8th Light Blog

At 8th Light, they follow a practice of training people through an apprenticeship period. As it is nearing the end of my apprenticeship, my mentor has asked me to write a blog talking about one thing I have learned during the course of my apprenticeship. For me, the one skill that I learned the most about was the one skill that needed the most work in the first place. The main thing I learned was that I was writing software for others. Similar to that idea came the need for increased customer interaction and learning how to interact with people in general.

Prior to working at 8th Light, almost all the programming I had ever done was either for myself, or for school projects. In the first case, I was my own user, so there was never any issue in communication there. And for the second case, the requirements were almost always very clearly drawn out(and not likely to change). Again, not much room for error. Once I came to 8th Light, I was forced to write code both specified and to be used by someone that was not myself. This was something new to deal with. For at least the first month or so, my thought process was for myself. It wasn’t until I came to that realization that I was able to change my thought process. There was not one single event that made me learn this, but it was something learned over time. When starting a story, once the requirements have been approved, I don’t try to change the story. Even if I don’t agree with the desired functionality, it is what the customer wanted, and that’s all that matters. And now, when I finish a story, I take the time review the requirements and make sure it completes all the requirements that the customer specified.

In order to provide a high quality product for another person, you must maintain a high level of collaboration with them. Without talking to them, you will never be able to guess what they want. So, in going along with the first lesson, I also learned that a lot of customer interaction is important and any issues that arise should be addressed quickly. One event in particular occurred that helped me realize this was the week leading up to one of our releases. It was around this point that the customer decided to begin some testing of the system and uncovered a number of bugs. There was some concern as to whether or not all the bugs were being kept track of in some way, and this added stress to both the development team and the customer. It wasn’t the bugs that taught me anything, but the manner in which Micah handled them. After our iteration meeting, he called attention to the problem. He didn’t blame anybody, but just said that something needed to be done to fix the problem and even proposed some possible solutions. It was the high level of communication between the development team and the customers that was valuable to me. This made me realize that you have to address problems quickly, and it helps to offer multiple solutions to a problem. The customer also seemed to appreciate that we brought the issue up, and partly because of this week of bugs, we introduced a new bug tracking tool to our process.

I also began to learn that if you have a question about how something is supposed to work, sometimes the best solution is to just ask the customer. At one of our recent iteration meetings, the customer mentioned functionality that they expected to be in a completed story that had never been discussed. We realized that there was not enough feedback gained from the requirements, so we altered our process to account for that. Now, after determining the requirements, we bring them to the customer and discuss them in person. This is something we just began, but it already has shown signs of success. The customer has actually come to us to discuss the requirements for some of the stories. It is because our team values communication that we were able to improve our process.

Learning these things has already helped me work more productively. If I have a question, instead of trying to spend too much time reasoning it out my own, it can be much faster to either go to the requirements or directly to the customer. During the course of my apprenticeship, I also learned a lot about coding but nothing was as important as what I learned about human interaction. This is a lesson that has definitely changed my mentality towards coding and will hopefully improve my skills as a professional software craftsman.

Craftsman Clarification

There has been some discrepancy in the use of the term “software craftsman”. Rather than going into details about various uses of the term, I’ll just clarify what I believe it means.

software craftsman n. A man who practices the software craft.

There are a few points to make about this definition.

1. “software craft”

A craftsman believes that software is a craft. This is important because not everyone believes this. A craftsman takes pride in his work an strives to do the best job he can. He believes that writing good software requires skill and careful attention. That software is not something that can be manufactured nor can it be delivered faster by merely adding more bodies.

2. “practices”

A craftsman practices his craft, always striving to become more skillful, to produce better software.

There are traditionally 3 stages of craftsmanship:

1. Apprentice
2. Journeyman
3. Master

No matter which stage one may be in, as long as he practices software as a craft, he is a craftsman.

3. “A man”

Technically the term “craftsman” is gender specific. Women are just as capable of software craftsmanship. Indeed, I’d like to see more software craftswomen out there. In an effort not to alienate anyone we should use the term “software craftsperson” more liberally.

Update: There’s a movement afoot to make the term “software craftsman” gender neutral. Feel free to comment below.

I’ve checked with the book “Software Craftsmanship” by Pete McBreen to see if it conflicts with my definition. Although, he uses the term “software craftsman” ambiguously at times, he is careful to use the term “master craftsman” when referring to craftsmen at the height of his craft. This is in line with my definition.

I hope this serves as a reference for my use of the term. People should not think me presumptuous when I call myself or my colleagues craftsmen. I mean only what I describe above.

I spent a lot of time with my grandpa growing up. He has spent much of his retirement ‘fooling around’ in a workshop he built on his slice of Pike County, Illinois farmland. From a very early age I spent a lot of weekends and entire weeks of the summer as Grandpa’s little helper. I’d work on the things he was working on while helping and learning. When I was about 7 years old, I was helping Grandpa refinish a dresser. I had a flat paint scraper in my little hands and was trying to dig into the layers of flaking paint that gripped the dresser. I really didn’t have the strength to get under the paint with that big blade, so I turned the tool on edge and started scratching deeply into the wood. I was making progress now, but tearing the heck out of the surface. Now in Grandpa’s version of this story, he says that when he saw what I was doing he corrected me too harshly and sharply and later found me teared up in a corner of the workshop sorry for what I’d done. I honestly don’t remember being that hurt by his rebuke, but I do know how to use a paint scraper and dozens of other tools properly because of that time I spent ‘helping’ grandpa in his shop.

As software crafts-people our tools are other bits of software. We spend every minute of every day using software. Our editors, compilers, interpreters, source code repositories, IDEs, debuggers, and test frameworks enable every stage of our work. Everything we do to create and add value to a software project requires some other software tool to make it happen.

At many of the places I’ve worked, the developers have a laundry list of complaints about their software tools. Often, teams develop elaborate rituals and incantations to dance around the shortcomings of their tools. “Before you check in, copy this file over there then add a note to that file then spin around in your chair three times and your check-in should succeed.” Now I agree that there are lots of poorly designed tools out there. Some tools do things that just don’t make sense and others crash all the time, but I have a challenge for us as software crafts-people: Own your tools. Tools are software, you are a software crafts-person. You can find or make a tool to do anything you need.

Groups decide to invest in a tool, often at great cost, but very few people end up understanding or even using the tool. The tools usually gets blamed for its shortcomings before anyone has really made the effort to get them to work. They give up on it far to early. Own your tools. Understand everything it can do, and if it isn’t enough, find a way to make it do what you want.

One of the cool things that happens is that investing time in your tools may give you the chance to explore a new language. One of our goals as craftsmen at 8th Light is to learn a new language every year, but often its hard to justify the time spent in a new language when you are heads-down in a project. Using a new language to create a tool for yourself may give you just the excuse you need to spread out a bit and learn something new.

Is it really worth it? Can the time spent writing “non-production” code really be justified? Let’s take a task, say the creation of a new class in C++. Most people when creating a new class, will open up the last class they worked on, copy the entire thing, paste it into a new file, delete all the methods and data, then do a find/replace on the class name. There are probably a few comments that need editing, the revision history needs to be cleaned out and maybe there is a comment header or footer that needs to be updated. This entire process could take maybe 2 minutes. It hardly seems like it’s worth automating. Except … Wait! It won’t compile, because you mistakenly didn’t remove the parameters from the constructor and the compiler can’t resolve the dependencies. This is a manual process, so it’s error prone. So you spend maybe another 3 minutes getting the thing to compile. Then we need a test harness so you do the same copy, paste, delete, find / replace process. 8 minutes later we have a new class and test harness and we are ready to start working. The hour or so investment to build a tool for yourself will surely be worth it now. If you share your work with the rest of your team and suddenly everyone is saving 8 minutes every time a new class is generated, you might have your hour back by the end of the week.

Some IDEs and editors have some class generation utilities for you. This may get you part of the way there, but it probably won’t put your company’s header on the top or put in your source control keywords. It may not make your destructor virtual or create a private copy constructor to start like I like to do. The tool doesn’t do exactly what you want. Own your tool. You are a software craftsmen. You can create software that generates a class for yourself. If you are in an editor that supports macros or bundles, you may be able to implement the tool in the editor’s macro language.

In this spirit, the craftsmen at 8th light have contributed to open source software tool projects for several years. Micah is the author of the widely used Fitnesse acceptance test framework and Eric has taken over the management of Selenium on Rails. Micah’s also been working on a whole new development framework called LimeLight. We love open source tools because they let anyone own the tool.

Grandpa used to make things out of sliced walnuts. He’d glue together little baskets or crosses and fill the walnut cavities with colorful beads. As you can imagine, a walnut is a pretty difficult thing to slice. At the very least it’s awfully dangerous to get your fingers that close to a band saw. Grandpa showed me a while ago the tool that he made to save his lower digits. It’s a pretty simple block of wood with a half-walnut sized divot carved out of it. It was a woodworker using his woodworking skills to create (and own) a tool for woodworking.

If you’d like my class generator, you can have it here. Chances are, it won’t do exactly what you need it to do, so … own your tool.