Thedwick

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen some nifty technology or development practice presented with the implicit assumption that everyone in the world is doing greenfield development. But in my entire career so far, both at commercial software companies and at internal IT shops, I’ve only ever been on one successful and one aborted greenfield development project. Everything else I’ve worked on involved taking something that already exists and adding some new functionality to it. Sometimes that’s one big sweeping change, and more often it’s a series of incremental changes.

The XP camp seems to acknowledge this reality the most, but even they make one critical assumption: the system you’re working on is fully covered by a comprehensive set of unit tests. In reality, if even one corner of your app isn’t covered by unit tests, then you can no longer refactor with abandon and not incur a high manual testing cost (or high production risk). If you can’t refactor with abandon, then you can’t design to today’s requirements and not worry about tomorrow’s requirements. If you can’t design to today’s requirements, then you can no longer start development without a waterfall-like comprehensive requirements process, and so on and so on.

For every presentation I see at a conference about a technology, I’d like to see a description of it in a greenfield environment and a not greenfield environment. Let’s call it a brownfield environment because our nice, open, green field (possibly with poppies and butterflies, etc) is marred by some gopher hole, or cow patties, or whatever our legacy environment presents us. Most metaphors are vaguely brown.

It should be possible to describe the average brownfield adoption of a technology or process, what the cost/benefit curve looks like at each step, and at what points people tend to lose courage. Maybe I’ll do it, between conference calls and diaper changes.

So as my first real post, I’m going to start out pretty geeky. I’m in a bean-bag chair at Software Development West, a meeting of minds in software development in the Santa Clara Convention Center. The free wireless access is sucking me in and I’m not fighting it.

It was actually quite challenging to get here, not because it’s expensive (although it is, but luckily my company has no problem paying) but because carving a few hours out of my work schedule is challenging, much less an entire week. I’m glad I did it, though, because listening to earnest discussions about the Strategy pattern is energizing me in a way that explaining for the hundredth time to a trader why they didn’t see the price for a future they wanted to trade isn’t.

Yesterday was a session by Alan Shalloway about design patterns followed by a session by Joshua Kerievsky about refactoring to patterns. Alan is sitting right next to me in a beanbag as I type, which is pretty cool even though he has no idea who I am or that I’m writing about him. I’ve recently set the career goal of wanting to be one of these gurus, having found the management track not terribly satisfying in a personal way, even though it pays well, and it’s marginally more stable than being a line developer, and it does afford me the opportunity to make more decisions for myself. It’s helped enormously to have a long term goal even though I have no idea how to get there.

Today is “Better Software — No Matter What” with Scott Meyers. He’s got some good stuff. The painful part about each of these sessions is that much of what they say is common sense, which any given guru will freely admit. The real challenge comes in how you implement it in your own particular situation. Nobody’s going to give you a manual about how to do that.

I’m writing this blog as I wait for Microsoft Outook to finally appear through Citrix. I filled out an internal IT survey recently that was intended to figure out what each functional title does in our company in “reality land” and make sure our review and promotion process reflected that reality. To the question “What tools are most important to your daily job” I had to honestly answer “Outlook” and I found that a bit depressing and enlightening. Maybe that’s the real mark of having reached managerhood.

Oop-it’s come up now. Got to go to my paid job