Software People Inspiring

Its Not How Fast we Deliver, It's How Fast We Learn

 

Just a little thought experiment for ya.

Split the room into 2 teams. (Yes, this is an imaginary room, and imaginary teams. But the splitting's real, alright?)

Both teams have to guess a 4-digit number.

Team A must guess all 4-digits at once. If they guess wrong, you tell them "wrong". And then it's Team B's turn.

Team B must guess one digit at a time. They guess the first digit. If they guess wrong, you tell them "wrong" and then it's Team A's turn again.

How many guesses might Team A need? It could be as many as 10,000.

Team B might have to make 40 guesses - 10 for each digit.

If we opened a book on this game, which team would you bet on?

Team B, obviously. They have odds of 250:1 of being the winner.

Okay. So let's speed things up a bit for Team A. For every guess you allow Team B, Team A gets 10 guesses.

So who would you bet on now?

Still Team B. They have 25:1 odds of being the winner, even though Team A delivers guesses at 10 times the velocity.

You can probably see where I'm going here.

In an iterative process like software development, over time what defines winners and losers is not how fast teams deliver features. It's how fast they learn about what works and what doesn't for their businesses.

Delivering less in each cycle actually helps them to learn faster. In software development, most of the value comes from acting on customer/user/market feedback.

Every feature we're asked to deliver is at best a guess. And we can cram as many guesses as we like into each cycle of delivery, but our productivity is not defined by this. It's defined by how readily we can act on the feedback we get with each delivery. The more frequent the feedback, and the longer we can sustain our ability to act on feedback, the sooner we will arrive at the real value in what we're creating.

In a market like Video-On-Demand, we can be sure of one thing. Whatever strategies work today, they will probably be irrelevant tomorrow. The challenge of products like YouTube, iPlayer and Canvas is in recognising that continuous, sustained evolution in years to come is what will define the market leaders, not fast delivery to gain market share in the short term.

Software development's a marathon. You cannot break a 26-mile marathon down into a sequence of 100m sprints. You run the inevitable risk of sacrificing the race just so you can have the fleeting honour of being in first place after the first few hundred metres.

Technical debt is a useful analogy, but I find lactic acid much more compelling. If you start a marathon at a sprint, lactic acid builds up faster in your muscles and you'll very soon find it impossible to go on.

If you "sprint" to deliver code, the crap builds up faster, too. I've seen so many software-intensive businesses rush at the start to take an early lead, only to end up being carried off on a stretcher a year or two later while their more disciplined competitors slowly but surely creep ahead and end up in front.

I'm pretty sure the bright young things who are tasked with consulting for the government on these issues, and the whole Digital Economy thingummyjig here in the UK, have completely overlooked this. I don't see it mentioned in any of their literature, and as a software development coach working in this space, I'm not aware of any software developers being consulted about it.

Software craftsmanship is one of the defining factors in the long-term success of digital businesses (as well as traditional businesses who rely on software, which is pretty much every major UK company these days).

I don't dare to imagine that those charged with shaping the UK's digital strategy will even begin to comprehend how important clean code is in the overall equation. But the logic and reality is inescapable. If code is hard to change, it cannot easily evolve. And if software cannot easily evolve, our digital economy could end up being carried off on a stretcher in the not-too-distant future with crippling muscle cramps and exhaustion.

We humble, voiceless and invisible code monkeys are actually a critical limiting factor on the fortunes of "Digital Britain", every bit as much as the people who built the ships and railways and bridges were for "Steam Britain".

I do not expect the government to acknowledge this. Nor Martha Lane Fox or Tim Berners-Lee. I do not expect building the UK's software development capability will ever be anything more than a footnote at best in the digital strategy (right now, it's not even that).

So I guess it's down to us. We can lead by example. Hopefully if enough of us show the way and commit ourselves to the goal of continuous delivery of clean, reliable code, and to being ready, willing and able to adapt our code based on feedback, the people who pay us will get the opportunities to learn and evolve their products and services fast enough to keep pace with the competition.

Chances are nobody's going to ask us to do it. And we probably won't get paid more if we do it. Likely as not, they won't even thank us.

But deep down, we care, and that's why we know it's the right thing to do.

This Week I Have Been Mostly Saving Bletchley Park

 

Well, what a week it's been.

The weekend had me running a Test-driven Development master class, which seems to have been a success. Many of those who attended are now booked on future courses, so I guess that's the best measure of customer satisfaction I can get.

(Don't forget, there's another TDD master class on July 17-18, with a couple of places still available, and a refactoring master class the following week.)

Then on Tuesday I was at Bletchley Park with the legendary Johnny Ball (a very nice man and a force of nature) to launch the Boffoonery digital download, which I've been busy promoting on Twitter, Facebook and around and about the countryside ever since. It's currently #5 in the iTunes comedy albums chart, which is fantastic. But with such a great line-up, and produced and directed by such talented people (not including myself), maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. A tweet from Stephen Fry helped put a good wind behind our sails on Tuesday, but hundreds more of you have been very supportive with your tweets

At £8 for 63 minutes of comedy gold, it's a bargain in of itself. And for every download, Bletchley Park gets 5 quid, and potentially another 20 quid of lottery funding. So every download makes a difference.

All in all, a very tiring, but equally satisfying, week.

With So Many More Cameras Looking, Shouldn't We Have Proof Of Flying Saucers By Now?

 

Here's one for any physics PhDs with time on their hands.

If you watch the documentary on the Blu Ray extras for Close Encounters, Steven Spielberg makes a good argument for why he stopped believing in flying saucers. In the 21st century, high quality still and video cameras are so ubiquitous that surely by now someone would have captured the definitive image of an alien spacecraft if they were regularly visiting us. The fact that all we seem to get is shaky, pixellated footage of ballons, birds, planes and other convential objects, along with very obvious CGI fakes (and some sophisticated and less obvious fakes, as the technology and now-how becomes more commonplace), suggests we're not being visited. Certainly, not often.

But this is all a bit handwavy. Someone should be able to crunch some numbers on this. There could be figures out there for camera ownership (including mobile phones and so on), right? And camera "reach", in terms of resolution, optical zoom, light sensitivity and so on.

Match that against reported UFO sightings in certain areas (e.g., United States, UK) and see how many more pictures and videos we should expect to be getting compared to, say, 1960 in the same geographical areas. If UFO reports are roughly the same in number this decade as they were in the 60's, for the sake or argument, but 10 times as many people are carrying cameras that are at least as good as a handheld consumer camera from the 60's, should we not expect 10 times as many decent UFO pictures in the same elapsed time? And if cameras are better today - higher quality images with bigger resolutions, better zooms, wider lenses and do so on, then should we not be able to estimate how much clearer the UFOs in the pictures ought to be?

It should be possible to estimate our increased likelihood of getting that photo or video of a UFO that everyone's been waiting for, assuming they're real, of course.

Join My UK Institute of Software Development. Or Don't. Whatever.

 

Greetings, puny earthling.

I have been appointed director of a brand new Institute of Software Development. Just now. By me. About 30 seconds after I wrote "Institute of Software Development" on a scrap of paper and thought "yes, that sounds suitably pompous".

It is, of course, my childish response to today's announcements by Gordon "Soon To Be Ex-Prime Minister" Brown made in a speech about so-called Digital Britain. It's all the usual vendor-driven, hype-oriented bullshit we're used to from politicians - especially when they're talking about anything to do with computers, because that, to them, is essentially magic beans and giant beanstalks territory. Mentions of "semantic web" (like the current web, only semantic, see) and "apps" and "digital content" and all the stuff people who pay someone to print off their email and read it out loud to them talk about.

He paints a picture of Digital Britain - empowered digital citizens connected by ultra-fast broadband to super-duper-whiz-bang-single-sign-on-will-even-make-the-tea-for-you online government services, and of empowered digital content creators (you may know them as "wankers with iPhones") leading the world in the creation of eye-popping visuals and aurals and very probably anals the likes of which none of us can frankly be bothered to imagine.

It all sounds great. Apart from the bit that seems to have been read directly from some vendor's latest brochure. Which it very probably was. But there's just one teensy-weensy little flaw in the grand plan. Just who in the Sam Hill is going to write all the software that will power Digital Britain?

Mr Brown claims that 250,000 new IT jobs will be created by his strategy, but that's a lot of skilled, talented professionals to conjure up in just a few years. Most importantly, where will all the new programmers come from? These people would have to be in schools and universities right now, as we speak, studying computer science, software engineering or other relevant disciplines. And they most definitely are not. Not in those numbers. Intake is down. And the quality of entrants into the profession is gradually eroding year on year.

The fact is, we're already scraping the bottom of the barrel. The dotcom bubble sucked in tens of thousands of wannabe programmers as share prices went stratospheric and anyone who could spell "A.S.P." was in with a shot at a career as a "web developer" (like a real software developer, only without the programming ability - which was seen as optional back then). After the bubble burst we found our talent pool chronically watered down with this low-quality dotcom intake - so much so that it could probably have been described as homeopathic. And any rational, educated scientist will tell you that homeopathy doesn't deliver.

It's bad enough today, when 9 out of every 10 developers you meet are frankly not up to the job and 9 out of 10 projects are consequently a nightmare for all involved. Another fairytale bubble could make that 99 out of 100 if the strategy doesn't make building the UK's software development capability it's number one priority. No good new programmers, no good new software. No good new software, no Digital Britain. It's really that simple.

And from the speech Mr Brown gave today and the Digital Britain report itself, it's apparant that not only isn't this a priority, it's not even worth a mention. I shouldn't be surprised. People who actually write software for a living are not represented in the priveleged circle of advisors the government has turned to to help shape the strategy. Instead, the report was shaped by academics, dotcom entrepreneurs, professional services companies, software vendors (not British ones, I should add) and more bloody celebrities.

Us codemonkeys are voiceless backroom boys (and gals, of course) in all of this. Just like we are in our own businesses. In our own IT departments. In our own teams. There's a clear pecking order from business leaders down through IT managers and project managers, past business analysts and architects and finally, right at the very bottom of the pile, the people who actually make software happen.

Which is entirely unnacceptable. If this was a strategy about Law in 2020, or the Future of Medicine, you could be damned sure that practicing lawyers and medical clinicians would be involved in the highest level discussions.

When I read Mr Brown's speech, I see hundreds, possibly thousands, of software projects being inadvertantly green-lighted. Potentially hundreds of millions of lines of code that will have to be written, tested, deployed, rewritten (several times) and adapted in the next ten years here in the UK. This truly dwarfs the economics of the online semantic social wotsisnames and digital content iThingy doodahs the government and their cohorts are salivating over, and they seem totally blind to it.

Blind, too, to the paradox they're defining here. As less and less people show an interest in learning how to tie their own shoelaces, let alone program a computer, we have a 10-year strategy that requires an unprecedented construction effort to create the critical software infrastructure that will power this digital revolution.

A programmer would not be blind to this, and many have tried to make their voices heard. But the government is not listening. Our existing institutions, like the BCS, are weak and ineffectual in such matters, and arguably are too widely-focused to speak specifically for people who write code.

We are not important. We are not famous academics (y'know, who've written books and been on telly and everything). We are not celebrated dotcom entrepreneurs. We are not Stephen Fry. (Love him though I definitely do). We have no voice in all of this, even though it's really going to be down to us at the end of the day to make it happen. As it always is when there's new software involved. We are the hard place to Mr Brown's digital rock. We must find a voice and make ourselves heard. We must do, because there is no "try".

So, in a petulant frenzy ("this is a petulant frenzy, I'm petulant and I'm having a frenzy" - bonus points to anyone who can identify the reference) I have literally just now formed my own Institute of Software Development so that when I write stinky missives to Number 10 about all of this I can put "Director, Institute of Software Development" on the letterhead and then maybe Gordon will think I'm as credible a source of guidance on these matters as Bono, Lorraine Kelly, Mr Kipling, Scooby Doo and any other celebs he's sought technology advice from recently.

Right now we only have one member. But you are very welcome to join. Membership is free to anyone who writes (or has written) code for a living. There is no newsletter and every year you won't get to vote on anything. You can put MISD after your name, if you think it will help. You know where to send the application. Usual address.

And an institute needs distinguished fellows, and perhaps just one or two celebs, of course. I have just taken a vote from the board of directors (me), and am delighted to announce the following fellowships:

John Daniels
Steve Freeman
Alan Cameron Wills
Steve Cook
C A O Hoare
Ivan Moore
Martin Fowler
Michael Winner
Bono

They don't get a say in it, of course. We have very strict rules about that sort of thing.

Message ends.

Boffoonery On BBC Radio 5 Live

 

Those of you who can access the BBC iPlayer for radio (is that UK only, I don't know) might be interested in a piece buried in the late night schedules of Radio 5 Live about Boffoonery and Bletchley Park, recorded at the theatre with interviews from myself, Sue Black and the BBC's own Bill Thompson.

It starts at about 2:13:39.

The Big Post-Show Boffoonery Blog Post

 

While I recover from Boffoonery! on Tuesday night, I thought I'd settle down with a nice cup of hot cocoa and write The Big Post-Show Boffoonery Blog Post.



First thing's first: how did it go?

Well, judging by the audience reactions I could hear over the tannoy backstage, and by the stream of Twitter updates that started almost as soon as the curtain went up at 7.30pm, it went down really rather well. Better than we expected. Better than we could have hoped, actually.

There were plenty of big laughs, rapturous applause and a fair amount of enthusiastic cheering. This wasn't nervous laughter or polite applause. People seemed to find it genuinely very funny. And consistently funny throughout a packed and fast-paced two hours.

These are just a few choice quotes from people's Twitter streams afterwards:

"An unexpected appearance from @DaveGorman made last night at #Boffoonery unbelievably amazing! A great show!"

"Absolutely top evening at #boffoonery last night. Was in the second row. If there's another one I'll be there. Thanks 4 laughs."

"Absolutely loved #Boffoonery last night... Many thanks to @bobbyllew @robinince @herring1967 @DaveGorman for the laughs!"

"had a fantastic time last night! Will be blogging about it later on @ITPRO"

"Huzzah! to all involved with @boffoonery (and/or #boffoonery ), brilliant evening and sounds most successful for #bpark"

"Boffoonery -excellent last night ! All good comedy but star for me was Robin Ince -had me in tears in good way :)"

"Simon Singh & Johnny Ball and I saw them (and lots of others) live last night at #Boffoonery (which was a great show)"

"Very much enjoyed @robinince and company at Boffoonery last night. Congrats to all who put it on #boffoonery"

"Had such fun at #boffoonery last night for #bpark. Johnny Ball, what a legend. @stephenfry back in the closet ;-) Well done to all"

"@boffoonery Was such a good night. Good laugh & I will def be looking to visit #bpark in the near future"

...and so on.



It wasn't just the audience who appeared to be having a good time, though. The performers who so generously gave their time to help Bletchley Park seemed to get a kick out of it, too. This is partly because the show - in terms of the scripts, the direction, the stage production, sound, sets, costumes etc - was of a much higher quality than charity gigs tend to be. And great performers enjoy doing good work just as much as great programmers enjoy working on great software.

But it was also because the audience was very smart. Richard Herring, who many believe is one of the best comedians working in Britain at the moment, said on his blog that it was one of the smartest audiences he'd ever played to.



And with people like Dr Sue Black, Ivan Moore, Mike Hill, Peter Camfield, Alan Cameron Wills, Antony Marcano, Kerry Jones and the BBC's Bill Thompson (I love his blog, and he's a thoroughly nice chap, as it turns out) among the throng that's not surprising. This was a VERY smart audience for a comedy gig. We might even have set some kind of record for the highest average IQ of a West End theatre audience ever. Next year we'll get MENSA in to poll everyone as they collect their tickets :-)

So what was the final reckoning? Well, there's still a lot of bean-counting to be done so it may be a few weeks before we know exactly what the profit is. But, if we stayed on budget, and there are good indications that we managed to do that, then it could be in the region of £7-8,000. Which is a profit of about 40% - unheard of for a show like this, I'm reliably informed. It won't change their world overnight, but I know the Bletchley Park Trust will be able to put that money to very good use.

On top of that, the raffle (first prize was a ZX Spectrum signed by Sir Clive Sinclair himself - listen to Sir Clive discussing it on Audio.boo) raised another £1,140.

The show was recorded by a very professional sound engineer and his team, and if all goes to plan, you'll be able to download highlights from iTunes or buy it on CD from the Bletchley Park Trust for about a fiver before the year's out. We hope it will raise a few thousand pounds extra, and it will also let all of you who couldn't get to London or who couldn't get tickets to share in the fun and help BP into the bargain.

So who were our "boffoons"?


Photography by Clive Flint, except Stephen Fry by Johnny Boylan

We were so very lucky to get such an impressive line-up. Pretty much everyone we asked said "yes" and was so generous with their time.

The talent on display behind the scenes was equally impressive.

Comedy writer James Cary had the original idea to do a comedy show to help Bletchley Park and has been actively steering the production since we first met in a coffee shop way back in March. James pulled out all the stops to deliver scripts that were of a quality above and beyond the call of duty. He's a very busy man writing and script-editing for TV and radio, and it's fantastically nice of him to literally give away top material like this.

The show was brilliantly directed by veteran comedy producer David Tyler of Pozzitive Television, who is also a very nice man and probably has a million other things to do at the moment, so we're so very grateful that he put his heart and soul into delivering a tight, fast-paced and very funny show. Several of our boffoons remarked on how impressed they were with his direction, and they should know!

The whole thing was expertly held together by our stage producer, Bethan Richards, also from Pozzitive. I was mightily impressed. I think we all were. Beth played the pivotal role in creating a high-class show under enormously tight budget and time constraints. If she had been one of the Wachowski brothers, The Matrix Revolutions would have cost under $100 and looked twice as good, I'm sure. Someone should put her in charge of Connecting For Health.

Stage Manager Helen Morant did a truly fantastic job making sure everybody and everything was exactly where they/it needed to be. The show pretty much went without a hitch, and with very limited rehearsal time.

We were ably supported by experienced theatre professional Hugh de la Bedoyere as our general manager, who provided desperately needed advice and due diligence to compensate for my frightening lack of experience in producing a stage show. We could have walked into some real gotchas without Hugh's input.

Authentic period costumes were very generously loaned to us by Allied Assortments, who a few of you may have seen putting on a 1940's fashion show at Bletchley Park in September. Being able to dress our performers in period garb really added to the atmosphere, and made for some great photo opprtunities, too. We simply could not have afforded to make or hire costumes that would look that good, so we're deeply grateful.

A big thank you, too, to photographer Clive Flint, who stepped in at very short notice and did such a marvellous job of capturing the event.

We're massively grateful to Simon Baker and Gus Power from commutineer.com, without whose generous sponsorship we might even have made a loss. They're two really nice guys, and damn fine software developers, and I was so pleased to have such cool backers for the show.

So what next?

Well, keep an eye out for news about the audio download here, on www.boffoonery.com and on Twitter (@boffoonery), as well as potential updates on a possible "Boffoonery 2.0".

Supercrush by Devin Townsend...

 

...is now officially my favourite song. We all have that list of human beings that we're desperately glad we discovered. Mine includes people like Carl Sagan, Roger Penrose, Frank Zappa, Maurice Ravel, Douglas Adams, Tom Baker (kind of hard to miss if you were born in Cheshire in the seventies) and now the truly gobsmacking Devin Townsend. His new album, Addicted, is in shops on Nov 17th.

Be First To Hear When Boffoonery! Audio Download Is Available

 

For those of you who can't make it to The Bloomsbury Theatre on Nov 3rd for Boffoonery!, as well as those of you who would like a momento of the evening, plans are afoot to record highlights of the show in glorious digital stereo.

The audio recording of Boffoonery! would be available for download from sites like iTunes in exchange for a small donation to Bletchley Park of five english pounds.

We're not exactly sure when the recording would be ready for downloading, but folk have already been asking. If you'd like us to drop you a line when the download's available, send us your email address using the form below (which we will protect with our very lives in true Bletchley Park style, I assure you!)

If you would like to be informed when the audio recording of Boffoonery! is available for download from iTunes, please enter your email address below and click "submit".
Email Address

Derren Brown's Lottery Trick - Damp Squib

 

This week's "big event" on Channel 4 was very disappointing. In a closed studio with high secuirty and no live audience (for security reasons, he claims), psychological illusionist Derren Brown appears to predict all 6 winning lottery numbers in advance.

This whole trick plays into the inherent irrationalism of most people who play the lottery. There is a 14 million-to-one chance that he actually predicted the 6 numbers in advance. And it's highly unlikely that he somehow managed to fix the draw, too.



So how did he do it? Well, I actually think it's very, very simple. The trick itself was a camera trick as old as the moving image itself: split screen. We see a single camera view throughout the entire sequence - even though we're told there are two cameramen there. A locked off camera for 7 minutes and no cuts is very, very rare to see on live TV these days. For the duration of the illusion, the screen has Derren's selection of predicted numbers on a plinth one one side of the screen and himself with a TV showing the live lottery broadcast from the BBC on the other side. He only briefly moves over to where the plinth is at the start and then some time after the live draw. It's perfectly possible, indeed highly likely, that when he moved back to where the TV was placed, the image was then split at that point to show the plinth recorded earlier, masking any magician's assistant who might have come in and replaced the selection of numbers moments AFTER the draw.

"Oh, but you can see the camera moving slightly throughout the trick", says my friend (who has just finished off the last of the beers and now about to pop out to the shop to get some more, aren't you?) This is where the timeless split screen effect has been updated for the computerficated highly-def world. Watch this shaky video of a UFO. Surely it must be real because it would be almost impossible to match the camera shake with the UFO and the background so perfectly.



Basically, you shoot your source video in a higher resolution than the finished video requires, and then the "shake" can be added in digitally to create the illusion that it must be live and genuine. The camera movements in the Derren Brown trick are small, and - if you'll notice - quite mechanical. My guess is that left and right video feeds shot in 1080p are being merged into a single HD image then a smaller image frame is used so that small pans and zooms can be achieved to produce lower-definition, but still broadcast quality, video.

Note that we do NOT see the predicted numbers until after the draw. The lack of independent eyes in the studio, plus this fact and the very unusual single camera style screams "camera trick" to me.

"Oh, but what about the kids on the bus?" Yes, apparantly in the audience for the show where Derren explains how he did the trick - two whole days later - they were shown video of Derren and some kids on an open-topped bus riding through Oxford Street in November 2008, the Xmas lights being highly visible. Each child holds up a card with one of the lottery numbers drawn on Wednesday, "proving" that he actually predicted the numbers almost a year ago. How did he do that? Well, two days is a long time - plenty of time to edit video you shot on an open-topped topped bus driving along Oxford Street in November 2008 of 6 kids hold up a card for all 50 individual lottery numbers down to the winning six. Surprisingly, this "amazing" proof was not shown in the TV version, so only the audience there got to see it. Which makes me wonder what weaknesses it might have revealed in the illusion. I wasn't there and I haven't seen it, but I'd hazard a guess that at no point in that fabled video sequence do we see all 6 numbers held up on cards in the same shot - or perhaps even any two at the same time. If you were there, and you know different, then please correct me. But, being a rationalist, I will ultimately require hard evidence rather than someone's recollection of what they think they saw. I want to see this video!

So there you have it. A pretty simple trick. Not especially watchable TV. And a massive amount of media hype. Which, I think, is the real illusion. The fact that anybody's talking about it is truly baffling.

Standing Room At Boffoonery!

 

We have standing room for another 15 people at Boffoonery! on Nov 3rd. Call 0207 388 8822 to book.