Author: Allan Kelly

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

Throwing mud at a wall is a metaphor I use again and again. As a description of what I do and as a metaphor for creating change in organizations.

When you throw mud at a wall most of it falls off immediately. Some will stick for a little while then falls off. A little sticks permanent. Perhaps too little to see. So you throw some more and the same thing happens. Sometimes it looks like no mud has stuck but actually a little bit has even though you cannot see it.

Every time the mud falls off it is sad, even depressing but you have to keep throwing. Thats all you can do really.

You keep throwing, the more mud that sticks the better the chances that more will stick next time. Gradually, slowly, sometimes imperceptibly the mud builds up. As long as you can maintain your energy, stamina and resolve, you keep trying.

It can be depressing. Sometimes you can stay positive and you give up. Perhaps you move on to another wall.

In this blog, in my books, in my tweets (thankfully vastly reduced recently) I throw mud. Yes, I am a mud slinger, some people think I doing it with bad intentions. But my intentions good, I see a world that needs to think differently.

And when I’m hired to help companies I see it much the same way. I throw a lot of ideas at people, I suggest lots of changes, I throw mud at a wall and most of my ideas fall off. Much of what I suggest gets ignored. No matter how much I talk I have no authority, people are free to ignore me.

Some places I’m very successful, some less so. When I’m inside a company I try to be a bit more directed with my mud throwing, and I limit the ideas I’m throwing. But still it is a question of stamina and resolve. Some places are just more receptive to new ideas than others.

And actually, this is my model for all organizational change. To my mind, all us “change agents” (yes I hate the term too) can do is make suggestions. Throw ideas at people, if they like the ideas, if they think the idea might help then they might adopt it. But they don’t have to. It is hard to force change on people, if you try they may say they will change, they may go through the motions but sooner or later – when your back is turned – the mud will fall off.

Individuals have free will. Most of them want to work as best they can. So if some “agile coach” turns up with an idea workers don’t think will work they are free to ignore it.

I’m not a great believer in authority: just because you are blessed with the title “Manager” (or “Director” or “Executive” or even “President”) doesn’t mean people will fall your orders immediately and without question.

The best way of getting your mud to stick, getting your ideas and changes adopted is to help people understand how such changes will benefit them as individuals. Benefit them in the work they do, the quality of their life-work balance and the pride they feel in work.

Conversely, there are some people, even some organisations, who are totally unreceptive to mud. They go out of their way to avoid it. It is hard enough throwing mud which doesn’t stick, but when people don’t want it to stick, well, I’m probably better off going elsewhere.

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Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

mary had a little lamb
its fleece was white as snow

The post POst test appeared first on Allan Kelly Associates.

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

Q: What is the difference between programming in college and programming in the real world?
A: Error handling

Do you remember when you were learning to program? Do you remember those text books you had back in college? And do you remember what they said about error handling?

As I remember it most of what they said about error handling was:

        /* error handling omitted for brevity */

Or perhaps:

        (* error handling omitted for brevity *)

Back in college error handling hardly got a mention, and if it did it was to abort the program. Yet in the real world 80% of what you program is error handling, or rather exceptions, the corner cases, what happens when things go wrong.

I’ve been saying this for years but this week I realised how shocking this was.

A couple of years ago a paper entitled “Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems” (2014, you know its an academic paper because it has 8 authors)) was momentarily famous on Twitter. I grabbed it and had a quick read but this week I had reason to go back and look at it again. In the process I found a 20 minutes video presentation by one of the authors.

To cut a long story short, the authors looked at the source code for large open source applications (Cassandra, MapReduce, etc) and software failures. Among various finding they reported:

• Finding 1: “A majority (77%) of the failures require more than one input event to manifest, but most of the failures (90%) require no more than 3” – so even if didn’t happen very often, they were difficult to simulate in system testing
• Finding 9: “A majority of the production failures (77%) can be reproduced by a unit test.” (Yes the reoccurrence of 77% is suspicion but I think it is an improbably but genuine co-incidence, please read the paper or watch the video before you fault the paper on this.)
• Finding 10: “Almost all catastrophic failures (92%) are the result of incorrect handling of non-fatal errors explicitly signalled in software.”
• Finding 11 “35% of the catastrophic failures are caused by trivial mistakes in error handling logic — ones that simply violate best programming practices; and that can be detected without system specific knowledge.”

The authors even created a tool to scan code for some of these problems. In many cases they found code like:

catch (…) {
        // TODO
}

catch (Exception e) {
        /* will never happen */
}

My old jibe about error handling looked very real.

This morning I pulled some old books off my shelves and was shocked by what I found:

First the book I was prescribed at not one but two University programming courses: “Problem Solving and Structured Programming in Modula-2” by Elliot B. Kaufman (1988).

I can’t find “Error handling omitted” in this book, my memory was wrong but the book is worse. I can’t find any error handling to speak of! I found one example which returns a boolean success/fail flag but there is no discussion of what to do with it. “Error handling” is not even in the index, let alone the table of contents – actually “Error” isn’t even there.

Each chapter ends with a “Common Programming Errors” section but this section is mostly about compile time errors.

Next I looked at the silver book, Wirth’s “Pascal User Manual and Report” (1991). I can only find two references to “errors” (nothing to exception). Both these references are in the report section and don’t say anything about how to program error handling.

As I looked at more old books I noticed how they just assumed everything worked well.

K&R is slightly better – “The C Programming Language” by Kernighan and Ritchie (1988) that is. Most of the examples here do check for errors, then printf. Sometimes that is it, sometimes there return 0 or break. On page 164 they say:

“We have generally not worried about exit status in our small illustrative programs, but any serious program should take care to return sensible, useful status values.”

In other words: Error handling omitted for brevity.

Moving away from the introductory books I turned to what might be the longest single volume technical book I ever read. A book I quoted as a bible, a book who’s author I still put on a pedestal: “Large Scale C++ Software Design”, John Lakos (1996). While John does say a bit more about error handling it does not feature in the index and there is no dedicated section to it. Looking at it now I am in disbelief, how could a book a large scale C++ not have at least one chapter on error handling?

Of the books I look at this morning only Kernighan and Pike’s “Practice of Programming” (1999) gave any coverage to error handling. And that isn’t saying much.

OK, these are all ancient books. Have things changed? – you tell me.

I hope more recent books, in more modern languages have got better – and my old (1999) copy of “Learning Python” (Ascher) contains a whole chapter on exceptions as does Stroustrup’s “C++ Programming Language” (2000).

But I am sure error and exception handling hasn’t got any simpler. I can’t believe that JavaScript, PHP, Swift, and simiar. have somehow made the problem go away. “Throw exception(blah, blah, blah)” might be a great improvement over “return -1” but I can’t imagine handling these cases has got easier.

Based on the “Simple Testing” paper improvements in training programmer in error handling need to be redoubled.

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Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

The #NoProjects #NoEstimates workshop returns to London on 15 February with Duarte Vasco and myself.

Learning Connexions are taking bookings now, for a 10% discount use the code VASCO10.

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Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

Learning Connexions and I are running my “Requirements Backlogs and User Stories” workshop next Monday – 3 December in London. They have set up a Black Friday discount code which is only good today and reduces the price by 20% – so just under £500 for a day (including lunch!)

The code is: BLUEFRIDAY2K18
And actually it works with all their courses not just mine.

As for the day itself, the title pretty much says it all. We do some exercises, we review some actual user stories, we value some stories and we talk a lot. I deliberately keep the classes small so that we have plenty of time to discuss the things attendees want to talk about.

Most of the attendees are Product Owners, Product Managers or Business Analysts. We also get a few developers and project managers along too. But whatever your role I’m sure you will learn something,

And sorry, if I’d known this a few days earlier I’d have included this in my last post.

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