Categories
General nonsense

Putting Things Off

As I come to the end of a week off work, with a list of things that need doing around the house that’s little changed since the beginning of the week, it strikes me that it’s about time us procrastinators had our own system. With that in mind, I present the following (with apologies to David Allen).

The Putting Things Off System

The main principles of Putting Things Off can be summarised in four steps:

Collect

Every time you come across something you need to do, put it into a ‘bucket’ (an e-mail folder, a drawer in an old filing cabinet you never look in, or perhaps an actual bucket). Once you get all the things you need to remember out of your head, it’s easier to forget about them.

Once a bucket gets full, move it out of sight somewhere and start a new one. Don’t make the mistake of looking in the buckets – it’ll just be depressing.

Process

When faced with a list of things that need doing, just pick a few at random and try to get rid of them using one of the following strategies:

Two-minute rule

If something looks like it would only take a couple of minutes, you can do it any time, so forget it for now. Don’t distract yourself by trying to do it straight away.

Delegate

Can you think of someone else to blame for the task not getting done? If so, you’re in the clear. Don’t remind them though, otherwise they might remove the obstacle, and with it your excuse for inaction.

Defer

Deferring things is just a more positive way of saying procrastination, so this is a good plan if no other excuse presents itself.

Organise

Organise all your tasks into projects, and allocate a ‘next task’ for each. That way you can ignore all but one item in each project, leaving far fewer things to think of reasons to avoid.

Organising by context can also be a helpful source of excuses. For example, a context might be ‘things I can’t do at home’ or ‘things I can’t do if it’s raining’.

Review

Review all your lists occasionally, to see whether you’ve ignored anything for so long that it’s gone away. One useful technique is the well-known ’43 folders’ – if you split stuff up across that many places, it’s far easier to forget about.

Do[n’t]

Finally, all this hard work will be to no avail if you still end up doing things. If all else fails, remember the words of the Grange Hill cast, and just say no.

[tags]GTD[/tags]

Categories
Agile

The simplest thing that could possibly work

But other times we’d be programming away, and we’d say, “Now, wait a second, what are we working on here?” We’d just get stuck. And if we were stuck more than a minute, I’d stop and say, “Kent, what’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”
— Ward Cunningham

Not a command: “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work!”, but a question: “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”.

Once you think of something really simple that might work, think for a minute – is there an obvious reason why it definitely won’t? If not, try it, and then you’ll know. More importantly, if it didn’t, you’ll know exactly why not. Maybe it was functionally correct, but not fit for purpose – perhaps an algorithm was too slow, or an interface was too confusing or ugly to release to users. The point is, you’ve either got something you can build on, or you’ve got a concrete reason to abandon an idea, rather than a theoretical argument. If you’re lucky, it’ll turn out that the simplest thing did work, and the problem’s solved.

Too often people seem to twist this into some kind of XP Prime Directive, claiming that a particular solution is over-engineered because it wasn’t TSTTCPW. On the other side of the fence, big-picture architect types use it as a straw man to criticise agile methodologies, claiming that they ignore anything that isn’t part of TSTTCPW, leading to simplistic and unscalable solutions.

As Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

[tags]XP, simplicity, Ward Cunningham[/tags]

Categories
Agile Software

Hoist by my own petard, part two

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but apparently not. While the build was finally underway last night, I noticed that my search box made the layout a bit odd when you were logged in, so moved the sign out and edit profile links alongside “Welcome your name” instead of underneath. While I was there, I recklessly changed it to “Welcome, your name” (with a comma). This time it couldn’t possibly break anything, so I checked it in and went home.

Yes, you guessed it.

sign_in 'fred', 'secret'
then_the_protocol_should_be_http
verify_text_present 'Welcome Fred Bloggs'

The really embarassing thing is the checkin comment though.

portal build 565 FAILED
finished at 8:10 AM on 21 June 2007 taking 4 minutes and 34 seconds

Build Changeset
Revision 565 committed by 802285285 on 2007-06-20 16:57:34
Move welcome message to same line as sign out/edit profile, to make room for search. This one will *not* break the build...
M /trunk/app/views/layouts/global.rhtml

Categories
Agile Software

Hoist by my own petard

So, this morning we had our iteration retrospective, and one of the things I brought up under “what should we do differently?” was that we seemed to be breaking the build a lot. We’d got out of the habit of always running the acceptance tests before committing even minor changes, and the build often stayed red for an hour or two while the culprit figured out what had gone wrong and fixed it. We all agreed to take more care in future.

Then this afternoon, I checked in a tiny change, affecting one RHTML file and a CSS stylesheet, just to add a search box to the top of the page layout. No code involved – what could possibly go wrong?

Oops.

Build failure

That’s two thirds of our acceptance test cases failing.

Turns out we had a lot of brittle acceptance tests, which relied on just submitting the first (and only) form in the page. Two-and-a-half hours and 37 modified files later (and long after I’d intended to go home) I’d added IDs to all the submit buttons and fixed the Selenium files to click them explicitly.

That’ll teach me.

Categories
Software

Multiple class attributes in HTML

Here’s a great tip courtesy of Trenton Moss’s Ten CSS tricks you may not know. I certainly didn’t know it, but it’s quite possible everyone else does and this post is going to make me look like an idiot. I can take it.

How many times have you ended up doing something like this?


...

Did you know that you can specify multiple classes on one element, just by separating them with spaces?


...

[tags]html,css,class[/tags]

Categories
Agile BT Ruby Software

A step-by-step BDD example using RSpec

We’ve now got a Ruby focus group at work, and one of the first things to be set up has been a weekly programming exercise [intranet link], in the style of Ruby Quiz. It’s now week two, and the problem is slightly more complex than last week’s gentle FizzBuzz introduction. Here’s the specification:

This time, the challenge is to come up with some Ruby code that converts a positive integer to its English language
equivalent. For example:

1 => one

10 => ten

123 => one hundred and twenty three

10,456 => ten thousand four hundred and fifty six

1,234,123 => one million two hundred thirty four thousand one hundred and twenty three

The code should work from numbers 1 – 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) but if it works for bigger numbers its all good.

For an extra challenge, when the strings for the numbers for 1 – 10,000,000,000 are sorted alphabetically, which is the
first odd number in the list?

I thought it might be interesting (to me, at least!) to record the process I go through to reach the solution, rather than just sharing the finished article. I’m using a behaviour-driven approach, although the process for writing a single method obviously doesn’t touch on a lot of the wider aspects of BDD.

So here it is, warts and all (I’m writing this as I go along, so I have no idea how long this post is going to get, or whether I’ll even arrive at a solution at all!)

Continue reading “A step-by-step BDD example using RSpec”
Categories
General nonsense

Some people have too much time on their hands

I don’t know whether there’s any camera trickery involved, but this video is pretty cool. Kind of like a DIY version of Honda’s famous Cog advert.

Categories
Agile BT Enterprise Rants Software

Software/geek symbiosis

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get the chance to attend a talk/workshop on TiddlyWiki, presented by its creator Jeremy Ruston, with quality supporting acts from JP and Doc Searls. Jeremy has just joined BT as Head of Open Source Innovation, which is pretty cool in itself.

One of the comments he made that particularly struck me was to the effect that a piece of software is a living thing, but is parasitic, requiring a ‘geek host’ to live on. Much of the value of software isn’t what it does, but what it can potentially do. Once you separate the software from its geek, it starts to die, because it can no longer adapt to changes in its environment.

I think this is something that we’re losing in the world of corporate IT.

Continue reading “Software/geek symbiosis”
Categories
BT General nonsense

Blast from the past

The things you find in server room cupboards!

Categories
Agile

Taking continuous integration for granted

Only a couple of years ago a source code management system, as far as I was concerned, was somewhere you checked files out of when you started development for a release, and checked them back in a month or two later. Integration was something that generally occupied the next few weeks, as everybody’s changes fought amongst themselves over who could find the most interesting ways to break stuff.

Yesterday we had a major power fault in the server room where our Subversion and CruiseControl boxes (amongst a lot of much more important stuff) lives.

It’s surprising how much of a pain it now seems not to be able to commit code as I get it working. Not to be able to integrate other people’s changes. Not to be able to check that my code passes all the acceptance tests in a controlled environment.

At least it’s not like the old days when we had to actually do all our development on the Unix server, so I can still get on with things until it’s all sorted out.

Aha! It seems that while I was typing this post, the repository has come back online.
[tags]continuous integration[/tags]