DaedTech

Stories about Software

Jan
26

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The Pyramid Corporation: Your Grade School Teacher for Adults

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 17 Comments

I can now proudly say that I have finished the initial draft of Developer Hegemony.  Currently, it weighs in at a robust 376 pages that contain my blood, sweat, and tears.

Digitally speaking, anyway.

I haven’t yet published the preview of it because I want to give the people I interviewed a chance to peruse the draft before I make their words available.  But I promise that you’ll have a chance to read in its entirety soon.

I have a lot more coming on that front as well, including the announcement of a launch date, so stay tuned.

I mention completing the book because this should leave me with more time and material to post here on DaedTech.  I’ve mostly cross posted from the other blogs I write for of late, but look for an uptick in posts here.

Alongside that change, I’m going to be shuffling some other things around in my life as well, and changing my focus somewhat in the coming months.  I’ll get to all of this later, but for now, suffice it to say that I plan to post more about the suboptimal current state of the corporate entity and what I believe we can do about it.

And, I’ll start that tonight, with a theme that I wanted to address but didn’t fit particularly well in the book itself.  I’m talking about all of the ways that the corporation has come to simulate a sort of parental/teacher hybrid for adults.

Caveats

Before I go too far, I want to say that I’m not intending to serve up a blistering critique of society, per se.  I feel more philosophical and observational about this.

In other words, think less “this is all so stupid and people are sheep” and more “how and why did we get to this place?”

I understand the how, to some degree.  I think, anyway.

Pyramid shaped corporations (the standard corporate structure) have a knack for becoming less than the sum of their parts.  You can get buy with common sense up to a certain level of scale, and then finally you get some weirdo that likes to clip his fingernails next to the coffee machine no matter how much anyone asks him not to.

Then, bam.

You’ve got a sign next to your coffee machine exhorting people not to clip their fingernails, and your whole company looks ridiculous.

I think that organizational childishness tends to scale more than linearly with the average marginal childishness of individuals hired.  The bigger you get, the more your collective adulthood escapes.

Still, though, it’s amazing we don’t blink more often and scratch our head at the state of things.

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Jan
24

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Managing Code Analysis Statistics with the NDepend API

Category: .NET Tags: , , |

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the NDepend blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  Also, NDepend just released a new version that addresses tech debt extensively — check it out while you’re there!

If you’re familiar with NDepend, you’re probably familiar with the Visual Studio plugin, the out of the box metrics, the excellent visualization tools, and the iconic Zone of Uselessness/Zone of Pain chart.  These feel familiar to NDepend users and have likely found their way into the normal application development process. NDepend has other features as well, however, some of which I do not necessarily hear discussed as frequently.  The NDepend API has membership in that “lesser known NDepend features club.”  Yes, that’s right — if you didn’t know this, NDepend has an API that you can use.

You may be familiar, as a user, with the NDepend power tools.  These include some pretty powerful capabilities, such as duplicate code detection, so it stands to reason that you may have played with them or even that you might routinely use them.  But what you may not realize is the power tools’ source code accompanies the installation of NDepend, and it furnishes a great series of examples on how to use the NDepend API.

NDepend’s API is contained in the DLLs that support the executable and plugin, so you needn’t do anything special to obtain it.  The NDepend website also treats the API as a first class citizen, providing detailed, excellent documentation.   With your NDepend installation, you can get up and running quickly with the API.

Probably the easiest way to introduce yourself is to open the source code for the power tools project and to add a power tool, or generally to modify that assembly.  If you want to create your own assembly to use the power tools, you can do that as well, though it is a bit more involved.  The purpose of this post is not to do a walk-through of setting up with the power tools, since that can be found here.  I will mention two things, however, that are worth bearing in mind as you get started.

  1. If you want to use the API outside of the installed project directory, there is additional setup overhead.  Because it leverages proprietary parts of NDepend under the covers, setup is more involved than just adding a DLL by reference.
  2. Because of point (1), if you want to create your own assembly outside of the NDepend project structure, be sure to follow the setup instructions exactly.

A Use Case

I’ve spoken so far in generalities about the API.  If you haven’t already used it, you might be wondering what kinds of applications it has, besides simply being interesting to play with.  Fair enough.

One interesting use case that I’ve experienced personally is getting information out of NDepend in a customized format.  For example, let’s say I’m analyzing a client’s codebase and want to cite statistical information about types and methods in the code.  Out of the box, what I do is open Visual Studio and then open NDepend’s query/rules editor.  This gives me the ability to create ad-hoc CQLinq queries that will have the information I need.

But from there, I have to transcribe the results into a format that I want, such as a spreadsheet.  That’s fine for small projects or sample sizes, but it becomes unwieldy if I want to plot statistics in large codebases.  To address this, I have enlisted the NDepend API.

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Jan
22

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Automate Your Documentation

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , |

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the SmartBear blog.

Few things, I’d say, strike boredom into the developer heart faster than the subject of documentation.  Does anyone out there really just love wrapping up development on a feature and then cranking out a Word document with a bunch of screen shots and step by step instructions.  Or, perhaps you fancy the excitement of pasting a legal header above a class you’ve just written, and then laboriously documenting all of methods, variables, and function parameters in the class?  If not that, how about the thrill of going back and updating comments that no longer make sense after the code has changed?

I suspect I don’t have a lot of takers at this point.

Documentation is boring, at least for the overwhelming majority of us.  After you’ve built a thing, you want to go build another thing — not rehash in laborious detail what you just did.  And yet, documentation is essential for communicating across time and teams to other people.  Your users will need documentation.  Future maintenance programmers need documentation.  Unless you’re going to be around in perpetuity to handle all that comes, you need to leave some sort of persistent knowledge transfer vehicle.

But that doesn’t mean it has to be tedious, repetitive, or boring.

Repetitive labor offers a certain counter-intuitive appeal, since it creates a “pain is gain” feeling of diligence and accomplishment when complete  But don’t be fooled.  People make many sloppy mistakes when doing repetitive tasks and drudgery is a terrible use of company money when you’re collecting a salary as a knowledge worker.  As people in the software industry, we earn a living automating grunt work out of existence, so let’s take a look at how we can help ourselves when it comes to documentation.

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Jan
19

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Collaborating with Outsiders to the Dev Team

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , |

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the SmartBear blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.

Developer news sites, blogs, books, and tutorials tend to speak at length about how developers should collaborate with one another to maximize team effectiveness. The subject of how developers should collaborate with people outside of their team often gets shorter shrift, however.

Personally, I find this to be a shame.  I think it tends to reinforce the stereotype that developers do a poor job of human interaction and need an organizational layer of people to translate between them and normal humans.  I would prefer to live in a world where people didn’t draw distinctions between “the developers” and “the business” because it was simply assumed that software development was part of the business.

For this reason, I’d like to offer some thoughts on how you, as a developer, can most effectively collaborate with non-developers — people outside of your team.  I will offer the caveat that some teams, particularly Scrum teams, are cross functional and thus include non-developers in the team itself.  I understand that, but for the purpose of speaking to the broadest audience, I will presuppose that your team is specialized in the sense that it is made up exclusively of software developers.  Besides, if your team does include other disciplines, it isn’t as if advice on how to collaborate with those folks magically becomes invalid.

Before getting into specifics, I want to mention two universal principles.  The first I will call out only briefly now and not again because it should be common sense and go without saying.  But, in case it doesn’t, treat these colleagues with courtesy and respect.  They are intelligent knowledge workers that simply have a different specialty than you do, and you ought to treat them as such.  If you can’t do it simply as part of being a decent human being, do it because acting like a primadonna is career limiting.  The second principle I’ll mention is that, because these collaborators are intelligent knowledge workers with a different specialty, you should endeavor to learn from them to improve your own work.

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Jan
17

By

Top Heavy Department Growth

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , , |

I’ve been somewhat remiss in answering reader questions lately.  Largely, I’ve lapsed because I’m choosing to focus on my upcoming book.  Nevertheless, I apologize for the lapse.  I do appreciate all the questions you folks send my way.  I’ll try to compensate today with this post about organizations engaging in top heavy department growth.

I’ll paraphrase this reader question because the specificity of the titles and information involved could make it sensitive if I didn’t take a couple of liberties.

I read your article about architect title over-specialization.  I’m a software developer with senior level experience.

Recently, my company has created “levels” above me.  I used to have only a dev manager above me.  But recently, the organization has brought in both new team leads under the dev manager and architects under a different manager.  Both take precedence over the existing developers.  These people now have authority to tell us what to do and they get to choose what they want to work on, leaving us with the leftovers.

I feel as if i’m being promoted down hill. Can you please advise?

How Companies Expand

If you’re up for it, I’ll offer a good bit of background reading to flesh out the terms.  If not, I’ll furnish minimal definitions here for reference.  A while back, I wrote a post describing the company hierarchy.  That post contains excerpts from my upcoming book, which you can pre-order and read on leanpub.

Here you have an apt illustration of the average company.  At the top, in executive roles, you have opportunistic individuals who define (and violate) the rules and culture of the company.  Then, in the middle, sit the idealists, who guzzle that same kool-aid and ask for more.  Finally, at the bottom toil the pragmatists, who roll their eyes at the company but put up with it for lack of better options.

Significantly, pyramids retain their stability by maintaining their shape.  Thus the most stabilizing growth pattern involves rewarding (over-promoting) loyal pragmatists, and hiring a bunch of grunts beneath them.  If you think of an existing pyramid that needs to get larger, you wouldn’t heap stuff on top.  Instead, you’d build from the bottom.  You’d pull some senior developers, make them architects or team leads to reward them hanging around, and hire a bunch of new grunts to report to them.

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