What does a customer wants?

Usually your customer wants to know a simple thing – when your team will deliver working software based on agreed requirements. They naively want to safely bet on highly uncertain future outcome – delivery of the complex never created before system that completely fulfil their dreams.

The customer wants reliable McDonalds experience, but with a little tweak – they want to hand in their own exclusive menu, often created by people who don’t have any idea how to cook.

In short, the customer requires creative flexibility of Cooking Master Chef fortified by ability to predictably deliver hamburgers as McDonalds.

But, is it possible in our development reality to chase two opposing goals – Predictability and Flexibility in the same time?

Predictability vs Flexibility

The best way to achieve predictability is standardization – formalize process, nail-down rules, follow and optimize them mercilessly. However, standards have negative effects – lower morale, inhibited creativity, reduced flexibility and slower response to changes.

Rapid adaptation is the best way to to be flexible – eagerness to quickly regroup and self-organize to address new challenges and creatively solve new problems. However, constant changes and creativity sparks lead to unpredictable and ad-hoc results without much opportunity to stabilize and optimize delivery.

Standardization is a crystallized answer to past events – how to repeat effectively something that was solved before and proved to work.

Adaptation is the response to current events – how to embrace unforeseen requests, challenges and events.

Standardization has own cost – processes and rules should be maintained, reviewed and optimized otherwise they will become source of overhead, rigidity and frustration. But if there is no standardization, lessons and best practices could be lost or not followed.

It is difficult, but possible to chase these two contrary goals in the same time. Build standards to solve repeating problems and optimize recurring activities. Adapt to meet new challenges.

Team Maturity Matrix

Development teams have different capabilities to strike both predictable and flexible delivery.

• Amateurs – do even simple things… unpredictably
• Explorers – capable of solving complex non-standard problems, but cannot guarantee time and budget (Ph.D guys)
• Mechanics – very efficient with standard solutions, but struggle with new stuff (anal-retentive guys)
• Regulars – predictability of delivery lowers for more challenging problems
• Strike Force – deliver reliable results for any type of problem

Any team should grow from Amateur status, but rare team could become Strike Force that mastered both – predictable and flexible delivery. Than what direction of growth to choose? It depends on nature of projects and problems the team tackle.

Finding sweet spot

Predictable delivery requires reduced variations in development process: uniform, ordered and consistent approach with focus on high efficiency.

Flexible delivery requires increased variations in the process: enabling more options, wider range of responses to improve fitness in changing environment.

These 2 goals could compliment each other. Predictability (with standardization) could bring consistency and stability in volatile and evolving development ecosystem. Adaptation helps to improve and find better standards and ideas for established processes.

So, can team deliver as McDonalds, but using exclusive menu? Yes, if they not only excel in programming, but also excel in the way they work – persistently re-evaluating approaches and improving both predictability and flexibility.

There are three simple requirements for the team

1. Follow standards (minimal, adhering to principles)
2. Challenge standards (not relevant, rigid, impeding, excessive)
3. Introduce and Improve standards (from lessons learned, best practices, enhancing flexibility and value stream)

And you will build powerful development machine that continuously transforming to embrace fluid reality while keeping steadiness and predictability as McDonalds.

]]> http://softwarecreation.org/2011/can-software-team-deliver-like-mcdonalds/feed/ 0 http://softwarecreation.org/2011/stuck-on-a-big-hard-programming-task-read-this/ http://softwarecreation.org/2011/stuck-on-a-big-hard-programming-task-read-this/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:18:45 +0000 Andriy Solovey http://softwarecreation.org/?p=232

Hit the road

Seasoned project managers will tell that delivery of software is result of many trade offs. The main trade off is between Time (when project will finish) and Scope (how much will be done). This post will show that using right tools you could gain improvement for both variables.

While it is possible to create orderly step-by-step process for increasing productivity of software teams, it will never be ideal – too many variations and situations will hinder it usefulness. I believe in set of useful tool that could be combined to craft custom optimal solution.

Strategies

There are several strategies that lead to increase in productivity – how many units of scope software team can produce within fixed time.

1. Increase Capacity (Capacity) - increase capacity by hiring more people or increasing work hours
   • productivity is increased as result of more resources and hours available
2. Improve Value Stream (Value) - increase added business value on each step and reduce waste and overhead
   • productivity is increased as result of optimized delivery of value
3. Adaptat to Reality  (Adaptation)- learn from practice and mistakes, validation of ideas by reality, adapt to changing situation
   • productivity increased as result of early corrections and improving how things are done
4. Empower Individuals (Individuals) - boost people knowledge, skills, morale and focus
   • productivity is increased as result of higher individual performance and motivation
5. Enhance Communication (Communication) - improve communication and mutual understanding inside and outside of the team
   • productivity is increased as result of availability of necessary information, clarity of what should be done and exchange of ideas for implementation
6. Organize Better (Organization) –  structure team and assign roles for better coordination and decision making
   • productivity is increased as result of better decisions and focus on important areas
7. Expand Expertise (Expertise) - increase range of skills and services offered by team
   • productivity is increased as result of better execution of necessary project activities
8. Scale Externally (Externality) – outsourcing and involvement of external communities
   • productivity is increased as result of involvement of more people outside of team
9. Tame Complexity (Design) – manage complexity and provide simple and well designed solutions
   • productivity is increased as result of reducing complexity burden on software development
10. Preserve Quality (Quality) – use defensive tactics to ensure high quality
    • productivity is increased as result of preventing system flaws and reduced effort to fix bugs

• People-oriented – people are the creators of software and have major effect on output
• Process-oriented – the way how people work has significant impact on outcome
• Development-oriented – development practices and approach to the system implementation matters a lot

People-oriented tools

Strategies: Capacity , Expertise , Communication ,  Organization

New people increase volume of possible work within the same time and new expertise increases range and quality of tasks. However, the increase in output is not linear and quickly diminishes, because more people cause communication and coordination overhead. In addition, compensation increase make this tool expensive and less attractive.

Resources:

• Methodology and Team Size, Alistair Cockburn
• Team Size Matters, schmula

2. Motivate

Strategies: Individuals , Quality

Happy motivated people are more productive, focused and concerned about quality and end result. While there is no common receipt for each individual, I believe there are some strong motivators: interesting and meaningful work, fair compensation, control over own tasks and outcomes, ability to learn and professionally grow, comfortable workplace and adequate tools, empathetical and caring management and so on.
Daniel H. Pink in Drive thinks that people are motivated by three elements:

• Autonomy: People want to have control over their work.
• Mastery: People want to get better at what they do.
• Purpose: People want to be part of something that is bigger than they are.

• Professional Growth

Tips: Motivate individually, but set also group targets to encourage cooperation

• Drive, Daniel H. Pink
• The Ideal Software Company. Utopia?

3. Professional Growth

Strategies: Individuals , Expertise , Quality , Adaptation

Software professionals should learn a lot to become productive and proficient. People learn in several ways and learning from mistakes is the most memorable, but expensive way. Learning by self-study, formal training and coaching by experienced colleagues are more effective ways. Encourage and direct learning to grow high performance experts and team. And certainly, continue learning as much as possible from mistakes and practice. :)

• How to Become an Expert. Top 7 Qualities
• How to Become an Expert. The Effective Way

4. Overtime

Strategies: Capacity , Individuals , Quality

Nobody recommends involuntary overtime for a long time as benefits will disappear quickly when a stressed team lowers quality and starts breaking apart.

5. Right leaders

Strategies: Communication , Organization

Good leaders jell teams, align people with goals, boost energy and remove barriers. Leaders vary from commanders to visionaries and each style has merits under specific circumstances. Right leaders are essential for the project success.

Tips: Adjust leadership style to situation

• What is The Best Leadership Style for The Software Team?

Strategies: Expertise , Organization

A software team requires range of skills and involved in different activities to achieve end goal – implemented software system for customer needs. Beyond software implementation the team deals with a customer domain, company vision, market demands, technologies, operation environments and other project aspects. The team is involved in research, analysis, coordination, design, architecture, usability, testing, deployment, hosting and other activities. Therefore team players should be able to play different roles and have expertise to cover various aspects to ensure good end results.

Resources:

• Why specialization in Software development is bad for business

Strategies: Capacity , Expertise , Externality , Organization , Communication

Tasks and challenges should match skills and experience of team players. It doesn’t make sense for backend developers to convert Photoshop files into html or conduct marketing research and focus groups. If team cannot afford to hire a permanent specialist, they should try to find professional mercenaries who will do work faster on higher quality level.

Strategies: Individuals

Flow (or Immersion) is a state of mental focus so intense that awareness of the real world is lost, generally resulting in a feeling of joy and satisfaction. When learning and tasks are too easy, people become bored. If they are too complex they become stressed and frustrated. Flow happens when perception and understanding are challenged near capacity without being exceeded.

• ability to focus
• clear goals
• immediate feedback
• control over actions, activities and the environment

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Strategies: Quality , Organization , Individuals

Few people will be always disciplined no matter what and few will always violate rules. Majority are context sensitive – relax than discipline is low and work hard when discipline is enforced. Build a minimal set of rules approved by majority and stick to these rules.

Resources:

• Lost Personalities: How our company alters us

Process-oriented tools

10. Increase feedback and early practical use of ideas

Strategies: Adaptation , Quality , Value

Reality is complex, fluid and unclear. Many assumptions and plans quickly go bust. The process that has built-in mechanism for signaling problems and self-correction is the most effective. Rapid feedback is the core part of such process.

Tips: Iterative development is one of the best examples of the process that relies heavily on feedback.

11. Build alignment

Strategies: Communication , Organization

People jump significant gaps to understand each other – sometimes without much success. Clear vision, smart priorities and honest evaluation allow team players moving in unison and enforce each other. Good understanding focus people on right goals and reduce wasteful activities. Communication and trust are important for alignment.

• vision – project direction and top-level goals
• interests – mix of personal, customer and companies interests (sometimes conflicting)
• understanding – clarity about what others mean
• trust – confidence in other people intentions and promises

12. Integrated decision making

Strategies: Communication , Quality , Adaptation

See Also:

• Self-organization

As project progresses you will find problems, wrong assumptions and challenges. You will have better experience and understanding. Even brightest ideas, best practices and excellent analysis and design could become outdated and ineffective. Continuously look for improvements, eliminate waste and bottlenecks.

Resources:

• How to rescue failing software projects: The Toyota Way
• Theory of Constraints
• Kaizen

Strategies: Individuals , Quality , Value

Highly productive team shouldn’t waste time on routine or non-core activities. Routine work should be automated and non-core work outsourced or covered by external components. The team should focus on high value-added distinctive work for business and application domain – this will bring maximum business results with minimal development effort.

• system thinking
• understanding what really matters and what are limitations
• broad vision and out-of-the box thinking
• knowledge of environment, context and system outside relations
• synthesis of concepts, information and experience

Strategies: Capacity , Expertise , Externality , Organization

Strategies: Value , Communication

You can better understand and change scope of application if you actively work with customers and become partners

• establish ubiquitous language – for better understanding of ideas and translation them into code
• tap into experience and get better insight for business domain and processes
• transform ideas – simplify and find better alternatives

• reducing scope
• simplifying solutions
• finding good enough alternatives

• Pareto Principle
• Ubiquitous Language
• Software Development is The Flow of Ideas. The Rest is Secondary

18. Select Right Process Flow

Strategies: Organization , Value

Select most optimal process for creating value.

• real-time flow –  immediately push tasks for implementation (continuous development flow for highly organized co-located teams)
• pull systems (Kanban) – pull tasks when previous batch is finished and the team is ready to continue (iterations and backlog)
• schedule the workload (Heijunka) – create schedule for contributors with limited availability (outside consultants or shared specialists as designers)

Tips: Use different flows for distinct stages of software creation. For example, a team process can internally use real-time flow, with external teams – Kanban and with consultants Heijunka.

Resources:

• The Toyota Way and Development Process

19. Self-Organization
Strategies: Communication , Individuals , Adaptation , Value

Tips: Not every team can self-organize – it requires maturity. And loss of direct control could be a problem for management if a project departs from company strategy and desired parameters (as budget, standards, resources).

• What is The Best Leadership Style for The Software Team?
• Organizing Self-organizing Teams
• Agile Self-Organizing Teams

Development-oriented tools

20. Increase reuse

Strategies: Design , Quality , Adaptation

Reuse code  (components, libraries, solutions) as much as possible to speed up development and minimize code base. Reuse will bring familiar tested solutions and prevent frequent re-inventions of the wheel.

See Also:

Tips: Design for reuse requires skills and time. It is easy to overly complicate the system by pursuing reusable code. Evolve and refactor code to achieve practically good reusability. Sometimes custome solutions are lighter and better suited for specific purposes than generic and reusable.

21. Generalize and Simplify
Strategies: Design , Quality , Communication

Complexity and poor understanding of the system is one of the worst problems in development. Design, code and concepts should be as simple as possible and clearly understood by the team. Simplicity and clarity are difficult to achieve and require special effort. It is much easier to produce convoluted over-engineered solution for complex problem (Ball of Mud) than simple and elegant solution.

Tips: Great design achieve simplicity by abstracting numerous details into simple concepts in process of solution evolution and learning from implementation.

• Big Ball of Mud, Brian Foote
• 11 Laws of The System Thinking in Software Development
• The Elements of Pragmatic Programming Style. Approach.

Innovation is expensive, uncertain and leave you with custom solutions on your own for support and future development. Piggyback on actively involving products, especially for non-core problems where good and proven solutions are available.Tips: Innovate to gain business advantage or solve serious technical challenges if you have an outstanding team and well-defined problems.

Resources:

• Should An Effective Developer Innovate, Imitate or just Integrate?
• Selecting The Best Strategy for Software Teams: Retreat, Evolution or Revolution

23. Domain Specific Design

Strategies: Design , Communication

Keep technical ideas and code concepts close to the customer domain. You will achieve consistency, better sync between system and business concepts. You can easier translate customer ideas into the system and customers will understand your implementation better.Tips: Domain Driven Design is one the best approaches to achieve synthesis of technical and business ideas for complex domains.

Resources:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• The Secret of Building Effective Software Systems
• The Elements of Pragmatic Programming Style. Composition.

24. Evolution

Strategies: Adaptation , Value , Design

Start with the simplest primitive solutions, enforce early use and seek for feedback. Adjust and improve design before continuing adding new features. Look for better ideas and abstractions. Delay fundamental design decisions until you are confident about system development direction and validated ideas on practice. Do not over-engineer and add unnecessary features.

Tips: Evolution main deficiency is slowness. Modern businesses often don’t have time for many improvement cycles – they want results now.

Resources:

• What can Software Development learn from Biological Evolution?
• Ideas in Software Development: Revolution vs. Evolution. Part 1.

• How a beautiful software system becomes Frankenstein

25. Open architecture and API

Strategies: Externality , Design

Open your solution for external developers who can extend and add more useful features. If you are lucky, you will get much more functionality than you can build internally while still controlling a core solution (iPhone is a perfect example).

Also Open API (convenient and supported by good documentation) give developers eligible ways to interact with you system without hacking or completely ignoring it.

Tips: Once Open API is used it becomes liability – next design decisions will be affected by compatibility and legacy concerns.
Resources:

• API

26. Follow Design Principles

Strategies: Design

Some of design principles

• You should be able to extend system without modifying it
• A class should have one, and only one, reason to change
• Depend on abstractions, not on concretions.
• Make fine grained interfaces that are client specific.

Famous design patterns are built around these principles. Follow sound design principles to build flexible, easy to expand system.

Resources:

• Principles of OOD, Rob Martin
• The Elements of Pragmatic Programming Style. Approach.
• The Elements of Pragmatic Programming Style. Composition.

27. Shared Code, Ideas and Standards

Strategies: Design , Expertise , Communication , Quality

The team should collectively own code and pursue consistency and use of best practices. Otherwise the system will become clash of isolated impassible code islands – scary for people who didn’t build them. Share code and learn from each other to build outstanding system with high quality and integrity of every component.

Tips: Pair Programming is one the best ways to share code, ideas and best practices
Resources:

• Collective Code Ownership
• Pair Programming

28. Use Better technology and tools

Strategies: Individuals , Design , Value

Tips: Obsession with new technologies and race to use them is dangerous for project. Keep sanity until new technology is proven to be beneficial :)

• http://www.sdtimes.com
• http://www.computerworld.com

Guide for increasing team productivity

Questions

Anxiety started to penetrate our souls. We know what is wrong: our team is short of people, we have too many commitments, our code is becoming a big mess, new technology and our new software version makes something bad with servers. A snowball of different problems makes us stressed, distracted and incapable of productive work.

What could our manager do next?

1. Distrust. Become a dictator, make own decisions including hiring external consultants to recommend what to do or even replace us. However,
   • we are good programmers and know our business well – the problem is not in lack of skill and knowledge
   • external people will take a lot of time to understand the system and they will have different motivation and won’t care about the long-term success
   • people will be demotivated and the manager cannot make effective decisions without active team involvement
2. Faith. Give to team the full power to fix a problems and make own decisions in hope that smart people, motivation and technical expertise will do magic. However,
   • fresh outlook and thinking out of box are hard when a team immersed for a long time into difficult situation
   • a team possibly doesn’t have understanding and control over external forces – management, customers, finances
   • changing of reality is tough (especially in people heads) and requires more than technical experience

There is a third way. Place improvement practices in the core of development process. Make self-improvement inevitable and required for any activity. Do it every day.

Toyota Way is the best example of large-scale reliable self-improvement process. It focuses on eliminating waste, solving problems at root cause and making right decisions. Toyota Way reduces problems, increases internal efficiency and makes a company successful. This is the best receipt for coming out of crisis.

Targets:

• Problems - emergencies, fires that require immediate fix: bugs, server crushes, deadline slips

• Waste - inefficient and non-value adding activities: waiting, misinformation, stress

• Challenges - adaptation to external forces (market, competitors, customers, society): new trends and technologies, changes in users expectations for user interface and functionality

Practices to see waste and stop to fix problems

1. Seeing waste

The team and managers should learn to see targets – real problems and waste. Otherwise improvements will be wild shots in the dark.

There are many targets in software development:

• stressed people – reduced energy, less productivity, more mistakes
• waiting – delays, tools / system problems and downtime, capacity bottlenecks (waiting for results of other people work)
• over-engineering – producing features and complicate design without real need
• unfinished work – functionality not used in a live system, probably still in design or under development or simply discarded (but not removed)
• defects – complete waste of time and money
• unused creativity – loosing time, ideas, skills, improvements and learning by not engaging or listening to your employees
• inadequate information – unclear, misleading or simply wrong information that causes useless activity and leads to rework at the end

• over-processing – taking unneeded steps to build software because of poor process and system design, overhead, bureaucracy, compliance, cumbersome tools
• motion – how much effort to get necessary information, access systems or use tools
• multi-tasking – losing time to switch between projects, tasks or different activities

2. Jidoka - stop to fix the problem to get quality right the first time

It is not enough to see your targets. The Team should carry commandment to shoot targets immediately. Otherwise the best intentions will be buried under growing avalanche of problems.

How to stop:

• quality for the customer drives all the processes – prevents temporary patches and bad for quality decisions
• low tolerance for quality problems and immediate detection are core work principle
• use Andon – a system to signal for help, notify about a problem and stop the process

• build in tools and process capabilities of detecting problems and stopping itself
• use all modern QA methods available
• managers encourage stops to fix problems and support implementation of counter measures

Making Decisions

“Make decisions slowly by consensus and thoroughly considering all options, implement rapidly.“ – Toyota Way

Even knowing problems and committed to solve them, the Team should make right decisions how to do it.

Make decisions slowly

1. Go and See (Genchi Genbutsu)
2. Understand underlying causes (Kaizen)
3. Broadly consider alternative solutions and develop a detailed rationale for preferred solution delaying certain decision as long as possible (Set-Based concurrent engineering)
4. Build consensus within a team and partners where group decision is preferred (while management can step in if consensus is not achieved)
5. Use very efficient communication devices – preferably one side of one sheet of paper

Implement rapidly

1. Put in place solutions and counter measures.
2. Evaluate the results
3. Standardize if solution is effective.

Practices to Eliminate Waste and Solve Problems

3. Genchi Genbutsu – go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand situation

How often do we jump to conclusion based on partial information, vague assumptions and what other people say? Information creates reality in your mind. This reality is a base for your decisions. So, you and the Team should get right information to make right decisions:

• observe situation with blank mind
• avoid assumptions and preconceptions
• use personally verified information

In short, base decisions on what really is going on

4. Kaizen (5 why’s) -continuous learning and improvement

“We view errors as opportunities for learning” – Toyota Way
The Team should find the root causes of the problems. Kaizen helps to find the root cause by repeatedly asking why the problem occurs.

Example of Kaizen
Problem: there are persistent javascript errors on a live site

1. Why? A developer didn’t build correct logic for complex web UI components interaction
2. Why? A developer built own solution without guidance and enough experience in this area
3. Why? A team expert didn’t tell about existing proven solutions, didn’t help and didn’t share knowledge
4. Why? The team is under stress, over-committed and don’t have time to communicate
5. Why? Managers accept too much work without consulting with development team
6. Why? you can continue…

Kaizen forces us to overcome desire to find a first convenient explanation and patch problems without fixing root causes. By ruthlessly applying this practice, we get deeper insight into reality and better learn our product, processes, people, environment and tools. Kaizen is a core practice to see waste, solve problems and improve process.

To avoid forgetting learning from Kaizen, it is important to standardize the improved process and make it a base for further improvements.

Practices to Support Flow

5. Standards – best you know today which is to be improved tomorrow

Standardized work is easier, cheaper and faster – stable repeatable methods can maintain predictability, high productivity and support quality.
Effective standards are not coming from theories, they come from

• best practices
• accumulated learnings and individual experience
• lessons from applying existing standards

The Team should try to use standards in many areas: project phases and activities; development practices; architecture and design approaches; code conventions; tools; programming techniques; libraries and third-party code; reuse of components and solutions; testing and so on.
Standardization in software development is a controversial topic – some theorists want to bring programming closer to standard-dominated engineering, practitioners are keen to reduce standardization to minimum promoting creativity and self-organization. In the rigid interpretation, standards are “must to follow” rules for any situation, in other interpretation standards are well defined steps and guidelines highly recommended for specific context. I support the latter definition. A productive team should have standards in place to focus on customer needs instead of fighting with the same puzzles and problems over and over again.

The system of standards shouldn’t be a heavy bureaucratic conduit, but a light and fluid book of knowledge. The book that contains most helpful and important rules and checklists. Standards will be effective if they are minimal, reviewed often (Kaizen) and followed by every team member.

6. Reliable thoroughly tested technology

The Team should be conservative with new technologies. Software development and IT thrive on change and innovation. However, Toyota Way suggests to be conservative in adapting technology and considers stability and reliability of operations as much more important goal than keeping on the cutting edge of technology.

Considerations for using technology

• primary goal is to improve flow and support people, process and values.
• process is driven by business, not technology concerns; software and tools do not eliminate themselves waste
• technology is visual and intuitive – people can use it correctly and effectively

• process manually before adapting technology to support the process – understand what problems it solves and how technology could help
• important: people / processes are easy to Kaizen, machines are difficult

Adopting new technology:

• new technology is unreliable and difficult to standardize, therefore it endangers flow
• proven process takes precedence over new and untested technology
• conduct actual tests before adapting new technology
• reject technology if it conflicts with culture or might disrupt stability, reliability and predictability

In the same time encourage people to consider new technologies while looking into new approaches. If technology improves process and flow – quickly implement after thorough testing.

7. Visual Controls

The Team should have clear status of information. Visual controls can convey complex information in fast and efficient for our brains way. We can use controls as a user story board; status of projects, servers or code build; burn down charts and others.
Simple visual indicators help people determine immediately whether they are deviating from the standards, provide quick gist of situation and direction for solving problems.

• use simple and most important indicators

• than provide clear picture for decisions and what to do next
• reduce reports to one screen / piece of paper even for the most important decisions

People, leaders and teams

8. People

People who build software are the people who should improve the process. They are directly involved and have first-hand experience of problems and waste.

Toyota Way expects that each team member is a problem solver and values job experience more than theoretical knowledge. The Team will beat any external consultants and find better way to work if people are open about problems and eager to find good solutions.

9. Leaders

The Team desperately needs strong leaders to build great products to overcome problems. Toyota grows leaders within who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy and must understand the daily work in great details

Chief Engineer is a key person in Toyota projects.:

• blessed by top management
• has control over project
• exceptional engineer
• critical link: between engineers and customer satisfaction
• coach for other engineers
• focus on concepts first, technicalities later

Chief Engineer concept is an excellent example for software technical leadership. A software team leader often lacks authority or makes too technical decisions without good understanding of customer needs.

10. Teams

The Team should be diverse and capable of solving wide range of problems. Toyota builds cross functional product teams, which

• use integrative decision making
• fast and accurate in implementation
• enhance process and flow by solving difficult technological problems

Software developers and their leaders are foundation of success in any project. Management, process and technology can only support them. And anyway, the process is as good as people follow it. Therefore, it is important to make software teams a key player in process improvements – they know problems, they understand work and they are capable to find good solutions.

Using Toyota Way

Can The Team revert a situation and win? Can it build the optimal process and expertise for fast development of high quality and low cost solutions?

This post shows the most effective option – build continuously improving process into the heart of development. The process that focuses on quality, eliminates waste and fixes problems at root cause. I believe this approach is a foundation of long term success. Your managers and company would love it!

A software project is a creative, unique and therefore unpredictable endeavor. We are not building the same thing over and over again, but solve new problems, address increasing demands and use perpetually changing technologies. Under these conditions, people – smart, creative and productive – are the most important factor of success . Software development process can only support and compliment these people, but it cannot guarantee success alone and make the factor of people negligible.

But, business wants predictable, reliable and successful results. I bet they don’t want to be at mercy how cards are shuffled in their talented development team. The answer is in establishing a process that increases chances of success and aligned with present nature of software development (unpredictable, empirical and heavily dependent on people).

The Toyota Way can be a great example that worth to learn. Toyota evolved from a small looming equipment shop to the largest car manufacturing company. The main foundation of successful growth is the system of few core principles that enables best quality, high productivity, lowest cost, shortest time and long-term success.

Agile and Lean Software Development adopted some practices from Toyota. Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit  (by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck) is an excellent book that review Lean practices and principles in details. This post focuses more on philosophy and the system of practices as a whole that can turn software development team into a smart reliable machine.

1. Value

Why customer will pay money for your product? How does your company creates value?

All we are doing is looking at the time line from the moment the customer give us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that time line by removing the non-value-added wastes.

- Taiichi Ohno, founder of TPS

The only thing that adds value in software development is transformation of information and code into what customer wants. It is very important for software team to know how does it create value for customers. Or simply, decrypt the formula:
Customer (needs) -> Cash (delivered software)

Software Development Value Stream
Problems, needs and ideas are translated into units of development – functionality, user experience (interface, interactions, usability) and system qualities (performance, reliability, security, etc). A software development team transforms these pieces of requirements into a computer system using value-added and many not-so-value-added actions.

The ultimate goal of Toyota Way is to eliminate non-value-added activities while keeping the best quality of the product.

2. Flow

What is the process of creating value in your company?

Properties of the optimal flow for software development:

• cut back to zero the amount of time that any unit of work is sitting idle or waiting for somebody to work on it
• move design, code and information fast, link processes and people together that problems surface right away

One-piece flow
The most effective flow is one-piece flow – a customer need is immediately converted into a delivered software solution. In the same time this is the most demanding flow: a customer, designers, developers, testers and system administrators should be dedicated to the project, immediately available and work as one team together until the need is implemented in a live system.

One-piece flow has significant benefits (if it is implemented right):

• Quality - defects detected quickly; close proximity and connections ensure that necessary information is available immediately and important details are not missing; problems are solved quickly
• Flexibility - flexibility to respond and do what customer really wants in real time
• Productivity - the team engaged in high value added continuous work
• Morale - immediate results of work bring sense of accomplishment and job satisfaction
• Cost - lean production with minimal waste

However, in reality one-piece flow is difficult to achieve in many projects:

• a customer is not engaged all the time
• complex business domain requires analysis and preparation before development can start
• project activities involve people with different skills that are not available immediately
• deployment of mission-critical systems demands intensive testing and scheduling

• management, marketing, end-user expect specific time-lines, features and support

• and so on

Toyota uses two additional principles to overcome challenges of one-piece flow: pull systems and leveling out the workload.
However, Toyota Way says: “Flow where you can, pull where you must“. The big challenging goal is to turn eventually all the processes into one-piece flow.

Pull system (Kanban)
Kanban is a signaling system to trigger action. It adds to flow small buffers pulled by customer demand. Kanban allows optimal use of people and natural breaks in processes.

Agile iterations and Scrum sprints are close to Kanban ideas. A team pulls new user stories every time-boxed iteration from the backlog to design, implement, test and deploy within the same iteration.

However, it is not classical Kanban. An original idea would be to pull small batches of user stories for development after a team has finished a current batch (not at the end of fixed time iteration). In parallel, QA pulls implemented user stories for testing and so on. A customer can continue preparing next batches of work based on their priority of needs.

Main ideas

• provide dependent down stream teams with what they want, when they want and in amount they want
• just-in-time – started by high priority needs
• minimize work-in-progress and untested code
• frequently push what a customer can use right away
• be responsive to day-by-day shifts in demand instead of relaying on long-term schedules

Kanban is effective way to synchronize people and teams work without bringing them into continuous flow, where they should be always ready for the next unit of work.

Level Out the Workload (Heijunka)
The main idea of Heijunka is to level production by volume and activities mix.

• it is not built around actual flow of customer orders
• workload is leveled for the period considering previous history and scheduled projects

In software development workload could be leveled and scheduled when people could make reliable guess for what is expected. It is different from Kanban that works as just-in-time system adapting to the current workload.

Good candidates for Heijunka are

• standard procedures (automated testing, performance testing, deployment)
• recurring events (meetings, planning, demo, code reviews)

• scheduled tasks for people with limited availability (external consultants, customers, management)

• tasks with high confidence in estimation, usually done many times before (initial requirement exploration, design mockups, security audit, training new team members, reusing components and solutions)

Benefits:

• predictability and active planning

• balanced use of people, ability to schedule their involvement

• smoother demand on customers, shared resources and contractors

Toyota Way is focused on eliminating waste of non-value added work (Muda). Heijunka eliminates two additional types of waste:

• unevenness in project schedule (Mura)
• overburden of people and systems (Muri)

Building your own flow

These three approaches can help you to build most optimal flow. Consider cons and pros:

One-piece flow (push)
pros: minimal waste, fast implementation, low cost, quick problems resolution
cons: uneven workload, requires full availability and high level of engagement
when to use: for one collocated team work that is dedicated to one project

Kanban (pull)
pros: dynamic adaptation to load; synchronization of different teams and disconnected processes
cons: low predictability for completion; buffers hide waste
when to use: disconnected or involved in the multiple projects teams; activities that need people with limited availability

Heijunka (level)
pros: good predictability, ability to plan, balanced use of people: avoid overburden and uneven workload
cons: non-adaptive, inefficient for tasks with unpredictable effort (a lot in traditional software development)
when to use: activities that are standardized, highly predictable or have to be scheduled

You cannot build reliable and optimal flow from the scratch based on a theory only. The best process for your projects will emerge as result of evolution, problem solving and eliminating waste. This is a topic of the next post.

If some problem occurs in one-piece flow manufacturing then the whole production line stops. In this sense it is a very bad system of manufacturing. But when production stops everyone is forced to solve the problem immediately. So team members have to think, and through thinking team members grow and become better team members and people.

- Teruyuki Minoura

References:
The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit  by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck

People are amazing, surprising and interesting. They change reality with power of thought and make things happen. What is most exciting – all people are completely different in their attitudes and behavior. But this comes with price – it is difficult to understand people and even more difficult to find the best way to deal with them.
Many people, who see programmers as extensions of their computer systems, will be surprised to discover that programmers are amazing individuals too. Programmers exhibit similar to other people behavior, they have different personalities and need individual approach.

I offer in this post a simple theory about Three Dimensions of a Software Programmer that could help to put relations with these individuals on some rational basis.

Axioms

There are two basic axioms in foundation of the theory

1. Constancy - some programmers consistently outperform others under same conditions.
2. Variability - performance of a programmer varies under different conditions.

Talents (constants)

Talents are recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings and behavior that can be productively applied. – First, Break All the Rules
Genes and upbringing form an adult human with specific talents and personality, strengths and weaknesses. These core individual characteristics of a programmer are difficult to change (except some limited success with consumption of large quantities of beer). Programmers are different – creative, thorough, funny, systematic, laid-back, curious, analytical, spontaneous and so on. Some people cannot be programmers at all.
Each unique programmer has a base performance level that is constant and almost impossible to change.

Three Dimensions (variables)

Now we can move to the part of equation that can be changed. Can we make programmers permanently performing above their base level? To answer this question lets review three variables of programmer’s performance.

X. Energy
measures amount of work and power of ideas that could change and improve reality.
Here I consider a specific kind of energy – creative positive energy that is directed to build better software and aligned with company and customers goals. Individual’s desire to act, create and achieve is the source of this energy. As we discussed above, part of this energy is based on character and predetermined. However, there is a big variable component of individual energy that is driven by motivation and environment.

Y. Discipline
measures ability to focus and follow necessary steps to achieve goals with good quality.
Accountability, self-organization and focus are core elements that keep individuals to perform on a high level. Personality matters here – some people will promise and forget immediately, give up experiencing first difficulties or become distracted by more interesting tasks. Some will fight until the end and go beyond limits to meet commitments, exceed expectations and bring excellent results. However, significant part of programmer’s discipline is variable and depends on context and expectations.

Z. Expertise
measures knowledge and experience in programming, technology and a customer domain.
Expertise includes know how to build software, make right decisions and implement good solutions with minimal troubles. There is no doubt that expertise is growing with time, but individual variations are big. Many people consider expertise as the only important characteristic of a programmer. I believe that it has much lower value without two other variables.

Programmer’s Archetypes

FfHII

How to Improve

A programmer can be 10 times more productive than other programmer and 10 times more productive than himself under different conditions. Therefore right people under right conditions could be 100 times more productive than others.

How can you influence programmer’s performance with these three dimensions? Hopefully, you found right people with right talents. It is a waste of time to change personality and push in direction where talent is absent. However, it is possible to amplify natural strengths and create conditions for super productivity.

Energy
goal: make people empowered, motivated, interested and satisfied; engage them to perform above their base level of energy

job design

• interesting work – brings inspiration and motivation
• control – over own work and decisions – pushes people forward
• self-organization – opportunities to find own ways that bring best results
• creative tension – goals on the edge of capabilities to focus energy and open new energy sources
• defined outcomes – clear direction that reduces anxiety and doubt and increases productivity

psychology

• flow – put mind in a state of energized focus, full involvement, and success
• positive experience – good emotions and healthy team relations; comfortable and trusted environment
• personal interests – decision making considers and takes care of individual interests
• right incentives – compensation, rewards, recognition are the great source of energy and motivation

environment

• space for mistakes – tolerance and open ways to fix mistakes make people think about moving forward instead of covering assess
• productive environment – where people think about work instead of nuisances
• fit – between personal and company goals, culture and views – amplify people desire to work
• reasonable pressure – normal workload, minimal stress, time slack to avoid energy drains

Discipline
goal: make people focused, responsible and aligned; make them performing in the right way

support system

• established process – align actions with goals and support their execution (Agile is the best way to go)
• transparency – reasons for decisions should be clear, problems should surface quickly
• pull system (kanban) – signaling system to trigger action based on actual needs
• control mechanisms, check and balances, audit, risk management (e.g. iterations)

zone of responsibility

• clear areas of responsibility – what is included and what is not
• balance of responsibility and authority – adequate authority to accomplish goals; restrictions to avoid damage
• rules of engagements – when, where, and how force (bold actions) shall be used
• match confidence with responsibilities – an individual is prepared and ready for the new responsibilities

standards

• safety regulations – mandatory rules for everyone
• professional standards – recommended parameters of work and products (security, performance, availability, etc.)
• best practices – spread approaches that work

Expertise
goal: make people knowledgeable, experienced and growing based on their talents

career

• right career path – built on persons strengths – enable growth in area of competence and natural strengths without switching into paths that don’t match talents (e.g. management). Avoid consequences of raising to the level of incompetence (Peter Principle).
• broadbanding – build levels of achievements and pay schemes that allow to achieve and earn more within the same profession
• match expertise and challenges- keep people always interested and challenged, avoid boring or over complicated tasks
• assist self-discovery – help search for the better career and role

perspective

• diversity in tasks and activities – accelerates growth and understanding
• big picture, direct communication with customer – informed people make more optimal decisions
• exposure to different subject areas – broader knowledge opens new possibilities and solutions outside the narrow specialization

learning and practice

• feedback loop – continuous evaluation and improvements based on feedback
• opportunities for learning – grow expertise beside direct work tasks
• sharing, coaching, communication – peer and experts access and support for growth

There is no standard way to increase performance of an individual programmer. Each individual is unique and requires personal approach. The theory of Three Dimensions of a Software Programmer suggests framework for these approaches.
It takes a huge effort to understand every programmer in your team individually and craft personalized approach, path and conditions. But it makes sense to do. People will be productive, engaged and happy. The company will grow and succeed.

What could be a better outcome in our civilized hard working world?

Definitions
rule: prescribed guide for conduct or action
intuition: instinctive knowing (without the use of rational processes)
tacit knowledge: automatic, unexpressed knowledge that provides context for people, places, ideas, and experiences. Tacit knowledge is not easily shared. As Polanyi said: “We know more than we can tell.”
context: the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc.

Problems with rules

Most rules didn’t come from heaven. They come from ordinary people. They are product of practice, theories, traditions and fear.
Problems:

• context-free – rules reflect standard situations without considering your specific circumstances
• limited verification – most rules are empirical and do not pass vigorous analysis, strict prove and experiments
• time sensitive – many rules become outdated quickly in dynamic professions, industries and societies
• overcautious – fear fuels many rules and seeks to protect from the worst scenario, often imaginable
• low skills denominator – rules tuned to match capabilities of the majority without accounting for individual strengths and weaknesses
• misinterpretation – tacit knowledge of experts, which forms base for many rules, is difficult to transfer in correct and understandable form

Core 7 Qualities of the Expert

1. Motivation. Believe in self. Energy. Unsatisfaction
Motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. – Scientific American

You have to believe in self to become a successful expert. An expert need strength, energy and motivation to go beyond ordinary performance levels.
Top performers in different disciplines do this – envision own success and prepare their minds to achieve higher levels. Thinking can “wire” our brains for developing new capabilities and success.
Questions: Am I ready? How can I boost my strength, energy and motivation? How will I succeed?

2. Hard Work. Discipline. Focus.
The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. – Anders Ericsson

Hard work is not as difficult after you start and dive into it. Often the problem is that you cannot start or concentrate. Procrastination ruins your progress. There are many barriers for focused and productive work:

• pressure and stress kills productivity
• low interest – without engaged mind your brain will resist to form knowledge
• multitasking – takes away precious concentration and mindset needed for productive work
• unclear goals – disoriented mind cannot focus effectively
• no specific time  – you will tend to postpone, delay and miss practice without strictly scheduled time
• distractions – inconvenient  environment and frequent interruptions don’t help

New Scientist had an advice how to get a grip on yourself and strengthen willpower. The main ideas – willpower is limited resource, easily depleted; it requires planning, boost and  practice.

Also, keep yourself interested. Switch if you start loosing focus and interest. Reboot. Have prepared practices in different areas to enable fresh start for your mind.
Questions:  How do I maintain focus, stay committed and interested? Do I have clear goals, action plan and productive environment?

3. Think critically. Think as a beginner
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but int the expert there are few – Suzuki Roshi

As an expert you cannot go with the flow, believe everything and hide behind authoritative opinions. You cannot stick with your own views forever without changing them. You have to think critically: challenge beliefs, existing theories and dominant ideas. Some of them are completely wrong. Many of them have flaws and can be improved. Most of them are not the best in your specific context.
5 Whys is an excellent method to discover reality.
Better unforeseen solutions exist if you look for them. If you don’t think critically, you will be a follower without much chances to grow your ideas and find better solutions. Keep your mind open and question ideas including your own.
Questions:  What are hard facts, assumptions and theories? What should I trust, dismiss or verify?

4. Full brain power. Use right brain (in addition to left).
The right hemisphere synthesizes over space. The left analyzes over time. – Jerre Levy

Your right brain (more accurately – right brain mode) is inherited from our animal ancestors and shaped by millions years of evolution. Right brain mode is much more powerful, reliable and faster than left brain mode. Right brain works in parallel with images, subconscious mind and deep vast memory (even when you sleep). On the contrary, left brain works with symbols and words; it is logical, analytical and linear. It can only work with few ideas in the same time (4-7) and needs focus and conscious effort. We need left brain to formulate, express ideas and communicate them to others.
Experts are using both brains – left for rational thinking, analysis and communication, right for intuition, imagination and creative insights. One of the best books how to start using you right brain is The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
Learn how to expand your brain power with the right brain mode. If you use only left brain mode, you’ll stay dull, rational and predictable specialist.
Questions: How can I engage my both brain modes? (Hint: interest, humor, senses, emotions, surprise.) What puzzles can I feed to my subconscious mind?

5. Continuous learning. Sharing
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust

Experts never stop to learn. The day you believe you know everything is your last day as an expert. Experts learn from new research and existing knowledge, they learn from other people and they learn from own experience. Also they learn from disciplines outside of their professional realm that can provide new ideas.
For a example, a programmer could benefit from learning:

• psychology – better understand how users think and perceive, how to engage customers, how to make yourself and team productive and motivated;
• design, aesthetics, art – beautiful systems are more usable and successful
  
• management theories and practices – learn how to organize people and activities  (for example Agile learned a lot from Toyota Production System and Japanese product development)
• system theories – understand fundamental principles and laws governing complex systems
• economics, business – why people and business need software, how software fails or succeed on market; how your software fits into company business; how to start your own company
• culture, social life, demographics – trends in behavior, interest and problems of groups of people (by sex, age, education, profession, etc). This knowledge will explain current dynamic and suggest future opportunities.

Make learning essential part of your everyday life. If you don’t learn, you stop your journey to become an expert.
You gain deeper knowledge if you share your knowledge with other people – discuss, explain, teach, blog, speak, present. Other people – with different views and perspective – will quickly show weaknesses and quality of your knowledge. Sharing with others will push your learning further and deeper than keeping knowledge to yourself.

Questions: What do I not know? How will I learn it? How will I share it?

6. Self-improvement. Know yourself.
Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? – Matthew

We protect ourselves from inconvenient truth and often are blind to own mistakes. Our psychological defense systems help to avoid depression and anxiety by protecting our ego, but also distort our view and perception of true reality.
Good experts are capable to see truth, be objective and correct themselves. They try to avoid the trap of groupthink, crowd psychology and self white washing.  They know own strengths, weaknesses and biases.
Seek  the truth about self, know your internal beliefs and motivation and improve yourself. Otherwise, your rosy distorted pictures will hinder your growth and you will become the part of a problem, not the part of a solution.
Questions: What can I do better? How can I improve myself? Am I honest with myself?

7. Big picture. Systems Thinking. Creative solutions.
Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced. – Edward de Bono

Experts main advantages are tacit knowledge and experience. They understand big picture, reality, context and how systems work. However, it is not enough. Experts should solve problems. And therefore, they should train themselves for problem solving, innovation and changing reality in the novel ways. The outcome, a creative solution,  is quintessence of hard work, deep knowledge and intuition.
Questions:  What is the big picture: forces, players and relations? How things can be done better? Do I see new ways?

Questions to Ask Yourself

1. Motivation – Am I ready? How can I boost my strength, energy and motivation? How will I succeed?
2. Focus – How do I maintain focus, stay committed and interested? Do I have clear goals, action plan and productive environment?
3. Critical thinking – What are hard facts, assumptions and theories? What should I trust, dismiss or verify?
4. Full Brain power – How can I engage my both brain modes? What puzzles can I feed to my subconscious mind?
5. Continuous Learning – What do I not know? How will I learn it? How will I share it?
6. Self Improvement – What can I do better? How can I improve myself? Am I honest with myself?
7. Creative solutions – What is the big picture: forces, players and relations? How things can be done better? Do I see new ways?

If you know answers to these questions, you don’t need rules to solve problems – you are ready to make good decisions and become an expert.

References:
Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition , Wikipedia
The Science of Experience, by John Cloud/Tallahassee, TIME
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, by Andy Hunt
The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards
The Expert Mind , Scientific American
The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer

Disclaimer: This post is devoted to a person who wants to become an expert – the top player in a specific field as programming, soccer or chess. This post will be not interesting for people who are satisfied with their current performance and not interested to be the best.

If you want to become an expert, it is not enough to follow your work assignments or occasionally play with interesting stuff at home. You have to push yourself hard in specially designed way.

@Work
Your paid work tasks and projects are not designed to make you an expert. Your company expects results from your work: reliable, with minimal mistakes and focused on the company main goal – make money. Your employer could provide minimal training to help you with job requirements. However, your growth will be constrained by company needs, timelines, work assignments and acceptable methods. We cannot blame our organizations – this is part of the deal – they pay for your work and expect specific results. But… is this the best way for you to become an expert, acquire new skills and gain knowledge? To become an expert, you have to make many mistakes, learn from them, experiment with alternatives and work hard on your weaknesses. How many organizations do allow this risky, unproductive and unreliable way of working?

@Home
Your play at home with interesting stuff has problems too. To satisfy your programming instincts and curiosity, you will probably select what you enjoy to do and eager to try. You’ll immense in this activity and find great satisfaction from doing it. But…  is this the best way to become an expert by doing only what you like? Becoming an expert requires hard, sometimes unpleasant work, specifically designed to improve your performance and push you over comfort zone.

Genesis of an expert

Research shows that experts do not have more innate talent, but put more effort and dedication. Newcomers to the field need at least 10 years to become an expert. They move through several stages: from a novice, who blindly follows rules, to an expert, who does not need rules.
Most people will stop on the level of competent specialist acceptable for the majority of jobs in the field. Only few will continue pushing forward to achieve the top level.

We agree that expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance and even that expert performers have characteristics and abilities that are qualitatively different from or at least outside the range of those of normal adults. However, we deny that these differences are immutable, that is, due to innate talent. Only a few exceptions, most notably height, are genetically prescribed. Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. – Anders Ericsson

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance–for instance, keeping up with one’s golf buddies or passing a driver’s exam–most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind’s box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields. – Scientific American

Kathy Sierra wrote that you, to become an expert who kicks ass, should keep reminding: “I’ll keep pushing myself. There’s always some way to do it better…”. How should we push ourselves?

If you do same tasks over and over again, you will not become an expert. If you do what you are good at, you will not improve your overall performance. You should focus on improving skills beyond your present competence. Outcome of your practice as not as important as developing your capabilities.
You can spend years doing your favorite activities and still stay at amateur level while dedicated novice can quickly leave you behind. Practice should concentrate around your weaknesses and areas that are important, but you probably try to avoid. You should repeatedly progress to the higher level through persistent training and overcome your limits.

Anders Ericsson (his research is the most influential in this area) calls this approach deliberate practice:

“Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well-or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.”

Design your practice

Follow 7 steps

1. Who is an expert?
You should understand what is the profile of an expert that you want to be – required capabilities, knowledge, areas of expertise and types of the problems experts work on.
Have a beer with guru and ask for opinion (early enough), study job advertisements for high skilled positions (don’t be carried away), read about top players – why they are considered experts, what makes them special (skip part how they spend money) and how they achieved top level.

2. Find your gaps and weaknesses.
You can identify areas which require improvement once you know the profile of the ideal expert. Put them on the list and assign importance.

3. Build roadmap.
Answer the questions: in what order you want to work on these areas and what are the major steps.
Instead of focusing for a long time on one area, I would recommend to go in spiral – learn and practice various areas in parallel. Each spiral cycle should add to your experience small, but integral chunk of core expertise. Often developing diverse skills together brings synergy – deeper perspective, holistic view and increased capabilities for wider range of tasks.

4. Design practice to improve performance
Set specific goals and methods – how do you improve performance, gain skills and knowledge for each area.
Consider famous SMART goals for practice: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-boxed. Coach, who can effectively guide you, is very helpful on this stage. However, you can go alone if you are motivated and disciplined enough.
Don’t burn yourself too much – your mind and body should be ready and eager to practice. Give yourself time for recovery, life and other favorite activities, otherwise you’ll soon hate your practice.

5. Everyday practice on the edge of capabilities – at least 30 minutes
Deliberate practice is highly demanding and requires intensive concentration and focus. The practice should be scheduled, clear and focused – don’t give yourself chances to procrastinate. Concentrate on the excellence of execution – sloppy practice is not acceptable for top players. You should practice challenging tasks on the edge of your capabilities. Compare playing basketball with professional players or beginner kids from the neighborhood. Who will push you more and show how good you are?
Observe and understand how and what you do – this process will develop intuition and patterns in your brains for future fast automatic decision making. Train yourself to think and act on the higher level – what is difficult for other people, should be trivial for you.

6. Feedback
Constant feedback loop is the must in deliberate practice. Correct assessment of performance and results with following adjustment of practice will move you much faster. And certainly, interested and qualified coach capable of giving constructive and painful feedback is very important. Each day of practice should move you forward against higher and higher standards.

7. Correct your roadmap and practice.
Feedback, self-evaluation and practical use of your skills will tell if you are on the right track. Be fluid and open for change of direction, new knowledge and unexpected opportunities. Learn and adjust goals, plans and methods on the go. As Eisenhower said: plans are nothing, planning is everything. Your rise as an expert will open for you new horizons that definitely change your plans and original intentions.

Additional Requirements

• Discipline, motivation, unsatisfaction – top experts are extremely dedicated, disciplined and motivated to grow and improve performance. Without the goal of improving performance, the motivation to engage in practice vanishes, and practice becomes boring routine.
• Support – you’ll have ups and downs, moments of despair and disbelief. You need somebody who can understand, compassionate and encourage – friends, family, colleagues or a coach.

Deliberate practice in context

Practice @Work
Deliberate practice methods and work objectives are different. However, it is possible to grow as an expert and work productively.

• First, your company could have work in target areas of your expertise growth. Position yourself to take advantage of any opportunity to move there.
• Second, any company will benefit from motivated and competent player, who wants to grow his capabilities. A smart company will support and encourage your drive… and use for own benefits.

Strategy:

1. Job intelligence – what are opportunities, potential projects and tasks to assist with your progress as an expert? How can your help your company while upgrading your skills? Invent new opportunities. You have to build case for your advance and show benefits for the company.
2. Call for the job redesign – many companies will be flexible for people who wants to progress and contribute more (if no, maybe you are in the wrong place)
3. Productive work and intensive practice – work in the best way to help with your goals, but don’t make a company victim of your practice. Separate prototyping and experiments from production work. Make them open, controllable with a clear statement of benefits. Seek for challenging assignments on the edge of your capabilities.
4. Tap into company pool of talents, expertise and knowledge – this is free (actually paid) opportunity to use coaching and valuable resources for growth acceleration. Ask for advises, guidance and feedback.

You will find, as your star is rising (expertise growing), that you have more freedom to work in areas that have the most interest for you.

Practice @Home, @Train or @Cafe
This is time for

• research, learning, thinking
• crazy experiments
• irrelevant to your work practice
• practice that need special focus, time and conditions, difficult to achieve at work

Formal training
Qualified and relevant training can move you much faster. If you decide to invest in education be very specific what you expect and make sure that you’ll not waste your time.

Sample Road to become Web Development Expert
You can identify few key areas:

• HTML / CSS
• Graphic Design / Art
• Usability / Aesthetics
• Information Architecture
• Client – side programming / javascript / AJAX
• RIA (e.g. Silverlight / Flash)
• Server – side programming and databases

And design practice for each of them, for example:

Experts: Executive Summary

Experts are essential for the company/team competitive advantage. They enable revolutions and support evolution.

Experts are made, not born. Experts are made by themselves. It is a long, thorny and hard road. But this road makes their life interesting, positive, meaningful and brings happiness from achieving a rare gift – mastery in the field they love.

Albert Camus said: But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

For few people the harmony is a journey to become The Master.

Resources:
The Expert Mind , Scientific American
How to be an expert , Kathy Sierra
The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer

source

Qualities of well composed code:

1. Quick discovery and understanding of programming logic and components
2. Clear organization (for human brains)
3. Ease of reuse, modification and evolution
4. Close connection between customer ideas and system implementation

Style Components:

• Intention - understand your task and how to get it done
• Approach - basic principles of writing code
• Composition - organization of code
• Expression - expressing ideas in code
• Object Oriented Pragmatic Style

1. Design for customer problems
Make the customer problem space a core for the software system design. Make every line of code accountable for solving customer needs. It is true that any software system requires a lot of plumbing beyond pure implementation of customer needs. However, technology concerns shouldn’t prevail. High-level languages and modern programming platforms give us a power to concentrate on customer problems more than on solving technical problems.

Code could be divided into two categories:

• customer oriented – solves customer problems directly, e.g. implementing domain logic, UI interactions and display of information;
• system oriented – solves technical and application specific problems – data access, event handling, interfaces between subsystem, utilities and other code required for using libraries, systems and platforms.

Customer-oriented code brings most value and should be primary design concern. System-oriented code puts in place infrastructure and support for running customer oriented code.

Therefore, start with design of customer-oriented code and support it with minimal system-oriented code. This doesn’t mean that system-oriented code is not important. Complex system environments, sophisticated user interfaces and challenging non-functional requirements (performance, availability, reliability, etc.) could demand major system-oriented development effort. But still customers needs should pull and direct this effort and the whole implementation.
There are many ways to make technical problems dominant over customer problems:

1. Making predetermined technical decisions (databases, programming platforms, messaging systems, expensive middle tier etc.) without considering simpler alternatives.
2. Coming up with complex up-front design instead of evolving a simple design into optimal design.
3. Starting programming around interesting technical problems forgetting what is important for a customer.
4. Building frameworks and system-oriented code before writing code for immediate customer problems.

For a example, some teams could start with this picture in mind stretching customer requirements to fit it (even for relatively simple applications).

source
2. Organize and evolve code around domain concepts and customer ideas
Make system design reflecting customer domain and problem space. Keep customer ideas and system implementation connected and synchronized all the time. This is as important as refactoring practice for effective creation of the software system.
Domain-driven design is an excellent way to build software systems. It puts emphasis on ubiquitous language, distilled domain knowledge and shared domain models that drive software development.

3. Think as a customer
What we see depends mainly on what we look for – John Lubbock
A programmer often considers programming as an opportunity for solving interesting technical problems. Often a programmer even doesn’t understand what customers really want. There are 2 consequences. First, the programmer is not interested in simpler solutions focused on the customer problem. Second, the programmer is missing coherent view on the customer problems and purpose of the software system. Over-engineered, complex and misaligned code is one of the most serious problems in software development. An army of business analysts, stressed project managers and smart customer proxies will not force indifferent and ignorant programmers to write code in the best interest of customer.
The programmer should constantly ask himself: “Will this solution work for my customer?”. To give correct answer on this simple question the programmer should understand a lot – customer language, needs, problems, a big picture and business purpose.

Certainly, it is difficult to think as a customer if you are at the bottom of software creation chain:

• separated from a customer by project and product managers, architects, designers, consultants, experts and panels of stakeholders
• pressed by the heavy process, rigid organization structure and inability to make decisions
• fed with over-processed, distorted and disjointed doses of information coming down through long chain

Beautiful software ideas can turn into monster applications – unusable and disconnected from real needs. Did you feel (as a user) frustrated by complex confusing and irrational program screens and logic? Yes, we, programmers, can easily produce bad stuff if we cannot think as people who need our systems.

4. Sketch programming ideas with unit tests.
Write unit tests first. Any programmer should understand what he is trying to solve with the new code and how it will be used – possible input, expected output and public interface. A programmer should think about behavior in isolation, under border conditions or within context of existing code. An unit test is an excellent place to sketch nonexistent code, play with it without compilation and see if it is convenient and makes sense. Once the programmer likes sketched ideas in unit tests, he just need to build simple implementation to satisfy these unit tests. The process of writing unit tests focuses a programmer on solving customer problems, understanding code intent and making optimal design decisions. As an additional side effect, the programmer receives comprehensive suite of automated regression tests and executable specifications.

For a example,

CustomerDB.Save(TEST_USER, TEST_PWD)
Customer customer = CustomerDB.Login(TEST_USER, TEST_PWD);
Assert.IsNotNull(customer, "customer should be logged in");
customer.Purchase(TEST_PRODUCT);
List<Order> orders = OrderDB.LoadFor(customer) or maybe... customer.Orders //what is better?
Assert.AreEqual(1, orders.Count, "count");

There are many design decision are made in this unit test without writing any production code. And now programmer can concentrate on implemention without throes of creation.

5. Eliminate duplication
Simplification is ultimate sophistication – da Vinci
Elimination of duplication is the moving force of evolutionary design. This is straightforward and powerful method to grow an optimal system. Duplication in the code tells that you need better design. Many interesting design ideas are born from the simple need to eliminate duplication in the growing system. These ideas are based on deeper understanding and gained experience as oppose to speculative up-front design ideas.
The main goals of removing duplication are

• reduce code
• simplify solution
• make the system more manageable for programmers’ minds.

Some sources of duplication:

• copy and paste – acceptable only temporary
• similar logic different in details – generalization is required
• another implementation for the same problem – better team communication and reuse are required

Master the core skill of good evolutionary designers – how to detect and eliminate duplication.
The knowledge of design patterns is the most useful on this step. The initial simple solution rarely requires design patterns. But as a system grows, design patterns can effectively and elegantly solve new complex design problems.
Example of elimination of high level duplication with Template method design pattern
This code was used in many data access classes almost the same way, but with different inner steps

        using (SqlConnection conn = NewSqlConnection())

        {

            SqlCommand cmd = conn.CreateCommand();

            cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;

            cmd.CommandText = "SearchCustomers";

            cmd.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter("@city", city));

            ... //long list of parameters

            conn.Open();

            try

            {

                using (SqlDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader())

                {

                    foreach (DbDataRecord record in reader)

                        customers.Add(new Customer(record["id"], record["name"]))

                }

            }

            catch (Exception e)

            {

                //error handling logic here

            }

        }

The common logic could be moved into one template method with placeholders for different steps:

List<Customer> customers =  LoadRecordsFromSP<Customer>("SearchCustomers",

    (SqlCommand cmd) => {

         cmd.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter("@city", city));

         ...     //long list of parameters

    },

    (DbDataRecord record) => { new Customer(record["id"], record["name"]); }

);

6. Reduce code smells
Write code that doesn’t smell. Train your sense of smell for code and design problems. They will provide hints where code is probably bad.
These are common bad smells from a long list

• Duplicated code
• Large method
• Large class
• Long parameter list
• Dead Code
• Over-generalized code
• Lazy class

7. Use design patterns and abstractions to make code simpler
Learn design patterns. At some level of complexity they will provide excellent solutions and simplify design.
However, wrong abstractions and over used design patterns will make code more complex and less manageable. So, apply them carefully.

8. Decouple and isolate components
Only talk to your immediate friends; Don’t talk to strangers – Law of Demeter.
Reduce connections between programming units – subsystems, modules and objects – as much as possible. More relations between components make software system more complex and rigid. Decoupled and isolated system components have significant benefits:

• better understanding – easier to keep in memory and make sense for less states and relations
• increased reuse – components with minimal well-defined public interface and relations less dependent on context and can be used in many scenarios
• decreased breakdowns – caused by unpredictable run-time combination of relations
• effective testing – highly connected system require much more testing beyond isolated testing of components

9. Keep related code together
Put related code to the same package. It will enhance

• discovery - easier to find and reuse
• design - allows isolation, minimal interactions and consistent structure for related components
• maintenance and testing - reduce effect of new changes to fewer packages and system components.

There are two package approaches:

• Feature – code related to the same problem placed together
• Application layers – code for similar programming concepts

Benefits of packaging:

• Feature: related code in one place, changes together and form self-sufficient granule for reuse and release
• Application: separation of concerns, logical layering and reduced dependencies,  consistent global structure

Composing the program – Putting Things Together

1. Understand what customer wants and form intent.
2. Translate customer ideas into programming concepts (technology, platform and language, UI, libraries, components)
3. Make them simple, minimal and clear with pragmatic approach.
4. Organize code around domain concepts and customer needs; use domain-driven design.
5. Describe UI ideas with paper sketches
6. Specify program ideas with automated unit tests.
7. Merge UI and program ideas
8. Package related ideas together, isolate subsystems and components
9. Express ideas in code and UI screens
10. Remove duplication and bad code smells; improve design; consider using design patterns
11. Evolve and refactor common code into framework; emerge layers and abstractions for similar concepts

Pair Programming is a great way to build software systems. When Pair Programming works, it has significant benefits:

• better ideas – continuous brainstorming, larger knowledge pool, less gaps in understanding and more brain power to solve design problems;
• better quality – fewer bugs, instant validation of ideas, consistent approach and stricter adherence to team conventions;
• better knowledge – experience and knowledge sharing, deeper understanding of why, how and what was done;
• increased productivity – better focus and higher intensity, pushing each other and motivating to achieve best results, less procrastination and wasting of time;
• more enjoyment – most people like to work in groups and solve together interesting problems.

Extreme Programming leaders insist that all significant development should be done in pairs. But can we say that Pair Programming is the best method in all situations?

Programmers can find plausible alternatives to Pair Programming that don’t require two people sitting together all the time:

• ideas - frequent team brainstorming combined with short pair (or team) programming sessions for the most complex tasks;
• quality - dedicated tester closely works with developers, writing together automated tests;
• knowledge - frequent discussions, code reviews, training sessions;
• productivity - clear intent and pragmatic approach that bring focus, clarity and efficiency;
• enjoyment - close cooperation and mutual support

When Pair Programming is the most effective method?

The most important factor is match of skills and challenges. In Solo Programming the most productive mode is Flow when skills and challenges are matched. Pair Programming adds one more effective mode – Coaching that increases overall team productivity for the present and future tasks.

Successful modes
1. Flow – two programmers work on the interesting and challenging problem. They can have different skills and challenges, but both are capable to find good solution. For example, one can be javascript expert, another super backend programmer. They can get in flow working together on complex AJAX task combining their brainpower, knowledge and experience to create the best solution.
2. Coaching – expert programmer have experience and knowledge for solving the problem and shares it with other programmer, who cannot effectively solve problem alone. This more junior programmer has fundamentals to understand the solution and implementation. He learns and grows to become better programmer.

Failure modes
3. Wasting expert time – the problem is too simple that makes involvement of expert ineffective even for coaching
4. Overwhelmed novice – the problem is too complex or requires too much new knowledge that prevents the programmer from learning anything useful

Questionable modes
5. Two experts for a manageable task – pair programming doesn’t have much benefits if both programmers know how to implement the task and successfully solved similar problems before.
6. One programmer is in Flow, other is Learning – it is difficult to stay in Flow if other programmer frequently interrupts and needs many explanation for basic things that are not directly related to challenging problem.
7. One programmer is in Flow, other is Coaching – to make this mode successful for the growth, the coach should be open minded, avoid directing too much and should give opportunity for another programmer to come up with own (maybe even better) solutions.

In addition, psychological problems could prevent successful pair programming:

• Intimidation by expert – one programmer is intimidated by superior skills of other programmer and afraid to be considered as incapable
• Need time to think – a programmer needs more time to think over before pair programming, but he is forced to start pair programming session before thinking over his ideas
• Prefer to work alone – an introvert programmer likes to work alone (loner).
• Personal antipathy – programmers don’t like each other

Can we make Pair Programming always effective?
Yes! Match tasks, skills and pairs. Try to find pairs for 2 productive modes  – Flow and Coaching. A team will be most productive if the programmers pair solves together interesting problems matching their skills and learn from each other.

However, Pair Programming should be a free choice and preferred method, but it should not be a forced mandatory practice. As you can see from this post, there are some modes and psychological situations when Pair Programming is not working well.

In short, Pair Programming is one of the most useful tools in arsenal of the software team. Know when and how to use it.

Inspiring resource: Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihal