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Preserve Developer Mindshare – Don’t Nitpick

Mindshare


I’m not particularly interested in marketing principles in the commercial sense of the word (though I find the psychology of argumentation and persuasion to be fascinating), so please excuse any failed parallelism in advance. Today, I want to talk about the concept of mind share, but to apply it to the life of a work-a-day developer.

For those not familiar with the concept, mind share is the awareness that a consumer has about a particular product. For instance, if I say “smart phone”, the first things that pop into your head are probably “iPhone”, “Android”, “Blackberry”, perhaps in exactly that order. If that’s the case, iPhone has a larger mindshare from your perspective as a consumer than Blackberry or Android.

Another concept that comes into play is referred to in the linked wikipedia article as “evoked set”. This refers to the set of items that you’ll think of at all without some kind of researching or prompting. In our example above, you didn’t think of Windows Mobile, and now that you read the name, you probably think, “oh yeah, them.” If that’s the case, your evoked set is the first three, and Windows Mobile is out in the cold.

But let’s come back to this later.

A Modest Proposal

The other day, I happened to overhear the substance of a code review. The code was some relatively minor set of changes, and so the suggested fixes and changes were also relatively minor and unremarkable, but with an interesting exception because of its newness to me. The reviewer requested that the developer use the Visual Studio utilities “Sort Usings” and “Organize Usings”. For those not familiar with .NET, this is the Java equivalent of sorting your package imports or the C++ equivalent of sorting/organizing #includes. The only difference is that in C#/.NET, this is functionally useless from the compiled code perspective. That is, C# took a lesson from its counterparts and had its compiler take care of this housekeeping. From a developer’s point of view, this only potentially has ramifications in terms of additional intellisense overhead.

Still, this struck me on the surface as a good practice, albeit one I had never really considered. I suppose that unused using statements are a form of dead code, having intellisense perform better is a mild plus, and sorting them is probably… nice, I guess… for those who ever inspect the using statements. I am not one of those people — I never write them because of Ctrl-Period, and I never look at them. I used to remove them because of the CodeRush issues list for a file, but I tend to turn that off since it tends to unceremoniously remove the Linq extension methods and leave me with non-compiling code (fingers crossed for a fix in a future version).

Back to the story, the reviewer then went on to state that this would be required to ‘pass’ any future code reviews that he did. In spite of the apparent tiny benefit conferred by this practice, something about this proclamation seemed a little off and problematic to me. But, it slipped out of my mind in favor of more pressing matters until I was going through the process of promoting some code in a different scenario the other day, and suddenly, the unfocused nagging issue leaped into full view for me.

Anatomy of a Code Promotion

Generally speaking, a developer’s task is a simple one: implement features, fix any defects. So, if you’re given a task to implement, you implement it, take a moment to pat yourself on the back and move on. And, that’s what I did during my epiphany. Except, er no, wait.

I was using Rational Clear Case, so what I actually had to do was finish the change, and then check in my code. From there, to promote it, I had to open up Clear Case explorer, find my view, right click, and say “Deliver from Stream to Default”. From there, I had to launch Clear Case Project Explorer, find the integration stream, and click “Make a Baseline”. The policy is to name the baseline the default appended with an underscore and my login name. After that, I had to recommend the baseline. Ugh (and double Ugh for Clear Case as source control). Suddenly my life as a developer is not so simple. That’s no longer a one step process, but some number greater than one depending on our standards for granularity.

But wait, crap. I didn’t run all the unit tests to make sure the build wasn’t broken (actually, I tend to be fanatical about that, but I’m making a rhetorical point). I also didn’t run style cop to make sure I was conforming to the set of coding standard we have, nor did I run my other static analysis tools to check for simple mistakes. Alright, so time to do all that, and re-deliver.

But wait. Clear Case forces a rebase operation prior to code delivery (the equivalent of SVN update). And, it’s generally good practice to run all of your tests and analysis tools prior to and after a rebase to make sure that you know whether you are responsible for any broken tests, standards violations, etc or whether you inherited them. Man, this is getting intense.

So alright, promotion process is check your code for correctness, run all tests, run all static analysis. Then, rebase and do all that again. Then, follow that whole rigmarole about delivery and making baselines. My goodness — I haven’t even considered that I might have forgotten to add a file, so I should probably grab a clean copy of everything from source control and rebuild and, if anything breaks, re-deliver. And I haven’t even mentioned the possibility of handling merge conflicts.

Oh, and I now need to sort and organize my using statements. That seemed like a decent idea a few paragraphs ago, but now…

(I realize that there are optimizations that could be made to this particular process — different source control, continuous integration, etc. Point is, just about every process has some warts and, even if it doesn’t, managing concurrent changes and standards in a group environment requires more thought than we realize as we get accustomed to the process.)

Mindshare Revisited

In the face of all of this stuff, the mindshare metaphor begs consideration. If fixing our defects and implementing our features isn’t the iPhone, we’re in big trouble. From there, running unit tests and static analysis tools probably ought to be Android and Blackberry, but they may get pushed out a bit in favor of the particulars of wrangling the source control system and resolving merge conflicts, depending on the source control system and merge tool.

As we add more things, we have two options. We can either reduce the mind share of existing things in our evoked set, or we can spend time and energy expanding our evoked set. So, if we want to hold our efficiency of feature implementation constant, we’re going to have to leave some things out of our mindshare (and then perhaps be reminded of them at code reviews or with exasperated emails from team members with different evoked sets than ours, which we trade for exasperated emails of our own at things missing from their evoked sets). Alternatively, if we want to expand our mindshare, it’s going to come at the cost of a steep learning curve for all newer members and decreased efficiency across the board as we go through our rote checklist prior to each delivery.

Getting It Right

I don’t care for either of these options. So, I have two suggestions for people as the number of sticky notes and strings around our fingers grows in order to promote code.

  1. Don’t sweat the small stuff.
  2. Automate as much as possible.

In the case of “organize and sort usings”, I’d offer item (1). Something that provides no benefit to the end-product and questionable benefit to the development environment is something that ought not to occupy our mindshare as developers. But, in case I am just flat out wrong in my assessment of the benefit/detriment analysis, I’d offer option (2). Given that this is already implemented in Visual Studio, a small plugin running on the build machine could ensure that the using statements in all checked in code are always optimized, without adding to the maze of things developers have to remember.

And, to expand on this, I’d suggest that we in general move as many things into the (2) camp as possible, if we value them. Things like coding standards, static analysis, best practices, etc do matter, so why not force them with automatic, gated checkins or code transforms on the build machine. That ensures they’re always right, and without forcing up front memorization and, more importantly, without distraction from the most important problem — “implement features and fix defects”. The closer to 100% of our mindshare that iPhone occupies, the better for all project stakeholders.

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[…] are plenty of other examples one might dream up. The silly mandate of “sort and organize usings” that I blogged about some time back comes to mind. This is another example of standardizing […]

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