Transforming Chaos to Clarity
Making Your Software Development Hum
Ron Lichty, Software Engineering Mgmt
RonLichty@sbcGlobal.net
SofTech
August 26, 2009
Mark Ginnebaugh, President
softech.org

Ron Lichty,
Software Engineering Management
SOFTWEST

Poll: Software Development
in Disarray?
• Who has seen chaos in a product group?
• Who has seen chaos in your current group?
• Who feels like your devt is running rough?
• Suffering from organizational knots?
• Anyone have a development organization
that doesn't feel chaotic right now?!

Define Success
• What are you trying to accomplish
• How do you know you're not
• How will you know when you get there
• Assess what’s working
• Assess the issues and the symptoms
– Every organization is unique

Chaos Isn’t All Bad
• Don’t eliminate it entirely
• Going offroad may seem chaotic
– Innovation can spring from chaos
• Look for the pings and the misfires
– Tune the engine, not the route
– Make your product engine hum
• whether you’re cruising the highway or off-road

Systems to Diagnose
• Requirements
• Roadmaps and Strategy
• Motivation and Urgency
• Your Team
• Coaching and Mentoring Your Managers
• Project Planning
• Technical Debt
• Communication
• Development Process

Optimize Your
Requirements Process
• GIGO
• Programmers:
– who has received an exceptional set of rqmts?
– what was the programming experience like?
– how did it differ from the usual?
– ever gotten to delivery only to find out there was
another db field desired?
• How good are your requirements?
• Do your requirements change?

How’s Your Roadmap?
• Why do you need a roadmap?
• In an Agile world, what’s it look like?
• How do you create one?
• What do you do with it?
• Why do you need a roadmap?

Develop Motivation and
Communicate Urgency
• How is developer motivation measured?
– Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint
• What motivates programmers?
– Are you communicating your reality?
– Are you communicating their impact?
– Are you enabling them to do their best work?

Assess Your Team
• Most problems are not people
– but some are
– Occasional problem employees
• You must act
• Marty Brounstein, Handling the Problem Employee
– Employees who need to be mentored into roles
• People problems start with bad hiring
– One bad hire can quickly destroy a well humming team

Get Coaching/Mentoring
for Your Engineering Managers
• How did we become engineering managers?
• What qualities differentiate:
– Engineers / Managers / Directors / VPs Eng?
• How do you grow the qualities you need?

Smart Project Planning
• Deliver demonstrable progress frequently
• Get the risky stuff done first
– the UI should always be high on the risk list
• Deliver the highest customer value first
• Be first / be ready to integrate / be early
• Don’t over-engineer

Get Out of Technical Debt
• What’s “technical debt”?
– Shabby, rundown areas of code
– Untested code / lack of automated tests
– Undocumented code
– Brittle design
– Difficult to maintain, change, extend
• Expensive to debug
• Result: interest accrues
• Solution?
– Pay down debt: Revisit, refactor, write tests, do TDD

Fix Interdepartmental Communication
• Build trust relationships
• Product Mgmt & Eng. Mgmt: collaboration
• Establish processes for your partners to fit
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Never succumb to “them vs. us”
• Avoid the “blame game”

Optimize Process
• Just about any process is better than no
process.
– Mark Ginnebaugh
– The exception: process for process’ sake
• I’m a fan of
– “Just-Enough Process”
– Agile
– baby steps

Systems to Diagnose
• Requirements
• Roadmaps and Strategy
• Motivation and Urgency
• Your Team
• Coaching and Mentoring Your Managers
• Project Planning
• Technical Debt
• Communication
• Development Process

Other Systems to Diagnosis
• There are lots of other systems
– Meetings
– Quality
• Development’s quality
• QA
• TDD
– UI
– Risk
– ...and a long list more

The Bottom Line
• Chaos is common
• It’s really a series of challenges
• It’s a series of improvement milestones
• Each of them can be transformed
– Likely each new hum will reveal the next ping
• Like peeling an onion or climbing a mountain

Q&A
Ron Lichty
RonLichty@sbcGlobal.net