8th Annual VTT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING SEMINAR - New Thinking - Better Software Engineering - Great Experience

Originally published at http://www.sysart.fi/news/64/58/8th-Annual-VTT-software-engineer-seminar/d,devblogi, please comment there.

Lean, transparency, global software development.... in the cloud.

VTT and leading companies challenge you to learn and discuss about productive ways of doing things in changing environment. Topics include innovation, security, Cloud technologies, lean approach towards efficiency and other software development methods and tools.

The general theme seemed to be transparency and openness in development and innovation. In the keynote, Elektrobits Jari Partanen talked a lot about transparency in the context of process improvement, saying that transparency is key enabler to identify what are the opportunities for improvement for lean and agile approaches - "Transparency attracts". He also emphasized that having a wiki is not enough for information sharing, there must be some activities like workshops and so on.

Another good point in the opening keynote, at least from my point of view, was the comment about how Elektrobit doesn't want to stress word Lean, they wan't to emphasize their "Way of Working", because it more attractive to all of the organizational entities. It is true that Lean, just like agile, is being considered as a thing that development does. But this leads easily into situation where process optimization is on the local level, when you should optimize the whole.

Transparency theme continued in the sessions which talked about innovation. Innovation should be open and transparent on all organizational levels and it should be customer oriented, but usually there isn't any communication channels between different organization levels and then the innovations from customers tend to disappear. So there should be an open, social system supporting innovation. Even though social is hype at the moment, in this context it is interesting. As lean methods say, the improvement ideas should come from the actual workers, and here they mean the support persons, developers and marketing people who will see what the customer wants and how the customer uses the product.

Rest of the sessions were about lean, distributed development, security and user experience. Some of these suffered a little bit from hype, as there was few times when the presenter said when talking about some basic software develepoment, almost as an afterthought, "in the cloud". That term is seriously overused and overloaded. It is funny when some people use cloud to describe how application can interact with each other and form mashups, and some people talk about technical characteristics, like provisioning, scaling, availability etc. But that seems to be how it works.

One session caught my interest just because it had a great name, "Flow-based software development on epic level". But the session was somewhat a disappointment, the main idea can be said in one sentence, "Global development queue of prioritized cross-product epics are assigned to teams eliminating product silos". The problem with this is the lack of domain knowledge; when every team works with every product, no one understands the domains. It might work if all products are on same domain, like in F-Secure, where the presenter, Arto Saari, was working, but I have my doubts. And F-Secure hasn't implemented this at full scale, yet.

Few one liners from different sessions:

• "EB doesn't want to stress word Lean they want to emphasize their "Way of working" - it is more and more attracting all the organizational entities" - Jari Partanen, Elektrobit
• "Transparency is key enabler to identify what are the opportunities for improvement for lean and agile approaches - "Transparency attracts"" -Jari Partanen, Elektrobut "
• Success is increasingly determined by the ability to embrace the potential of innovation ecosystems" - Timo Koivumäki, VTT

Ignorance: The ultimate expense

James M. Morgan, Jefrey K. Liker, The Toyota Product Development System, p.213:

Many companies view paying for employees to learn as an unnecessary cost. Anything that is not tactical or does not produce immediate, measurable results is "fluff, and those who endorse opposing view are not considered serious-minded, action-oriented business people. But the absence of deep technical understanding drives a "more is better" philosophy, which leads to more elaborate gauges, more reviews, more audits, more inspections, and more checkpoints (because it is always "safe" to check and check again).

And after few lines where they talk about different quality initiatives like ISO, Six Sigma:

On the surface, these quality initiatives demonstrate a "commitment to quality" and make people feel that they have accomplished something. In truth, however, they fail miserably in achieving those things that guide an intelligent and balanced approach to fostering quality in a PD process: the time, dedication, and hard work required for a deep technical understanding of that process.

First, I'd like to add documentation into those "more is better" things. Same goes with different certifications and process models.

All of those things are used when those who doesn't have deep technical understanding try to control development process. They try to enforce some "best practices" they've seen in some publications without understanding them correctly and just think that "we must do this because everyone does this". There's at least two problems with this:

1. If you only follow best practices, you're only doing what those who developed did few years a go.
2. "Best practice" might not be the best in your context.

Maybe the root cause for all of this is that we tend to be lazy and try to take shortcuts when building our own ways of working. But there is no shortcuts. Yes, you can and should follow what others are doing. But you should find out why and in what context they are doing those things.

Engineering management at Facebook

Yishan Wong has written a great article about engineering management at Facebook. You can read it at http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management.html.

Some quick thoughts about some of the major points

1. Hiring is number one
I couldn't agree more. This is one point which has come up on http://manager-tools.com/ podcasts. They say pretty much the same thing: every manager should constantly look for new hires in his/hers networks. One reasons is that you don't want to be in situation where you have to hire someone, which can happen when you get a new project. That forces you to just get best one from the available candidates, whether he/she is good enough. But just like Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good".

2. Let process be implemented by those who practice it
In Toyota Production System this is called "standardized work". But standardized doesn't mean standard. The process is constantly improved by its users, and standardization is used mainly for metrics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takt_time). It's funny how written word becomes a word of god so easily.

3. Promotion from within
One thing missing here is how external recruiting can effect to motivation. If there's a motivated and ambitious person in organization and he/she would like to move forward on his career, it's a pretty big hit to his/hers motivation if someone from outside gets that job he/she would've wanted.