important than email, IM, or indeed any other form of communication in the development team is issue management. I believe that in  a project of any size, you’ll be hard pressed to ever finish if you don’t have good issue management. Issues should contain a title, description, history, assignee, status and indicate which version/iteration of which product the issue applies to. I don’t actually think a spreadsheet will cut it here. If there’s one investment you make, make sure it’s issue management.
      We used Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for all of the above. Being an ex-microsoft product team member, I am familiar with the way the product works, but there are lots of plug-ins available for scrum, agile (MSF) and CMMI. To do this on a startup budget, we were able to join the Microsoft BizSpark program (http://www.bizspark.com) which gave us instant access to Microsoft’s developer tools. I’d highly recommend taking a look at that program!
3. Backup – Now is the time to do a backup and recovery operation. You have no real data in the system and how you installed it all is probably fresh in your mind. Trust me, every first recovery operation fails. You need to imagine your office has been hit by lightning and you have no servers, and just a backup. If you can successfully recover your environment in under 24 hours, you’re in a good place. Document how to do it and test it regularly.
   When we were developing Enterprise Profile Management, our server with all issue management, reporting, builds and version control failed (the processor fried). We were taking backups, but the restore failed. It took me 22 hours to perform a forensic recovery of our production platform. Luckily the developers could work offline, but we still introduced a ton of integration bugs. Don’t skimp on backup.
4. Email, IM and Web Conferencing – You’re going to be working remotely at some time, whether you think you will or not. We quickly implemented the following tools:
   1. Email – Google Gmail for your domain (www.google.com/apps)
   2. IM – Windows Live Messenger and Skype (www.live.com, http://www.skype.com)
   3. Web Conferencing – Dim Dim (www.dimdim.com)
      Note: there are lots of other tools out there, we just chose these (with little science, but they’ve worked well for us)
5. Coding Standards – Getting at least some coding standards in place before you write any code is really important. Good Version Control Systems should be able to validate code against your standards on check-in. My key coding standards are:
   1. No String Literals – All strings must be externalised in resource files for later localization (a process called globalization)
   2. Commenting – I insist that every class, method, property, event and interface be commented. There’s method in my madness here; obviously code commenting is important but with proper commenting (especially in C#) and tools like sandcastle, you can automatically create documentation like ours at http://api.hubone.com.
   3. No Short Cuts – This one was a little contentious – Our code will in the future (hopefully) be worked on by people who had no idea of the concept. Writing out If…then constructs and property accessors in long-hand makes the code much more readable for novices, junior programmers, support teams and architects alike.
   4. Unit Test Everything –I insist that every method, property, event etc, etc has an associated unit test. These we execute as a part of the build. My goal is to have over 80% of any code written covered by unit tests. In fact, when developing an API, the unit tests are your client! Although this increases the programming effort up front, it actually reduces the total time taken to ship the product. I havelost count of how many times our massive unit test library has saved us from nasty regressions that we could never have found from UI testing.
6. Write some code –Don’t worry, you don’t need to be the world’s best developer to write some code. All you need to do is think carefully about the different items in the Bill of Materials and start prototyping the methods, properties and events that will make it all work. Ensure you adhere to your coding standards. The goal of this exercise is to effectively build a skeleton of your application before the developers get on board. This can make them hyper productive when they start. They’ll probably end up getting rid of every line of your code, but it will get them in the rhythm of how you want the platform to look. As the architect of our platform, I used this period to prototype and test all of my assumptions of how things would work. By the time the developers got on board, I had a passable working prototype of an API with unit tests and coding standards, although there is almost none of my code in the final product, this enabled us to get running really quickly.
7. Don’t write a test plan – Write the user documentation instead, and use this to test your application. That way you’ll know your application does everything the user guide says it does and you won’t double up on a test plan and the user guide (which should end up being pretty similar anyway). I wrote our user guide because I knew what I wanted the product to do and it’s also a fantastic way (sometimes they only way) you get to communicate with your customers.
8. Give ownership, responsibility and praise – You will have no choice. As you get developers, testers, writers and others on board, you must give them ownership of components. I find that if I give someone total ownership, they always deliver. People are proud when they do great work and if they feel and really have ownership over something, it will be their best work. Not only that, but they’ll pull out every stop to impress you, the team and your customers. If you hire correctly, you’ve got great professionals in the team. Respect them as professionals and the results will be awesome.
9. The best wire framing tools are not wire framing tools – You’re a start-up, right? Then you’ve discussed your ideas with potential customers and you deeply understand their needs. You could sit down with any number of wire framing tools and attempt to design components. How about you take a different approach? Write functional code which does what you (and therefore your customers want) – Developers find it far easier to code from a working model and they can re-use portions of your code. All of this streamlines the process and you can take your models to customers (with caveats on your poor coding skills and lack of stylistic ability).
10. Constantly review and drive – We spend some time every day in front of a whiteboard discussing options, vision, checklists and almost everything else, but in a start-up, it’s not really a democracy. I run my start-ups like a benevolent dictatorship – I hold the final decision, but let everyone have input. I’m the one talking to customers, and sometimes I bring customers in to explain a requirement, but at the end of the day, how it works is up to me (I have the most to lose if it doesn’t work!)

Notice here, we never had a specification, requirements specification or design, we build the code a piece at a time and made it work. We’ve gone back and documented some core functionality, flowcharts and features, but at the outset, it’s more important to make it work. I’ll share a caveat, though, I’m also the software architect so I can hold the requirements for scalability, security and reliability, and guide the team to accomplish those goals.

Hiring the team can happen sometime between points 7 and 8, I don’t recommend you do it before!

If you’d like more information, please feel free to get in touch at nick@hubone.com, and if you’d like a copy of the software this built, we can be found at http://www.hubone.com.