Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

This post from Joel has some really, really good points. Excerpt:

There was a time when if you read one book by Peter Norton, you literally knew everything there was to know about programming the IBM-PC. Over the last 20 years, programmers around the world have been hard at work building abstraction upon abstraction on top of the IBM-PC to make it easier to program and more powerful. But the law of leaky abstractions means that even as they built the abstractions that are supposed to make programming easier, the sheer amount of stuff you have to know to be a great programmer is expanding all the time.

I think this is part of why the Smalltalk community keeps being baffled about the C family of developers saying that Smalltalk is hard. Smalltalk is all about abstractions; a lot of the C style developers don't like looking that high up, and have to do a mental shift just to get there. Smalltalk is about simplicity, but it takes a mental leap to give up the familiar complexity.

If you forgot what email you registered with (here), there's a feature for having us email you your password. Unfortunately, I had never fully tested this feature, and it bailed with an error if you entered an email we hadn't seen. That will teach me to write unit tests. In any case, the server now responds to that situation appropriately - telling you sorry, try another email or register.

According to this story, Microsoft is also bidding on Rational. That's interesting. Well, one of the two will end up supporting the overblown, heavyweight cruft that is RUP, and the other will have another chance to look at the Agile side of things. Should be interesting either way, I think.

Apparently, someone thought it would be hilarious to launch a DOS attack on this server. Things seem to be ok now, but I'm working on some safeguards...

If you have downloaded a recent development build, you'll want to visit the site and grab the latest. There was an odd bug that arose when I added some code to check for a possibly running version - detecting one results in the auto-save feature being turned off. Unfortunately, I had the auto-save being turned off no matter how the check went.

This story left me rolling on the floor laughing. Either Gosling had no idea that the elisp in Emacs was part of something larger, or he's just completely clueless. Possibly both. Here's a quote from the page:

The Jackpot team is engaging in experiments using the open source NetBeansTM platform. NetBeans, the product of a small but widely-known company in Prague, the Czech Republic, is a modular, extensible IDE, written in the Java language, that has been in open source since June of 2000. The SunTM ONE Studio (formerly ForteTM for JavaTM) product line is based on NetBeans. By taking their experiments out of the lab and into the open-source developer community for real-world feedback, the team is opening the project to the wealth of talent in the open source community. "There have been a lot of good ideas and interesting approaches that haven't been reflected in the commercially available tools, particularly the IDE interface," says Michael Van de Vanter. "We're experimenting with plug-compatible tools on the NetBeans platform. By getting feedback from the open source community, we will further refine our prototypes."

Not available in commercial tools? Apparently, neither Gosling nor any of his team have ever seen a Smalltalk or Lisp implementation. Or if they did, they didn't understand it. Or I suppose they could just be making wild assertions that they are boldly going where no one has gone before, assuming no one will know the difference. That would make them lying weasels, of course, but hey - that's just my opinion.

Smalltalkers can now more easily connect thanks to the efforts of Janko Mivsek, Peter Hatch, and Rado Hodicak. This was posted to comp.lang.smalltalk this morning:

I'm glad to announce that a Smaltalk IRC Network is born. As you probably know, an IRC server run by Pete Hatch exist for a year or more already. To improve robustness and availability of IRC regardless of any internet related troubles, we decided to add two more servers and connect all of them together in IRC network. So, now you can connect to those three servers:

irc.parcplace.net (US, run by Pete Hatch, nickname pete) irc.4096.sk (Slovakia, run by Rado Hodicak, nickname rh) irc.eranova.si (Slovenia, run by Janko Mivsek, nickname Misolin)

After you connect to one of those servers, join a general channel #smalltalk . You can open your own channel like #squeak, or a channel for your project, for your group, etc etc .. And what is IRC chat good for?

1. staying in touch with Smalltalkers around the world
2. feel of community
3. fresh news, rumors, stories are heard on IRC an nowhere else ;)
4. real time "help desk" for your problems
5. good communication media for your Smalltalk group
6. remote XP like work
7. and many more.

If someone likes to join the net with his own server, he is welcomed. And specially squeakers are very welcomed too :) It is my desire to join all Smalltalkers to communicate together and being on the same IRC net, even on separate channels, is definitively a step towards that goal. So all of you are invited to join :) Janko

This really great - a lot of the BottomFeeder work was helped out via the IRC - it's been the primary means of communication between Dave Murphy and I.

Boris Popov has posted some interesting Logo possibilities. Personally, I like this:

Jason Ayers makes some good points on the c2 wiki on this topic. Check out his post yourself.

In September, Sam Shuster put out some information on the changes coming to the VW GUI with the upcoming 7.1 release of VisualWorks - the singleton UI process is gone, replaced by a more flexible system that will allow per window (or per application, or any other combination) processes. To get the lowdown, follow this link to the September Smalltalk Digest.

Readers of my blog will know that I'm skeptical (to say the least of the so called analysts - see here, and here, and here, and finally, here for my last round of rants on this subject. Still, many large companies seem to take what these people say as gospel, which means that this report on web services from the Meta Group will have a lot of influence:

According to META Group, more than 90% of large organizations will utilize host access products that externalize legacy applications via Web services by 2007 "We expect host access products to continue playing an important role for large organisations externalising legacy applications," said Mark Vanston, programme director with META Group's Enterprise Data Centre Strategies service. "Web-to-Host access solutions can reduce the cost of legacy integration, enabling organisations to leverage existing assets and capitalise on new IT opportunities"

Better go get the SOAP out...

I saw this usage report online, and it made sense. The approach those guys are taking seems much simpler than a SOAP basd approach:

At my company we are using a REST-based interface to allow the import and export of data to and from our trading system. We considered using SOAP, but felt that it would create an unnecessary extra layer of complexity without offering any benefits over a REST architecture. In fact SOAP's RPC approach seems to have many short comings versus the Representational State Transfer approach

With VW, this all ought to be pretty straightforward. You create servlets using Web Toolkit, and deal with the inbound and outbound XML using the XML support. A whole lot simpler than SOAP, and it's something that could be grown very incrementally.

The Call For Participation is out. Next year's show will be held in Toronto, Canada July 14-16. Hope to see you there!

And still trying to invent the future - take a look at the Croquet site. The summary page has useful information as well:

Croquet was built to answer a simple question. If we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could we go. What kinds of decisions would we make that we might have been unable to even consider 20 or 30 years ago, when the current set of operating systems were first created. The landscape of possibilities has evolved tremendously in the last few years. Without a doubt, we can consider Moore's law and the Internet as the two primary forces that are colliding like tectonic plates to create an enormous mountain range of possibilities. Since every existing OS was created when the world around it was still quite flat, they were not designed to truly take advantage of the heights that we are now able to scale. What is perhaps most remarkable about this particular question is that in answering it, we find that we are revisiting much of the work that was done in the early sixties and seventies that ultimately led to the current successful architectures. One could say that that in reality, this question was asked long ago, and the strength of the answer has successfully carried us for a quarter century. On the other hand, the current environments are really just the thin veneer over what even long ago were seriously outmoded approaches to development and design. Most of the really good fundamental ideas that people had were left on the cutting room floor.

Go read the whole thing - it's well worth the time. They are using Squeak as the basis.

There were some issues with the arguments I was passing in the urls - specifically, they had spaces in them. This didn't cause any problems for newer revs of IE or Netscape, but older browsers had problems. I should have that licked; please send me email if you spot something.

I read this story with trepidation. Apparently, the 8-12 year old set wants a cell phone - and the Wired story says this:

If a child in this age group doesn't already own a cell phone -- 21 percent of them do, according to research by SpectraCom -- he or she is likely part of the great majority pestering mom and dad for one

Fortunately, my daughter still seems to like board games and Christmas decorations and Barbie more than this stuff. Whew!

Here's an acronym I ran across awhile ago and ignored, but looked into a bit today: REST: REpresentational State Transfer The idea seems to be, if you can do an HTTP GET and get back an XML document for parsing, that's REST. How you know what you are going to get back? Anybody's guess, I suppose. Anyway, here's the story

Boy, I remember this kind of contradiction at PPD back in 1995-1996. Lots of fun for everyone. All the people managing this merger must really like the article's title:

IBM Australia denies Rational analyst comment snicker

Lamba the Ultimate reports that there's a JSR for adding some stuff to Java. See the post here. Here's an extract:

Sun has recently posted a list of new proposed features for Java 1.5. These include:

1. A syntax for defining enumerated types. This syntax provides linguistic support for the Typesafe Enumeration pattern.
2. An automatic conversion from primitive types to their corresponding reference type wrappers. This conversion facilitates the integration of generics into the language, and reduces inessential clutter.
3. Enhanced for loops allow convenient iteration over collections, without the need for an explicitly defined iterator. This reduces the need for boilerplate iteration code and the corresponding opportunities for errors.
4. Static import. A mechanism to allow the use of unqualified constants.

Useful links: The JSR document describing these proposals in more detail and the discussion on The Server Side. It's interesting to note how these changes are mostly cosmetic alterations to syntax rather than deeper semantic changes such as adding blocks. There's an interesting wiki page I started a while back that offers some interesting proposals that would really shake up Java.

It's as if the Sun guys almost get it, but not quite... Closures? Nahh, that would be useful, can't have that for the unwashed masses, can we? The Wiki Ref above actually makes some interesting proposals; on the other hand, people wanting such things could just use Smalltalk and be productive now. Can't have that either, I suppose; gotta follow the herd wherever it goes. At this pace, Java might conceivably be as usable as Smalltalk in about, oh, maybe 20-30 years. In th emeantime, the suckage continues....

In October, Alan Knight traveled to Erfurt, Germany for Net Object Days. You can see his trip report here

We have posted a new survey here: Cincom Smalltalk Survey and of course, all previous survey results may be found here: Survey Results This week's topic, inspired by my trip to the Brazil XP conference, is XP and Agile development. Thanks!

See the whole story here. My first take on this - it moves IBM away from the whole Agile Development Camp - Rational in general, and the RUP are not agile proponents by any stretch of the imagination. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. This is also interesting for other reasons - I'm of the opinion that Sun is doomed, as they are being squeezed on the commodity end by Microsoft and Dell - meanwhile, IBM is hitting them hard on the enterprise side. My guess is that IBM will eventually by the rights to Java and Open Source it. Right or wrong, I think it's going to be an interesting next couple of years in the IT business.

The Times story (free registration required) - has some interesting comments about Alan Kay and Smalltalk:

Dr. Kay and a few PARC colleagues, notably Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg, also developed Smalltalk, an influential programming language that uses blocks of code, known as objects, that are put together, like the cells that make up the human body, to build applications.

That's a nice quote from the mainstream media on Smalltalk!

First, bear in mind that my notes are not comprehensive - I didn't see all the talks, or even most of them. However, here are the permanent links for my blog entries on the show: Kent's opening talk Brief show notes, first day Scott Ambler - Agile Data, Agile Databases Kent's Keynote, XP Brazil Rob Mee on XP coaching Lowell Lindstrom - XP for the customer My thoughts on the show

UPDATE - I made the links friendlier for ancient browsers.

I gave my talk on XP in Smalltalk, and why I think it's better that way. You can get the presentation here. I had a good audience, and interestingly, a good number of non-Smalltalkers. All of the attendees received an NC CD, and after my talk, I had a number of people come up to ask questions. The thing I showed them - maybe I should have done this in the presentation - was to bring up the Web Toolkit ToyzInc demo, and walk through it. Then put a halt in a page, and watch the jaws drop! Yes, tools like Eclipse are getting better, but JSP coding isn't nearly this productive or fun. Anyway, the show itself was a lot of fun. I actually got to attend this show, instead of pulling booth duty (my typical fate at these things). It was a lot more fun to listen to the presentations. Once nice thing was that translation was provided - not just English to Portuguese, but also the reverse - so I could participate in events held in Portuguese - very nice. The XP hour on Thursday was especially nice that way. Funny thing, or at least ironic - here I studied Spanish for ten years, and the first country I visit in South America speaks Potuguese. I ran into three simply wonderful people from Paraguay who also did not speak Potuguese, and for whom English was their second tongue. I spent a couple of pleasant lunches conversing with them.. oh well. The folks from Object Magazine (Brazil were also very nice - Thanks Daniela for being so patient with my Spanish and (very halting) French. Daniela was kind enough to ask me to write an article for their magazine, and her editor asked to interview all of the invited speakers via email. I am pleased and humbled to be included with such a group of XP luminaries. Daniela (and a few other people) encouraged me to write a book - gosh, that sounds like real work. I'm tickled, and we'll see if I have that much ambition. The conference ended in a panel discussion on the future of XP - Kent Beck, Flavio, Scott Ambler, Lowell Lindstrom, Rob Mee - and Klaus Wuestefeld (an organizer and emcee, as well as XP expert) surprised me by asking me to participate in the panel. I took this as quite an honor! It was interesting - lots of good audience questions, including one on the future of Smalltalk. I related Cincom Smalltalk's annual 10% year on year customer increases, and that there are more Smalltalk vendors now than there were back in 1993 (Object-Arts, Object-Connect). This led to an interesting question - and later conversation - with Rob Mee. He has been working on a project with an old (conservative) bank in Germany, where they brought in all Open Source products to solve a problem - see my post on his talk for some notes. Well, that's a hard one. On the other hand, some of those OS things - a mock object framework (not needed in Smalltalk), JUnit (ships with VW), Eclipse (cool, but not as powerful as VW) simply aren't, IMHO, that relevant. Others, like Tomcat, are. On the other hand, the VW server frameworks scale quite nicely. The larger point is that there are scads of Open Source components for Java, and doesn't that swamp Smalltalk's ability to compete? Well, there are two answers to that

1. First, ask any of the XP luminaries what they would rather code in. After you here Smalltalk from almost all of them, draw your own conclusions
2. Second, The productivity gains in Smalltalk - 3x according to the SPR numbers - will still yield an earlier delivery

i.e., if project delivery dates actually matter, I think Smalltalk is still a better answer. Of course, I didn't have all this at hand when I spoke to Rob, and he still has a point. It's key to get more Open Source stuff going in Smalltalk. Bottom line, I had a marvelous conference. I am very, very glad that the Cincom Brazil folks - Thanks Ivan de Souaza and Nelson Martins! invited me. I am grateful to Klaus Wuestefeld for going out of his way to make me feel welcome. And I want to talk Objective Solutions - a Cincom Smalltalk customer - for being the driving force behind the show. Oh, and thanks to Scott Ambler for the kind present of a signed AM book! One other thought - if you go to Brazil, make sure to be ready for a lot of very good food!

Lowell Lindstrom of OMA spoke on a very interesting topic, and one that seemingly gets overlooked a lot - the customer side of XP - what do they get out of XP, and why do they care?

The Customer side of XP

What is our (developer's) ability to predict what the customer wants? not so good What is the customer's ability to specify what they really want? not so good So OMA started teaching XP classes a few years ago, and gradually came to the conclusion that teaching developers about XP wasn't enough. They had to talk to the customers as well.

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Metaphor - Lowell related a story about his sister learning to drive. Lowell was ten, riding in the car with his family, typical vacation. He and his brother fought, suddenly Dad tells sister (close to home) that she can drive Instant quiet - the brothers weren't sure they were safe (audience laughs). Only problem happened on last turn home. Sister doesn't make the turn correctly - doesn't cut wheel enough, heads for a fire hydrant. So Dad grabs wheel, pulls it, and yells a lot. So what does this mean to us? Steering is difficult when starting out. It's nice to have someone to help you out. In XP, the customer is steering.

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So what about Lowell? He started as a developer working with Bob Martin (Uncle Bob), who was then heavily involved in the C++ Report and OO community. Started Gravitating towards the customer point of view early - programming was fun, but not his passion. Moved into customer relations, product marketing, and Q/A.

1. Heard Ron and Kent talking about XP
2. Heard XP as a developer side thing, without enough customer side
3. Thought, how does XP impact sales, marketing, management (etc)?

So when OMA started teaching XP classes, they ran into a common issue - trust between customers and programmers was typically not high (on either side). Programmers generally didn't respect the customer, the customer did not trust the programmers enough to tell them what they really wanted. Solution - Lowell started teaching XP for Customers First class, adapted slides from the standard XP class. This was fine until they came to this:

Why are we here? Because we like to program

hmm. This required some dancing and adpatation. So why are customers here? Lowell has answers, but is still looking for a better quick summary. Customer's dilemma

1. Market is changing fast
2. The business is becoming more and more reliant on software (which is hard to get)
3. There is still a shortage of skilled programmers
4. There are lots (too many, almost) internal and external customers
5. There is a constant need to make very difficult choices about focusing limited resources

So again - Customer's dilemma Audience feedback to this - what does the customer want?

Make work easier Have more people use the product(s) Bring in profit Improve efficiency Improve reliability and repeatability of delivery to customers Have time for personal stuff Actually get the products that the customer wanted Better Time Management

Again - Customer's dilemma They want the same thing as developers - they want to execute the business as well, as much, with as little stress, and as much success, as is possible.

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XP Values

1. Simplicity
2. Communication
3. Feedback
4. Courage

KISS

So they derived a Customer's Bill of Rights Customers have a right to:

1. An overall plan - what can be done at what cost
2. Get the most possible value out of every programming week
3. See progress in a running system proven to work by repeatable tests you specify
4. Change your mind, substitute in functionality, change priorities without paying exhorbitant costs
5. Be informed of schedule changes in time to choose how to reduce scope to restore the original date.
6. Cancel at any time and be left with a useful, working system reflecting investment to date

There is, of course, a matching Developer's Bill of Rights

1. Know what is needed with clear priorities
2. Produce quality work at all times
3. As for and receive help from peers, superiors, customer
4. Accept responsibility instead of having it handed to you

Lowell drew a picture here, showing the overlap between the developers, customers, and stakeholders. The stakeholders - end customers, marketing, sales, management, media, testers, etc. - are often pretty remote, but still must be taken into account Key concept - it's a Whole Team Customer Team practices

On site customer	Business strategy alignment
XP Planning	Managing High level requirements
Acceptance tests	Stakeholder feedback
Small releases	Conflict resolution
Metaphor	Contract structure

Not necessarily comprehensive - but key if you want a well fuctioning customer team

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Managing scope Lowell drew a diagram with a set of boxes in it. The boxes are customer requirements to be delivered. Question - how many projects have completed exactly as they were specified? No hands go up. Ok, some do more, most do less, some deliver a less pluss some things not planned for. What's important? That the dividing line is far enough down that the customer perceives value - and has the acceptance tests that prove it. If we can deliver that, then the customer will probably be mostly happy

Rob gave a talk this afternoon on XP and coaching. My take on the XP coach is that it sounds a lot like a baseball manager - the job isn't to play baseball, but to make the other guys play baseball to the best of their abilities. now, like any metaphor, this one doesn't hold completely - while both jobs can be seen as transient (just look at how long the typical baseball manager lasts!), they aren't really the same. The coach is looking to train the team and go - the manager is really not hoping to work himself out of a job. In any event, Rob did a better job of conveying this than my notes indicate. It was a very interactive session, with a lot of feedback solicited from the audience. Here are the notes:

Rob Mee

XP and Coaching What is it - if XP is self organizing, why do we need a coach?

1. Someone who has done it before
2. Bootstrapping
3. Observing (everything)
4. enforcing discipline
5. Course correction
6. Participating in all team practices
7. keeping the balance

i.e., much like a sports team coach Attributes of a good coach?

1. Communication
2. Flexibility
3. Diplomatic
4. Aggressive
5. Persistent
6. Supportive
7. Creative
8. technically Competent
9. Likes to share power and responsibility

Questions: What about business domain knowledge?

You won't come in with it anyway. Will have to learn

What about coaching the customer team?

(Lowell)Could be a separate person. Just as we need competent programmers, we need competent customer

What is the most challenging of these skills for you?

difficult to answer in three minutes

Coach is a separate role from programmer - does he program?

Yes, participates and pairs (hopefully with everyone)

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Tips, Techniques, Patterns How to win over a reluctant team (individual)?

Promise to go away after a fixed time Ask for temporary cooperation They can do it their way when you leave

good cop/bad cop (Rob, Kent - audience laughs) The integrator bunny Use a fun or provocative token for integration. breaks the ice. Team building Used a bunny - too small, got lost. Then used bunny ears (wearable) Pattern - Ronaldo (soccer) work is not everything The coach needs to make sure that the team makes non-work time part of the culture Live your life normally, and do your job better Relax, get away from work, get refreshed Strategic Retreat As soon as you start coaching, you are on your way out

1. Start delegating
2. lead meetings less often
3. Stop giving tech advice
4. Make fewer decisions

Experiences - question on failures references Kent's project cancellation story from yesterday Quote - XP is more suited to party people than other processes (Kent) - as a coach, it's important not to get sucked into the personality conflicts of the staff Experience - XP at a Silicon Valley startup, $25M funding large, ambitious browser based system Currently about 3000 unit tests hundreds of acceptance tests Flexibility

1. removed WebLogic EJB 3 weeks before going live
2. Planning module - 4 dim rotating model, designed to handle 3 million nodes -- changed to handle 350 million in 3 weeks
How to replace the coach?
1. start finding possibilities early
2. intensive mentoring
3. handing over of responsibility
4. encourage XP community contribution (articles, talks, etc.)
Experience - XP in Germany
1. 100 year old insurance company
2. 4 yrs
3. 70 developers
4. how much money did you say?
5. nothing delivered
Fired all staff, waited a week, hired 12 back 1st meeting - mgrs, 12 staff - We need you to teach us XP Results
1. initial fear and dismay
2. most doubtful - cried, even - became biggest champion
3. team evolved into best estimators ever seen
4. 8 weeks to a deployable system
Tests Customer tests - Fit Unit tests - independent - no db contact, no 'container' (Tomcat) contact Why did it work?
1. realistic goals
2. one week iterations
3. OS packages (over 10)
4. Sane working conditions
5. beer
who to become new coach?
1. one diplomatic, flexible, communicative
2. another refactorer, aggressive
3. third - technically brilliant
Answer - coalition of all three Audience questions - how long to get there?

typically 2-3 months if team has no XP knowledge With some background, small team - could be 3-4 weeks

Kent - principle behind XP is one of creating social networks, not hierarchies Coaching is not about "power and glory" Job one - make the coach go away Job two - create a replacement

delivered by Kent Beck. He had an interesting talk, and got a lot of feedback from the audience. My notes:

Keynote - Kent Beck

The Spirit of Extreme Programming Asked the audience for some expectations - questions related to topic of talk

1. How do you deal with the question - How dare you challenge the conventional wisdon?
2. How do you handle personality issues?
3. Do you always find an appropriate system metaphor?
4. How often are clients really involved in the process?
8. How do you convince an organization to use XP?
9. Pete McBreen - Software Craftsmanship - square with XP
11. From a client perspective - what is the value of XP?
13. how to iterations work with project manager schedules?

How did XP get started? (Creation Myth)
Always been a programmer, father was a programmer. Always immersed. Was in the Smalltalk world, where it's easy to learn about programming. Technical expertise is just not enough - projects mostly fail for political reasons. Wanted to expand his viw beyond the programming to the whole context of programming. Question - what is the least I can do (besides programming) and still succeed? Only once - 1994 - got in at the start of a project. typically gets in after deadline, when everyone hates each other, and when the money is gone. This project is where SUnit, lots of testing, and frequent refactoring were born. It was a typical mainframe to mid-range project. After 4 months, much progress - but management liked it so well, that they explained the actual goal, as they say it - get the calculation engine running on the mainframe. So goals are important - but they change Next - brought into Chrysler for the payroll project. The goal was to fix the performance problems. Asked - where are the tests, so I don't break anything? Answer - we don't get correct answers yet. Said - I can make it run fast, so long as you don't care what the answers are. So, half the team left within 3 days, contracters were kicked out. IT chief asks for answers:

1. Cancel it
2. keep going the way you are going
3. Throw away all the code, give everyone a week off, and start over.

picked option 3, so long as Kent was in charge. He objected, as he said he was not a project lead. CEO convinced Kent with large sums of cash. inspiration - a combination of preparation and panic Now had plenty of panic. Interviewed entire staff so as to get to know them better. Came up with iterations (3 weeks), stories (to flesh out iteration goals) with first person. As things progressed, came up with acceptance tests to validate. Then came up with Unit tests as a developer task to help get to acceptance test Kent: I was just making this (expletive deleted) up Open workspace, people sitting together, continuous integration, unit testing - it all just came together on the Chrysler project with the team. Mental Model Do what they would normally do, but at maximum effort took 3-4 months of coaching to get to all those steps at once take everything I knew about software development, and turn it all up Thought this was having the knobs all the way up Since then, have moved to 1 week iterations - fits with the human notion of a unit of time that is imaginable.

All successful ventures have a creation myth

Companies and nations have them - projects can use them as well.

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Questions from earlier: What about personality issues? Kent - started out shy and introverted. The more people I meet, the more I learn and the better I get at what I do. Having different sorts work together helps. This is why the requirements come from the customer representative.

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Question from earlier: How often do clients really get involved? Software as sexual reproduction? Male - business representative Female - Developers Male - leaves 9 months later - the software is born Hurts so much, you aren't even going to try that again soon. (Business rep comes in with a new spec immediately...) Answer - How often are males really there all through pregnancy? What about software as ballroom dancing? Male - business Female - partner work - together If one leaves, it's not dancing Using dancing as a metaphor, software doesn't work unless the client gets involved. You need to get this metaphor embedded, and then it guides the process Metaphors are hard to come up with

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Close by talking about another question - What is the value to the customer? Total Effort - No Excuses. Focus and Intensity. Turn the knobs up. Be willing to recognize and try to kill doomed projects

I listened to Scott Ambler's presentation on data(bases) and agile methods this am - there was a lot of good stuff on the issues. Here are my notes:

Scott Ambler - Agile data, Agile databases

Metaphor from this morning - the data (dba) community is packing for Antarctica. Unfortunately, the rest of us are traveling in the desert or the jungle

1. Agile Data Method
2. Agile database techniques
3. Summary

Data people - want all the info (data model, etc) up front (Antarctica)
Developers - want agility and incremental (Jungle)
Two reactions to the dba
love them - willing to adapt, change
hate them - insists on up front logical data model, paper, validation, slow to change
Same kind of issues between local project teams and the enterprise planners (IT)

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Premises
The data and developer communities can, in fact, work together
Part of the problem was the early attitude of the OO community towards the data (RDBMS) community
Developers are not working in a vacuum - there is an enterprise architecture that has to be considered
The enterprise staff is theoretically supposed to support, not control, developers
Not them vs. us - only us. have to work together as a team
Need to find the sweet spot - don't fill the backpack to overflowing

Example - Scott's team (Antarctica) died 11 miles from the ship - carrying too much stuff

There is more to modeling than data modeling
Likewise, there's more to software than coding

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The Agile DBA Application developers need to understand the basics of Data Models
Likewise, an Agile DBA must understand the basics of programming Otherwise, they cannot communicate effectively. Similar to the translation issue of this presentation - the audience is listening to a Portuguese translation, things might get lost. If we were to work together, we would learn a bit of each other's languages.

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Enterprise Architects
There to support the team, not to produce large documents and models. There to help the team implement a vision that fits into the overall scheme. Should roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty (like a guide on an expedition). One size does not fit all in methodologies and data

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Agile Database Techniques for Agile DBA's Database refactoring is, in fact, as necessary as code refactoring but it's much harder What is it?
The act of making a simple change to the database schema The database is highly coupled to your application code, other application code, data import/export routines, reporting tools, persistance frameworks, documentation, etc. Thus, refactoring is hard What do you need?

1. Strong configuration management system
2. Full regression test suite
3. Willingness to work together
4. Acceptance of your situation

There actually are testing tools for databases. Use them.