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Martin Fowler: Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations

Tue, 09 Dec 2014 14:41:00 +0000

If you’re validating some data, you usually shouldn’t be using exceptions to signal validation failures. Here I describe how I’d refactor such code into using the Notification pattern.

Manoj Tharayil: Exploring RedCritter - website for Agile project mangement

Tue, 09 Dec 2014 06:19:00 +0000

I found redcritter as one of the apps under microsoft webmatrix. Searching for this software revealed on its own terms "RedCritter Tracker is ideal for software projects or other projects that require a "what's next" type of approach. It works for multiple teams or even individuals. RedCritter Tracker is the only project management service with badges, rewards, leaderboards and real-time Twitter-style feeds" Webmatrix gives me an option to publish it from my local computer. The second option is to publish it from the cloud. The local setup The installation was a breeze. I am creating my first account. Email: manoj.tharayil@gmail.com Username in gmail. Uploading to an azure website, does not seem to be complicated. The azure website was created easily. http://manojagile.azurewebsites.net/ This software gives me rights to add only three users in the free version. This is nota good idea!! Time to move on to something else!!

Martin Fowler: Garmin Oregon 600

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:28:00 +0000

I recently bought a Garmin Oregon 600 handheld satnav (GPS) and took it on a vacation, hiking in Switzerland. I find it fun to use, a worthwhile upgrade on my earlier Garmin 60 CSx. It has a bright, clear screen, good battery life, and you can easily find decent open-source topo maps to put on it.

more…

Patrick Kua : A Tech Lead Paradox: Technical Needs vs Business Needs

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 15:11:21 +0000

Agile Manifesto signatory Jim Highsmith talks about riding paradoxes in his approach to Adaptive Leadership.

A leader will find themselves choosing between two solutions or two situations that compete against each other. A leader successfully “rides the paradox” when they adopt an “AND” mindset, instead of an “OR” mindset. Instead of choosing one solution over another, they find a way to satisfy both situations, even though they contradict one another.

A common Tech Lead paradox is the case of Technical Needs versus Business Needs.

The case for Technical Needs

Before cloud services were available on the Internet, most companies would invest in hardware to run their services. The work to setup and configure machines was easier for non-technical stakeholders to see because of its physical aspect. Today software requires even more software and non-physical services that need configuring, testing and releasing. Much more of it is virtual.

Practices such as Continuous Delivery do not come without some overhead, although it provides an invaluable business capability. All of these “internally-facing” technical requirements demand time from the software delivery team.

The case for Business Needs

A lot of software is written for businesses, whose overall goal is to make money. A business that does not evolve their business offerings will lose out to competitors or to the ever-changing consumer marketplace. This means a business wants to always experiment with their existing services, or provide new services to keep their existing customer base, or to attract new customers.

This pressure to modify, or introduce new services demand either software support, or new software to be developed.

The conflict

A business will always put pressure on a development team to produce as much software as possible. At the same time, effective delivery of software is not possible without addressing some level of technical needs – such as technical debt, deployment pipelines, or automated test suites.

Time spent on technical needs is expected to improve developer effectiveness, but this is often hard to measure and prove to outside stakeholders. An endless amount of time can always be spent tweaking, optimising and improving technical infrastructure and tools. What starts off as “just an afternoon” turns into a week, or a month and business features are put on hold as a result. If this happens too long, the business might miss agreed external deadlines for certain features and thus lose customers, or money.

What does a Tech Lead do?

Champion time for Technical Needs

A Tech Lead champions for time to spend on Technical Needs by being part of the prioritisation process. They ensure that enough work is delivered, or finds solutions to business problems that minimise the amount of software that needs writing. They ensure the team is not over-loaded with delivering new features and changes and finds small slices to work on technical needs that will provide a good benefit.

Explain the business benefit of each Technical Need

A team can spend an endless amount of time investigating, configuring and supporting their technical infrastructure. A Tech Lead will have support from non-technical stakeholders if they understand what benefits they bring. The successful Tech Lead can explain not just what the team is working on, but also why and who else benefits.

Some typical business benefits include: reducing the amount of repetitive work, improving the quality (by minimising the chance of human error), or to prove out a business opportunity.

The Tech Lead builds trust with non-technical people by highlighting benefits on Technical Needs and also demonstrating if they reach those benefits.

Work on high impact items first

A list of Technical Needs will often be endless, so a Tech Lead will work to prioritise the list, culling items that no longer make sense, or pulling work items forward that may have an immediate and significant effect.

Keep a balance

The Tech Lead is mindful that the team cannot work on Technical Needs alone, and watches to ensure a good balance is met.

Maximise the use of “quiet” periods

Sometimes a development team will outpace the ability for a business to prioritise, “What’s next?” You might recognise these periods when a Product Owner has met all their objectives, or they are working on clarifying the next set. The Tech Lead uses these “quiet periods” as an opportunity for their development team to work on infrastructure, or tasks that have always been deprioritised.

These are often good periods for a team to run a “Hack Day” or for the team to work on small ideas they have had themselves that provide a good benefit.

If you liked this article, you will be interested in “Talking with Tech Leads,” a book that shares real life experiences from over 35 Tech Leads around the world. Now available on Leanpub.

Martin Fowler: photostream 79

Sun, 07 Dec 2014 15:57:00 +0000

Panchgani, India

Vinod Kumaar Ramakrishnan: Pull request is the new hammer

Sun, 07 Dec 2014 06:03:32 +0000

Building software is not an engineering problem, it is a communication problem between engineers and business. Agile Manifesto‘s first and foremost point is about the individuals and interactions. It is imperative that the feedback loop should be as short as possible to reduce the cost of late rework. Each team in an organization would be unique in terms of composition, their communication and means of interaction will be fine tuned for that particular group. The teams should be guided through non negotiable philosophies rather than intricate set of policies, restrictions and tools.

Cliche – ‘Any code can be understood by machines, code should be written such a way that it should be readable by humans’

Code is read many times more than it is written, so it is everyone’s desire to keep the code base very neat to adhere to good coding standards. One way of ensuring this is to do a code review. With Git the collaboration got easier that you ask anyone to clone your repo, do some work and contribute back through a pull request. Pull request is the only way of contributing code to a project which is otherwise a closed read only repository. The owner reviews the pull requests and decides what goes into his/her repo. The feedback cycle in this manner is too slow but works well for social coding.

Cliche – ‘If you have a hammer then all your problems look like nails’

It is becoming increasingly difficult to gather the right requirements, translate them quickly into working software and that too in an efficient manner. It is necessary for us to be able to roll up information from the environment and translate that into the software. To help the evolution we should be able to keep the feedback loop as small as possible so that it is very easy to add the right functionalities at a good pace. I happened to read a nice writeup on the importance of rolling up information from the environment. Many people fail to visualize what their intent is in selecting a tool in the first place, pull requests work very well in controlling what goes into someone’s personal project. It will also be successful in team setups, but it comes with a cost. The cost is the speed of evolution, as it will take longer and longer to sync the commits when the codebase grows.

Cliche – ‘Give a carpenter a latest power drill instead of a hammer, he will use it as a hammer’

In the SOA context it is a double whammy where there are many micro repos and pull requests are used to control the quality of the code. Choice of tools and technologies are always like rock, paper & scissors; what works in one context will not work in the other. Choose the right one considering the intent and moving targets in all dimensions in the system, change the approach if it does not fit in or the situation has changed.

Jiwei Zhu: As Always

Sat, 06 Dec 2014 16:00:26 +0000

祸福旦兮不可知，美梦不可负。
芳心未暮，好言如初。

多谢惠顾。

Sahana Chattopadhyay: Instructional Design in the VUCA World

Sat, 06 Dec 2014 15:37:00 +0000

The current trends of technology, globalization, shifting demographics and a connected globe clearly portend a dramatically changing world. We are feeling the impact in all spheres of our lives -- professional, personal and private. In my last post, I took a macro-view of the changing landscape of work and learning. In this post, I am trying to dig a little deeper and take a micro-view to see how these changes impact us as individuals and as a part of L&D.

L&D team's work has become more complex and challenging. The L&D needs to comprise some of the following roles to cater to the changing needs of the future of work:

Instructional Designer/Learning Designer-someone who will do needs analysis, design learning in line with adult learning principles, structure learning events for different delivery channels, and so on
Learning Delivery-tasks like facilitation / presentation of learning events, engaging learners, making best use of different media
Learning Management-tasks include programme / project management, learning evaluation, stakeholder management, supplier management
Community Manager
Performance Consultant
Leadership Development (Coaching Skills)-coaching and developing leaders is going to be of significant importance in this era of rapid change and ambiguity
Technology Enabler-someone who explores new technologies with an eye on how it can be used to enable learning at an organizational and personal level
Business and Data Analyst-maybe the same person or two different people, this role essentially requires someone to see the patterns and trends being revealed by the data captured (via LMS, through feedback, interaction of ESNs, queries raised)
Social and Informal Learning Evangelist and Guide
Organizational Development Expert

It is not necessary for an individual to play a single role. On the contrary, it is to the advantage of the individual, the team and the organization if people are poly-skilled in different aspects as per inclination and requirement. Some of these roles have existed for years (the ones in bold). Some are yet to become recognized roles. I have highlighted the ones that have been a part of L&D from times of greater stability and lesser complexity. However, even those roles can no longer function the way they used to. The roles need to be revisited and explored keeping in mind the shifting paradigms, their impact on workplace learning, and the place of L&D in the organization. It's critical for a CLO to have an eye on the changing landscape and enable new skill sets within the t

Historically, L&D has been vested with the responsibility of keeping skills and knowledge of the workforce updated based on:

Inputs from managers
Current business requirements
Skill-gap analysis

Most of the training programs were designed around "best practices" and explicit know-how gathered over the years. Training design, therefore, was not only top down but also past focused drawing insights from what worked in the past, getting expert inputs built in, and putting the content together in a linear and logical flow. This would then be packaged (ILT/elearning/blended learning) and delivered to the workforce in need of the said training. Context, conversation and collaboration weren't given much thought. These continued to happen but outside of the purview of the formal training.

With the advent of big shifts and disruptive technology in the shape of Social, Mobile Computing, Cloud Computing and Big Data, all the old notions of work are falling apart. I wrote about L&D's Role in the VUCA World some time back. Here, I am narrowing my focus to the role of Instructional Design in the VUCA world.

There have been paradigm shifts in what drives workplace learning today. And these in turn influence the role of instructional designers. Instructional design skills have existed as long as formal learning existed – from the designing of school curriculum to e-learning modules. However, it has changed in some very fundamental ways: In the past, instructional design presumed stable content and a fixed set of skills and knowledge. Design was linear. Children or adults – it was assumed that everyone had a set of skill and knowledge gaps that training programs could resolve. Today, that stability has been snatched away. We cannot design training programs for skills that are emergent and still unknown. Today, instructional design needs to be future focused. ID’s need to leverage existing and emergent power of technology that are inherently social and mobile.

The table below summarizes the key shifts that impact how we design learning experiences today:

All of these together have fostered deep rifts in how we work and learn. As Instructional Designers, these are critical paradigms we have to consider when designing the learning experience in our organizations. In the infographic, Futureproof Your Careers shared by Jane Hart, we can see the top 10 skills that will increasingly be required by all. Instructional design thinking must not only keep the skills in mind but also be cognizant of the forces of Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo) that will drive user behaviour.

Each of these forces have a transformational effect on our behaviour. Learning design must take these new usage patterns into account. Some of the emerging behaviours range from:

A preference to view a short 2 minute video to know about a something over reading a 2 page PDF
A predilection for images over text - with a smartphone at their fingertips, today's users prefer to share experiences via real-time video and images rather than long descriptive texts. Apps like WhatsApp makes it seamless to share.
An inclination towards accessing one's network for answers to queries over taking a formal course
A just-in-time, "let's get the problem solved attitude" over "let's learn in case we need it"
An expectation of finding courses, programs and access to their learning communities on their personal devices

These shifts have slowly but surely crept up on us one at a time. And now their cumulative effect is being felt in all spheres. A summary of how these paradigm shifts may impact the work and skills required of instructional designers are given in the table below.

One of the implications of the shift is that instructional designers can no longer think about designing only formal training programs that will go on the LMS. They have to think of the entire spectrum and see it holistically. Jane Hart's Workplace Learning Continuum illustrates the learning spectrum very effectively. Instructional designers need to take both ends of the continuum into consideration and leave the choice of access to users.

Depending on the need of the hour, users can access any end of the spectrum -- taking full-fledged training programs if they feel the need, or connecting and collaborating on the enterprise social network to solve their work-related challenges. The choice is theirs to make.

Since we are so used to thinking of formally designed, LMS-driven learning programs, we flounder when it comes to thinking about Learning Ecosystem design. Based on the framework above, I have tried to put together a visual representation of what such an ecosystem could be.

The ecosystem brings the offline and online world together. An instructional designer must think of all modalities of learning when design thinking.

Some questions to ask could be:

Are groups of users co-located? If yes, think of including some offline activities like Lunch & Learns, Hangout Sessions, and so on to strengthen informal & peer-to-peer learning.
Is expertise distributed? Have an Ask the Expert section. Anyone could be an expert on any topic; in this manner, the organizational tacit knowledge will get captured, interesting questions will surface, and the value of weak ties will be explored. Learning from the edge will come to the center.
Do users work out of different locations, including home, hubs, etc? If yes, inculcate the practice of narrating one's work.
Is the churn in workforce high? If yes, have a robust online + offline on-boarding program which includes adding users to relevant communities, an online buddy/mentor, a clearly defined roadmap based on their current role.
Does the workforce consist of different generations working together? Add some scope for mentoring and reverse mentoring. If the culture of the workplace is conducive, pairing individuals of different generations could be beneficial although it is important to keep in mind that stereotyping generational characteristics can be detrimental.

None of these are likely to happen overnight. Nor are they one-time activities. Putting in place a learning ecosystem where individuals engage as self-managed learners require constant vigilance, robust design thinking, application of sound community management principles and a strong change management focus. Some of the core tasks are illustrated in the diagram below.

Thus, an instructional designer today is required to not only understand the fundamentals of good instructional design but must also expand his/her skill sets to include an understanding of community management, the spectrum of learning from formal to informal, the impact of social, local and mobile on user behaviour, the need to equip users with self-managed learning skills. The latter is increasingly critical as we encounter unique challenges and requirements that call for emergent skills. No one can be "trained" for emergent skills. But the ecosystem can be designed to facilitate continuous learning, collaboration and communication.

Nishant Verma: I am lucky to have found Co-founders

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:37:00 +0000

Friends read my new post on "I am lucky to have found Co-founders". Link here

Excerpt from the post below:

Most of us who think of starting their own company are generally very confident. Confident of taking the plunge, confident of the idea we have, confident of how the execution should be, confident about what to do when things might not work out.

When I thought about why I co-founded a company (TestVagrant Technologies) with two other folks, it was an interesting thought process which revealed quite a lot about my thought process. So when I actually look back, this whole idea was there from quite a long time (almost 3 years). All three of us used to work together in the same company so we had that advantage of knowing each and experiencing what it feels like working with them. Also there were instances where their approach and problem solving skills highly impressed me.

Ola Bini: Separate blog about Privacy, Anonymity and Cryptography

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 20:29:13 +0000

It’s been a long while. But I have been writing a little bit during 2014 as well. I decided to switch venue a bit, once my writing became almost exclusively about privacy, anonymity and cryptography. Since my day-to-day job has been research in these areas for the last 2 years, it has become natural to write about what I think on these subjects.

So, if you are interested in following these kind of thoughts, please follow along at https://reap.ec.