Holding Auditions for Interviews

Over the past few years I have conducted a number of interviews. I take pride in having a robust process for interviewing and selecting the right candidate. I often say that 90% of the manager’s job is done if you hire the right staff. I look for great team fit, excellent problem solving skills and solid technical skills. We go through two interviews,  a technical assessment  and a final socialisation interview with the team.

I feel it’s important to include the team in the process. But thinking about it further the last step is a little informal. Ok, if you cannot chat about work, projects, code, social activities with someone then there is not a good chance you cannot work together. But you need something more solid that will start the bonding process between the team and the newcomer. A more robust process, something that challenges the candidate and gives the team confidence in the selection.

Reading through PeopleWare: Productive Projects & Teams (DeMarco & Lister) – I found the chapter Holding Auditions quite enlightening, here are some extracts:

“The business we’re in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers’ abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines. So the hiring process needs to focus on at least some sociological and human communication traits. The best way we've discovered to do this is through the use of auditions for job candidates.

The idea is simple enough. You ask a candidate to prepare a ten- or fifteen minute presentation on some aspect of past work. The date is set and you assemble a small audience made up of those who will be the new hire’s co-workers.

At the end of the audition and after the candidate has left, you hold a debriefing of those present. Each one gets to comment on the person’s suitability for the job and whether he or she seems likely to fit well into the team.

Even more important, any new person hired is more likely to be accepted smoothly into the group, since the other group members have had a voice in choosing the candidate.

It soon became clear that the audition process served to accelerate the socialization process between a new hire and the existing staff members. A successful audition was a kind of certification as a peer.”

What I Like

You are assessing the all-round presentation skills and ability of the candidate. During the presentation the energy, enthusiasm and passion for what they do will come out. The keenness for the role will be self-evident. Telling a team in a monotone voice that you are “passionate about IT”, isn't going to cut the mustard.

You are assessed by your peers. We do this already. I like this idea. As a manager with a team of 24 people realistically you are not going to spend a lot of time working closely with your new hire. Others in your team will. During the presentation they may pick up and strengths and weaknesses that you did not notice. 

The last paragraph of the audition process is a great statement. A good presentation starts the bond between the existing team and the newcomer. The team are confident that the right person has been hired. They have had a say in the process. Come day one they – and the new person – will be less nervous, they will both know what to expect.

What I Don’t Like

Nothing. It might be the first time a candidate has been asked to present in this manner, so there might be some culture shock. This is good. A robust interviewing process is a sign of an organised and well lead team.

What’s Next

I have PeopleSoft Developer role I need to take to market, so test of all I can trial this new formalised process in the not too distant future. 

Technical Debt - Breaking the Poor Development Cycle

What is Technical Debt

In nice simple terms technical debt is the cost of not doing software development in a sustainable, best practice approach. In terms of the actual development work it can range from poor coding practices including hard coding in dates, poorly named variables, sloppy SQL to poorly designed tables and stored procedures. In the wider SDLC in can be a lack of business understanding, poor requirements, heavy intensive manual testing, no automated testing, slow manually intensive migration processes and non-existent operational monitoring. Technical debt is often the outcome of a poorly planned and executed projected, time and budget constraints, an ever changing scope and a management philosophy of "get it done".

This article focuses on the development driven technical debt. How the development practices can be changed and improved so the debt can be paid and no new debt is incurred. Like your finances, you need to avoid the habit of taking out a consolidation loan to pay back credit card debt. Its just one loan to pay another. You need to save money or earn more.

Is there an Actual Cost

Yes. Its call incidents, BAU, break/fix, or the need to constantly make manual changes to keep the application running or the business needs to change it behaviours to work with the application in a less efficient manner. Incident work can be captured in a time tracking application. Operational and process costs are likely to be less visible. Just like finance debt (see the US Debt Clock) technical debt incurs an interest cost. This cost does not repay the debt. It gets higher with more technical debt. Just like financial debt you need to decide what level of "interest rate" you can live with. If your spend 35% of your team's time fixing incidents you can assume this is too high. If you need to spend 5% of your team time, this may be ok to live with. Like a mortgage interest rate at some point you do need to pay it off.

Technical Debt Cycle

Technical debt can easily become a cyclical process. Its not a good cycle. Debt tends to add to more debt and efforts to resolve it can only add to it. Its a vicious circle and an easy one to get into.

Poor Practices

It starts with poor quality design and coding. This can occur for a number of reasons, the Developer many not be familiar with the programming language, they may not know best practice, they are under time pressure to get the code written so they hard code, they may not be disciplined to follow best practice, there are no code reviews, no unit tests and no quality control until it hits the test environment or worse production environment.  

This is start of a cycle of events which the following diagram highlights.

 

Frequent Incidents

Poorly written code will break and it will break often. Worse of all it breaks in production when someone or (something) is trying to use it. This leads to incidents being logged - by users or by operational monitoring. These incidents need to be fixed, so the Developer needs to drop what their working on and work on the incident. This is called context switching. If the incident happens in some code you just worked on then you can fix it pretty quickly. Most happen in code you worked on a few weeks, months or even a year ago. You then have Knowledge Decay - and you need to time to re-familiarize yourself with the code. Even worse if its somebody else's code and an application you have never looked at before it can take several days to resolve an incident. Plus the incident will need testing and migrating. Its not just the Developer's time that it being used to fix the incident. If you are getting frequent incidents this will be happening a lot. Its frustrating for all involved.

Low Recoverables\Less Project Time\More Pressure

If your Developers are working on incidents then they are not working on projects - building new applications or enhancing existing ones. This tends to lead to projects falling behind as they are getting less resource time to complete tasks by an agreed deadline. It also leads to lower billable hours for the team. Long project meetings and email chains also do not help. Not a specific development or SDLC practice, but the sign of a poor and non-collaborative culture. Less time for projects tends to lead to more pressure to get them done. More pressure can easily lead to poor practices and our cycle is now three-quarters complete

Touch & Go

All of the previous three elements add up to a Touch and Go mentality. Developers are under pressure to fix incidents, work on projects, they also need training and over time begin to build up high leave balances. As time is precious a "death march" approach of getting tasks completed takes hold, even the most skilled and competent Developers will just get tasks done for the sake of it. They may be aware that their code is poor, that they are rushing, the become to expect interruptions, changing priorities, confidence drops and morale sags. 

This completes the cycle. The poor practices are further cemented and will get worse - like a hurricane over a warm ocean - it begins to spin faster. 

Breaking the Cycle

Once you have identified all the elements that make up the Technical Debt cycle and how it reinforces and spirals, you can start planning to break it. This will require process, procedural, coding changes and most importantly a cultural changes. You need to be prepared to do things properly and to defend the good habits you are trying to form.

Good Practices

In order to ensure that best practice is followed you need to define best practice. Establish coding standards. Include peer reviews. Make it clear what is expected of the Developers. Code which is poorly written will not pass a review and will require the Developer to re-write. Also the Technical Debt cycle encourages a silo-ing of Developers. They stop talking to and helping each other. This needs to be broken down, Daily stand-ups are very useful for this. Get the Developer to stand and talk, ask them about progress, issues, problems, etc. Offer them support and assistance. Ensure that robust and thorough unit tests are prepared, they are run, they pass. They are updated as required. Check the results as part of the review. Break the tasks down into manageable pieces of work. 

This will ensure that good quality code is written. It is more robust and hence less likely to break. This starts the cycle in a positive way - see below.

 

Less Frequent Incidents

Looking at a list of incidents can be a bit daunting, where do start and what do you do? Firstly, establish the priority order. Fix the ones that cause the most problems. Also look for like incidents or incidents where the same underlying problem causes multiple incidents to be raised. Have a plan and update it regularly. Stick to the tasks which are high priority. If possible look at including the incident fixes in planned project work. Accept there is a risk here of having to test fixes to existing code as well as new code. Remember each release requires a test migration and a test resource. It may be worth the risk - time and cost - to do all the fixes and enhancements in one go. This will also require some skilled negotiations with the business, they might not see the need to reduce technical debt as a priority. They may want only "new stuff" built. They might not realize the doing this just adds to the debt.

Also it may take sometime to see the benefit of less frequent incidents, especially if there is a long list. Plan frequent releases. Seek to build trust by fixing the higher priority and releasing to the business. The more you fix and the less of the new code that breaks the happier they are.

Improved Recoverables

Just like any good investment, good coding and good practices pays more over time. Less incidents, less fixes and good quality code means more time for building and enhancing applications. The "good stuff", what Developers enjoy. Stick to daily stand ups with short and to-the-point meetings. Ensure that the Developers and project team as a whole stand up and talk to each other. Visualize the results - be it on a whiteboard or a JIRA board - so the team (and others) can see progress.

Be Thorough

None of the above will sink in and be repeated if the unacceptable pressure to deliver is still present. This is where project and team leadership becomes important. Firstly, the Developers. Make sure they are supported as they continue with these practices. If you use external resources which are costly contractors make sure they cross-skill and train the team. Establish internal training sessions, make time for a couple of half day sessions a month in a training room. Identify the knowledge gaps and resolve them. Again, this will take time. However at this point the Developers know what they need to do properly. They are supported by their Project Manager and their Line Team Leaders/Managers. Priorities don't change frequently. Developers know they can sit down, focus and complete a piece of work where quality is the first priority. Once you are good at something, you can get faster at doing it and still be good. The other way around rarely works. 

Project Managers & Team Leadership

Doing stuffproperly - the first time, second time, third time - can take time and cost money, until your processes, coding, etc. matures to the point where you are fast, efficient and still producing quality code. Until then the Project Managers and Team Leaders must protect the team. Give them the space to complete tasks properly, run interference from customers, senior managers, etc. all with different priorities and time frames. Team Leadership is vital, even the best PM will be tempted to accept a little less quality for quicker outcome - and this has a habit of spiralling. Establish a good relationship with the PM, ensure they know of the standards and methods you follow, why you follow them and the expected outcome. Its important that the Developers do not get dragged into project or organisational politics. That customers, senior managers, etc. can distract and change priorities causing frustration and starting of the technical debt cycle again. Be prepared to take the time to explain the above approach to your customers, senior managers, etc. Once you get runs on the board with good code and good robust applications, there will be less pressure and less distractions.  

But People Yell at Me with Their Priorities

No matter how logical, sensible, best practice your approach is there will also be others seeking to distract and send you spiralling back into the bad old ways. You can't fix every problem at once for everyone. Drive a stick in the ground and do it. Be prepared to face escalations from those you are not first on the list to have their applications fixed. Be prepared for tough conversations with those whom just want to get tasks finished and close off projects, without consideration for whom is going to fix the left over project issues. At the end of the day you will have to attend meetings, respond to emails and escalations defending this approach. Regardless of this noise, make sure they team are not exposed to it. They have space, they get things done properly (I think I have said this twice, this is good, its important).

Pragmatism

At the end of the day you may find you still have technical debt. You may realize that you don't have time and resources to fix all of it. It comes down to make can you live with. Can you live with paying a mortgage. Most homeowners do and they accept it. Can I live with a high credit card balance with a high interest rate? Probably not. Be prepared for some distractions, some fixes will take to take place, some context switching will happen soon escalations will need dealing with. This is ok, as long as they not frequent or hugely time consuming.  Breaking the cycle can often take a lot of time, several months would be great, but realistic it may take a year or more. Always look for the opportunity to include debt reduction in any work you do. 

Avoidance Is Best

The best and most efficient way of resolving technical debt is to avoid it. When you get the opportunity to build a brand new application, sit down and plan, establish the best practice standards, roles & responsibilities, what code to reuse, what new components to use. Challenge requirements, model and test before you build. Visualize building your application with quality code, robust unit tests, reliable automated deployments, automating testing, good test scripts, engaged users, a pragmatic and enthusiastic business owner. The outcome will be worth the effort you put in.

Key Learnings

Work out what practices and behaviours makes up your technical debt, how you got into debt and how you keep getting deeper into debt. This is the first step in breaking it.

Plan how to get out of debt. Don't accept going in cycles or getting deeper into debt. Trumpet the wins and successes you achieve, this helps build the trust and time you will need to break the cycle.

Avoidance is best. 

The Application 100 Day Review

Introduction

In 2013 Group Applications introduced the "One Hundred Day Review" concept. The idea was to have an approach to deal with "phase 2" items from a green fields application development and feedback post go live feedback on the application. To do this in a structured and organised approach so the original project closes, the project team moves to new work and there is not a list of outstanding tasks, improvements, on hold tickets that just falls into limbo. It was first used on the Volunteer Application. This went live in March 2013, in early July we went back to the business and asked them what they wanted changed and fixed. This was captured and carried out. These reviews are also planned for Study Options (February 2014) and FindAThesis (July 2014). As such they appear on the Group Applications Resource planning for 2014.

Background

Name and Address Register & the Yellow Line

Over 10 years ago I worked as the PM, BA, Co-Developer, Test Lead, etc with one other Developer and a Business SME (Subject Matter Expert) to build the Building Consents application for Manukau City Council. As we were pushed for time as a small team working on an existing code base and database that was left over from the first failed implementation, we made some very pragmatic decisions. One of the areas of the original application we did not change was the name and address register. We had used a model borrowed from another project that was not used in any other applications. The outcome was the process by which names, addresses and roles were added, edited and deleted seemed slow and clumsy to us. We thought users would hate it. However we did not have time to rebuild it and placed it first on our list to fix post go live. We went live on the 13th November 2003. When I left council in mid-2011 we still had not changed it. There was no need, no one complained, the users all found it easy to use and no one ever asked us once in 8 years to change it.

One of the modules we developed was the consent tracking page. Users could see the location of the consent and who was working on it. Users complained that they could not see the location without having to look at it in detail and read the entire screen. So we added a css and code change that highlighted the current location of the consent on the page with a bright yellow background. This background was ugly, it was so bright you could see it standing three feet back from the PC. The users loved it. It was so easy to see and use. So the term "the Yellow line" entered into both the Business and IT vocabulary.  We referred to the current location of a consent as the consent the yellow line was on. The Current Location report became known the Yellow Line report. It was simple and effective.

What's the Lesson?

The lesson is until you use an application thoroughly and frequently you won't fully understand what works and what does not. Deciding in test phases what needs to be changed, enhanced or improved may not be needed post go live and other areas which seemed okay may suddenly be a pain point. The example above is interesting as the Name and Address Register was infrequently used so no one minded the extra step or two to use. The consent tracking page was used heavily every hour of the day. In needed to be more user friendly. Ironically "fixed" with a bright yellow line.

Once an application is released there is a real temptation to ask for early changes. If there are urgent fixes this is a differently story, these need to be resolved. Non-urgent fixes may not need to be resolved or may become unimportant and can wait. Give the application and users time to use the application and ask them to capture feedback and discuss among themselves.

What's Included?

• Any tickets that have been left over from the original development, inclusive of bugs, improvements and wish-list items.
• Any current non-urgent fixes.
• Any changes which will make the application easier to use and maintain. 

Plus any requests from the teams responsible for support and maintenance. They may have ideas on how to improve it.

A lot of the requests from the first Volunteer Project 100-Day review were changes such as adding new fields to pages, adding a validation rule in, resolving an issue with an alert appearing in the log files, make some fields and input boxes bigger. Mainly small items which make the application a lot easier to use.

What's the Process?

The process is relatively simple.

• Before you commence development of the original application explain this concept to the business. Any ideas, improvements, etc that occur late in the build and in UAT can wait for 100 Day Review for inclusion.
• Complete and release the application, flag tickets remaining from the project in JIRA as required to be reviewed. Inform the business to start their 100-day review list.
• About 3 months later arrange a meeting with the business and discuss the list. There will need to be conversations around funding, priority against other activities and timing.
• Discuss what items need to be built, what bugs need to be fixed and if any of the existing bugs are so trivial the tickets can be closed. Be pragmatic.
• Stand up the review as a small project and apply normal SDLC rules and standards until completion.
• Close out the project as per normal.

What Happens if there are LOTS of Changes and Bugs?

This is likely to be outcome of the original project not capturing the requirements correctly, poor development, poor testing (including UAT) and possibly an unrealistic 100-day list. The projects stood up by 100-day reviews are meant to be small. If the volume of change is significant then you may need to consider a refactoring type project or build a completely new application.

Further Changes

Further requests for changes will come as the application is further used. Business processes are not static and the application will need to change to meet any changes in process. Users will find further ways to improve the application and may uncover bugs that are deeply buried in the application. There is no hard and fast rule to standing up projects to deliver these changes. This is something that should evolve over the life cycle of the application.

Closing Thoughts

The review does not have to be exactly 100 days, especially if you release 100 days before Xmas. I would not make it a shorter period, but a longer period of one to six months would be okay.

System Warrant of Fitness

Introduction

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 A number of projects have kicked off and somewhat completed over the past 18 months looking to significantly enhance a number of applications. However many of these projects have failed to acknowledge the current technical debt of the applications that they are attempting to change. The end result is often a project which runs well over time and over cost, with unhappy project members, stakeholders, managers and customers.

 Moving forward, systems must be assessed - i.e. Warrant of Fitness - before attempting to add functionality, to determine whether they are in a fit state to be enhanced. If not, the project must include the payback of technical debt or scale back on such ambitious plans or not even commence.

Technical Debt Definition

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 Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is a metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete. "Interest payments" are both in the necessary local maintenance and the absence of maintenance by other users of the project. On-going development in the upstream project can increase the cost of "paying off the debt" in the future. One pays off the debt by simply completing the uncompleted work. It also may be considered as outstanding tasks to complete a project - to the customer's satisfaction - even after the project has "completed" and "closed". The OSCH Project is a good example of this.

 Another measure of technical debt interest is the number of support calls logged after the project closes. Ideally projects complete and no calls are raised; the Volunteer Project is a good example of this. Technical Debt Avoidance is far more efficient and cost effective than paying the debt off - as at the point of payment you include interest. A number of steps have been taken to reduce debt which involve solid adherence to SDLC principles. Inclusion of code reviews, early and frequent involvement of testers in analysis and development, thorough, sound, robust requirements, frequent regression testing and so on. As a result current projects are leaving behind little or no technical debt. Again the Volunteer Project is a good example of this.

Technical Debt Responsibility

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 Payment of technical debt is not solely the responsibility of IT, but includes the application owner, steering committee members and stakeholders - all must take a level of responsibility. Business pressures, where the business considers getting something released sooner before all of the necessary changes are complete, builds up technical debt comprising those uncompleted changes. However poor coding, review, test, design practices i.e. - SDLC - are largely the responsibility of IT. 

Background

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 The Admissions\Expressions project - in simple terms the merging of Expressions functionality into the Admissions application - was a deliverable from the FOC Programme of Work (POW). The project was focused on introducing significant change to the Admissions application. At the time the project was scoped there were a number of known issues with the Admissions application, inclusive of the obsolescence of the version of GRAILS the application was written in, the need to modularise and refactor the application, open tickets with support issues. Though known to the project team and business they were not considered necessary to resolve. Though the upgrade and modularisation was completed, the outstanding tickets were not scoped for inclusion in the project. However, as the project required regression testing it is almost certain that current known and unknown issues would be raised in testing. This then places the project in the position of apparently uncovering a range of "bugs' - which are in fact current issues. At this point a decision then needs to be made to fix or ignore. Some issues cannot be ignored as the inclusion of new functionality means a minor issue now becomes a critical issue. Effort spent on resolving these issues incurs a time, cost and opportunity spend. This pushes out the project timeline and costs and places the project team in an uncomfortable position. 

What is the SWOF?

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At the business case stage of a project a systems warrant of fitness needs to be carried out. The system - and this is inclusive of infrastructure, database engines, network, current test scripts, automated testing, etc. (not just code) - needs to be assessed to determine its state of readiness for change. Necessary steps to check
• Known issues captured in JIRA. Outstanding tickets that are require action i.e. to be fixed; need to be included within the project. Tickets which won't be fixed ideally need to be closed flagged as "Won't Fix".
• Current versions of the code base and libraries.
• Current state of the code. This may require a deeper dive and review of the time. Code refactoring and modularisation are effort and cost intensive. However if necessary needs to be stated.
• Versions of underlying infrastructure including physical and virtual servers, database engines and versions, state of backups, restores, disaster recovery plans. This could be quite comprehensive and a decision would be needed on how deep to go. However there may be serious underlying issues - such as obsolete and poorly database - which impede application performance.
• Current state of test scripts and automated testing
• Last known run of regression testing, coverage of regression testing i.e. 100% of application functionality and results of regression testing
• Last known run of performance testing
• Current state of technical and functional documentation

 Desired Outcome

.The outcome of the assessment should determine whether the project is technically feasible and should flow into the future stages of the project, particularly the design phases. There are significant economies to be achieved if technical debt tasks are combined with functional enhancements i.e. regression testing of a code upgrade as well as functional change as opposed to two separate regression tests.