Getting better at being wrong

Brian Marick writes how we should get better at being wrong:

"We should work smarter and harder at being wrong. We should get so good at being wrong that our predictive failings do no harm to us, our project, our employer, or our users."

The basic idea is that changes should become so easy that we can get rid of a lot of up-front design and specification work. Lack of up-front design will inevitably result in failures (being wrong), but that should not be too harmful.

I have been managing a project with two programmers and in this we have replaced up-front design with "just-in-time design". We are still working on the very first story and have only one table in our database schema. So far we have changed our mind with the database table twice resulting in changes to the code that the developers had already written. In both of these times I have felt bad... I have been thinking that this could have been avoided if I had been thinking this more carefully (designing it) before jumping into development. But do I have a reason to feel bad?

The programmers are not too experienced and, because of this, the changes triggered by table modification are not very easy for them. It takes time to change and then some trial and error to get it back in a working state again. The domain model entity class, Hibernate mapping and one Spring MVC controller needed to be changed. I know that for an experienced developer that is piece of cake! But what if the developers are not familiar with refactoring tools and are not familiar with the technology used (Hibernate and Spring in this case)? Is it necessary to have really experienced and good developers in order to succeed with an agile process? I know I have heard that claim before several times.

Coming back to Brian's note about getting good at being wrong. I think it applies to our case also. The team needs to get better at refactoring, unit testing, and it needs to learn to master the frameworks and tools. This is what it means to get better at being wrong in our case. So to me it looks like it is true that an agile process needs better programmers. But before that happens I guess our agile process is not so agile. After all, you cannot call agile if changes are slow.

Would more up-front design actually help us? With a detailed specification it might have been that only one schema change had been enough. So maybe there had been less rework. But, in my experience there is always some rework no matter how much you invest in careful specification and design before moving to implementation. I'm thinking that, even with a less experienced team, our process has been quite good. We have done some rework, yes, but I think we have saved time by growing the infrastructure and design while programming. Designing everything beforehand with computerized UML diagrams would have been slower and probably had missed the target.

Brian's blog entry can be found here.

Comments

[Zsolt]

On a technical note, Hibernate allows you to employ a quite manageable approach with automatic schema generation/update from your mapped classes. This is especially helpful when you are starting out with a new project and the db schema is not yet carved in stone. So whenever your container is cycled Hibernate will sync any changes to your model with the schema. Granted, it is not a perfect solution —Hibernate doesn't drop columns that become unneeded due to the removal of a property in your mapping— but I found it quite usable.

Once the domain model is stable enough, this Hibernate feature can be disabled and you can finetune the schema as needed.

The Hibernate 3.0.5 property that controls this behaviour is hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto with values update | create | create-drop

[Dave Nicolette]

We've used the same approach mentioned by Zsolt at our company, with good results. Anything that facilitates refactoring makes it easier to do just-in-time design and to be less worried that you might have forgotten something important at the outset.

[Artem]

>Would more up-front design actually help us?
> With a detailed specification it might have been that only one schema change had been enough.

Complete and frozen up-front design wouldn't be of a big help. You anyway would have to change something, so investing too much efforts would be useless waste of time.

However, some effort-investment would probably help. That's what the trial spikes and architects are for - to get rid of the most obvious wrong things fast.

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