As a way of introducing a game, I’ve started to implement planning poker to estimate a Product Backlog, aka feature list, for two of my project teams. The experiments have gone fairly well so far. Basically everyone reviews the list of user stories, use cases, features, or tasks hopefully be then the poker rounds start:

1. You hand out a stack of cards with numbers on them 1,3,5,8,11,13.
2. You explain that the numbers are ‘story points’ and simply represent the relative complexity of a task.
   • A ‘1’ might be creating an error message popup.
   • A ‘5’ might be implementing validation of a HTML form.
   • A ’13’ might be implementing some complex set of business rules in a rules engine that no one is familiar with.
3. Then you start with the first item.
4. Everyone selects the card they thing corresponds to the estimate for that item.
5. On the count of 3 everyone reveals.
6. If everyone is the same you’re done.
7. If there are differences people speak up about why they thought it was a 3 versus a 5 until everyone’s had a chance to comment.
8. Then you repeat the process. At this point generally estimates start to converge. If need be run a round or two more.
9. Continue until you run out of items.

The developers I’ve sprung this on so far seem to enjoy it at least for the novelty period. The group today was a bit disappointed though that it didn’t involve real money and poker chips. You then use the estimated story points to plan your iterations based on what the team thinks they can do. I’m experimenting with this still, but the general idea comes from Mike Cohn one of the heavyweights in the Scrum arena.

To give credit, I picked up this tip from Elizabeth Hendrickson:

To check whether people are actually reading long technical requirements or design documents, liberally sprinkle the text with ridiculous quotes, like “My HoverCraft is Full of Eels.”

The basic idea is that very few people actually read long technical documentation. So why do we create long technical documents. Elizabeth related that she’s been doing this for a while, but very few people ever catch the phrases and thus very few people are reviewing these ‘important’ documents.

She said she once had a developer who came up to her after reading something she sent around for reviews and asked about this hovercraft thing. Being from the QA/Testing side of the house, Elizabeth really liked working with this developer. As a manager I find myself creating very few of these documents so I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but I expect the experiment to be very enjoyable.

While I understand the idea behind leaving out some details in example code in technical books, I just don’t agree with it in general. The reason behind picking up a book on a particular framework, language, or technique is to be able to immerse yourself in some sample code. If the authors opt out by including incomplete examples or relying on you downloading their example code I feel just a bit cheated and frustrated. “Not all code examples from this book will be complete,” is a bit of a cop out when some of the incomplete examples are in the first few chapters where the basic concepts are being introduced.

I learn primarily by example and reinforcement. That means when I crack open a book I expect to be able to type in the examples pretty much verbatim and get them to run successfully after I clean up my ever present typos. Typing in the code helps me learn it, more so than just reading or cutting and pasting it from the author’s examples. Short snippets of code are fine, but if the author bothers to show a real example class it should contain pretty much everything you need to run it or at least have it compile. The last couple of technical books I’ve read seem to assume you’ll just figure out all the stuff they left out like the implementations of 3 or 4 other classes the example depends on.

I have a limited amount of coding time between the daily meeting load, distractions, HR issues, and clearing obstacles for my developers. When I get home and my two young daughters are off to bed I have a few hours a night to possibly go through a technical book. I don’t have time to waste chasing down little details in the examples that were left out or imagining how I setup some example code by inventing an implementation. I realize this approach forces me to go looking for answers and do a lot of experimenting to get some examples to run, but far too much of that is frustration and not learning. I like rapid feedback loops, one of the reasons I enjoy TDD so much. Frustration is pretty much the opposite of what I’m looking for.

No books were named in this rant, but that’s partially because the phenomenon is so commonplace. A good counter example in my recent experience would be Head First Design Patterns. I love that they give full class examples and exercises that are left to the reader. That way I can get the concepts and then enjoy the challenge of the exercises. They of course add a lot of visual interest, crossword puzzles, and inside jokes.

Just starting to dig into Spring in Action. So far so good until I run into the first example. It’s just a Hello World style example so what could go wrong?

First issue crops up when I notice the following line:

BeanFactory factory =
      new XmlBeanFactory(new FileInputStream("hello.xml"));

IntelliJ just keeps barking at me that the constructor for

can only take a

. Digging through the APIs I find that since I’m using Spring 1.2.2, this has changed since the book’s printing. At least there’s a reference to it in Manning’s forums for the book. And they mention in the book that the examples are for 1.1.3.

After that I do a very dumb thing. I setup a simple unit test to invoke the HelloWorld method. So far so good. I run the test:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/logging/LogFactory
(long stack trace follows)

OK, so I assume I’ve just screwed up my path to the hello.xml file. That would be the bonehead move that costs me 45 minutes. Somehow I had it in my head that all the dependent libraries must be wrapped up in the spring.jar. After lots of red bars, I finally try importing

. Of course IntelliJ can’t find it. A simple addition to my

directory and my classpath and BooYa green bar. I sleep a lot better with green bars.

I haven’t written a line of code in about a week at work. Sure I’ve reviewed some code, and made suggestions for developers, but I haven’t typed out any code in about a week now. It seems like management issues keep overwhelming any day to day coding or research. I’m beginning to feel like an ‘Enterprise Architect,’ I just draw pretty UML diagrams and let the programmers implement my design. Danger! Danger! Will Robinson.

So this week things will change. I’m putting together a JUnit intro for our organization since many of them still don’t get the paradigm. And I’m coding in a half decent IDE, like IntelliJ, not just living in the ever so horrible PowerPoint IDE. ‘Code or Die’ like the old skateboard video game goes.