Category Archives: Business

Investing in professional development

Business, Technology

There’s some debate still about these 20x developers out there, complete geniuses that gave rise to the “rock-star” moniker that every company seemed to advertise for. I’ve remained a touch skeptical–not that there aren’t amazing software engineers, I know several — but I’m skeptical because we still don’t have a really good, accessible ways to measure human contribution to software. Lines of code, commits and story point velocity are readily available. Regressions, debugging and runtime numbers can be gathered as well, but we know that all this still doesn’t paint the whole picture. Also add in the real-world impact that other factors outside of development have on performance as well: good product management, architecture and QA among them, but also deadlines, poor communication and bad management. With all of these variables, it’s going to be pretty tough to accurate gauge order-of-magnitude differences between programmers in the real world. And frankly, I don’t know that you need to because in your gut you already know.

“The differences arising from individuals in any given study will drown out any differences you might want to attribute to a change in methodology.” — Steve McConnell

Back in 2011 Steve McConnell responded to criticisms of his 10x programmer claim thoughtfully by pointing out what he was seeing in the studies that have already been done, most not even focused on individual contribution. What he found was that “the differences arising from individuals in any given study will drown out any differences you might want to attribute to a change in methodology.” In short, it nearly totally depends on who’s on your team. However, over-emphasis on this leads to ignoring methodology and tooling altogether and focusing instead on individual development and hiring, which would be short-sighted. My point here is that on the balance, the latter should constitute a more significant portion of team building efforts.

The trouble arises when you commoditize development. While there are many software tasks that require no planning or design, there is much more that requires careful thought. As Yevgeniy Brikman said in support of the 10x developer, “It’s not about writing more code; it’s about writing the right code. You become a 10x programmer not by doing an order of magnitude more work, but by making better decisions an order of magnitude more often.”

“It’s not about writing more code; it’s about writing the right code. You become a 10x programmer not by doing an order of magnitude more work, but by making better decisions an order of magnitude more often.” — Yevgeniy Brikman

This is why I prefer the title software engineer. Writing good applications is really about a mind well-suited for building: choices, compromises and the collective wisdom of personal experience and industry best practices. Don’t commoditize development. It’s a highly-talented and highly-compensated profession. It’s not about nuturing a team, it’s about providing the humans working around you with the best possible resources to be successful, innovative and frankly, fun to be around. Yes, tools matter, and methodology matters–they matter a lot and they can have a big impact on the quality and speed of your work, but investing in these while sacrificing investment in the professional development of the individuals on the team… well… that’s as bad as it sounds.

 

Getting to “Know”

Business

We spend too much of our lives in ambiguity. So many outcomes, so many possibilities! Even an enumeration of the combinatorics would be a staggering waste of time and so we consent to let things play out. But we don’t completely let go – of course not! We make decisions in the moment, we strive to utilize consistent tactics, even strategies as well as we can. And when we have successes they are the result of our efforts, and yes, some luck. And when we have failures they are bad luck, and yes, maybe poor planning. We can press forward in uncertainty but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock tells us, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Bricks-without-Clay-copy
“Data, data, data! I cannot make bricks without clay.”

Certainly, the exploration of risk is rewarding and I don’t mean to take the fun out of it! But making data-driven decisions removes the worst outcomes. And less negative risk means less unpredictability and this is a good thing for business. It is predictability that allows us to make wise investments, to outmaneuver the competition, and it is the predictable inflow of money that keeps the lights on. This is why getting to “know” is so vital. Reorganize your processes to identify and weed out the worst variables first. Answer every question amounting to “why this won’t work.” You need not wait until all questions have been answered, but there is a critical mass that should be addressed before safely riding the long tail of uncertainty. But knowing where you stand on the most key factors of success puts you on the threshold of good decision making. If you decide to stop, you can do so early and with good reason. If you need to pivot, you have the wisdom of understanding just how it should be done. And if you should indeed continue on, do it with confidence that comes from really knowing where you stand. The earlier you know, the less risk you take on and the less time you spend

The decision to move forward in light of the data is much more sound than the decision to move forward despite the risks. Get to “know” then make the call.

Rapid Design Prototyping

Business, Design, Technology

I’ve enjoyed listening to the Startup Podcast over the past couple of weeks. It’s encouraging to listen in on seemingly normal guys as they put together a brand new company. In episode #13 they talk about rapid design prototyping with Google Venture’s design team. The team walks them through a design sprint to discover what their mobile app should be.

Fake it ’till you make it… or don’t.

In Gimlet’s case they should not build a mobile app, and I can’t tell you how many months of development time I’ve saved by NOT BUILDING an idea that we’ve had. In a relatively short amount of time you can design out a website or app and see if it’s going to really meet your needs or if it’s just a cute idea. The world is full of cute ideas – I don’t want those. I want a great idea that can work.

Save yourself some time, developer. Don’t build it until you’ve seen it.

 

Ownership

Business, Reviews, Technology

Screen Shot 2013-12-23 at 10.32.56 AM

I’m learning Python and needed a decent IDE to get my work done – I’m so spoiled! I installed PyCharm and have found it sufficient. Today, after several days of using it, I finally noticed that the tip of the day is blank! This is fine, I unchecked the box, but what I wanted to point out was the missed opportunity: the tip of the day is your chance to educate the user on helpful functionality, to increase product retention through brand loyalty. And what is done with this opportunity?

Tips not found. Make sure you installed PyCharm Community Edition correctly.

Nope I won’t. If you can’t take ownership of this problem (first take: don’t show the tip by default if it isn’t working) at least in the tone of the presentation, then I know enough able you to move forward.  Disable the feature and wait for the functionality to be proven in the future.  This is a very matter-of-fact approach that could be softened by different messaging:

Woah.  I can’t find any tips!  Click _here_ if you have some time to help diagnose what happened with your install.  In the meantime we’ve disabled this feature, you can get to it again from the Help menu.

See, I already want to buy whatever software would give me this kind of lip service!

Four Not-So-Secret Ingredients of Moab

Business, Technology

Today I was reviewing the Moab documentation for an upcoming training and I ran across several feature gems that I thought were worth calling out. I’ll call them some of the “not-so-secret ingredients” that makes Moab great.

Scheduling with Partitions
Moab uses partitions to logical divide available resources in your environment. This allows you to separate geographically or by hardware configuration. For example, because a given job can only use resources within a single partition, you may want to create a partition to group nodes on the same local switch so that you can guarantee the fastest interprocess communication speed. Another cool benefit of partitions is the ability to set partition-specific policies, limits, priorities and scheduling algorithms, though this is rarely necessary.

Green Computing
In an effort to conserve power, Moab can automatically turn off idle nodes until they are needed again. This can be a significant savings if you’re not maxing your capacity all the time. To save on time, Moab can keep a pool of nodes on standby so that there is no delay when additional resources are needed. Moab comes with reference scripts for IPMI, but can be configured to work with iLO, DRAC and xCAT as well.

Fairshare
Using configured targets, you can use historical resource utilization as a factor for job priority. In essence, this would prevent a user with relatively infrequent workload to get buried in the backlog of jobs from much busier users. This kind of thinking extends to groups, accounts and other groupings as well. There are a number of configuration settings for fairshare that allow you to tweak performance to your needs, such as caps, evaluation timeframe, and consumption metrics.

Reservation Groups
You can associate multiple reservations through reservation groups. This allows each reservation to share the same variables. These variables can then be used in job triggers to automate tasks like email notification, script execution and internal Moab actions, such as creating another reservation. Of course, you can always override the inheritance by setting a variable locally on an individual reservation in the group.

How Adaptive Decides to Develop a New Feature of Moab

Business, Technology

If you’re reading this wondering why we chose to do one feature over another, please note that you’re not the first (or the last) to shake your fist while shouting this question! We hope that all of our customers are this passionate about our software. I know I am with the products I use, so we expect nothing less!

Unfortunately for you though, we don’t often reveal much about the planned features on our product roadmap. What little we do reveal are those things that we are most confident about delivering. Frankly, we don’t show more because we don’t want to disappoint you! We have a very complex product with a lot of integrations and moving parts. Sometimes it can take a good while to create and test additional functionality. Oftentimes delivery is influenced by changes in the market, current technologies, and planetary alignment. We’d hate for any of our customers to become dramatically attached to a favorite promised feature, and then disappoint them by delivering a different, though equally valuable feature.

I admire many of the approaches taken by the 37Signals team and ran across this line from David Hansson about the dangers of over-promising,

“It’s better to turn customers away than to placate their instincts and lure them in with vague promises. It’s incredibly rare that a single feature will truly make or break your chance with a customer. If your software is a good enough fit, most people can make do without that one or two things that they’d like to see.”

I want to break down some of our process around how we choose which features to develop, but it’s very interesting to talk about why we choose certain features. I love a line I hear from Simon Sinek, “People don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it.” But this is a topic for another day. So here are the four steps we use to get the right features in the development pipeline: discovery, organization, prioritization, and timing.

Discovery

Determining the next Moab feature can be overwhelming and it often feels as though we’re looking for a good read while standing in the middle of the Library of Congress. But we relish the fact that we are not alone! We hear our customers loud and clear and know exactly which areas of the product they’d like to see improvements in. We are working on some ideas to improve the quality of feedback we’re getting on this channel. We also work together with our partners to discover and evaluate new synergies and approaches. We are constantly looking for emerging technologies and market opportunities that align with our corporate strategies. And we regularly reflect on our own failures and search for better solutions. There is no shortage of good ideas, and we try to collect them all.

Organization

In order to ensure that we deliver real value with each release, we group all of these ideas into initiatives that address end-to-end functionality and practical use cases. We understand from experience that cherry-picking our favorite little features from various areas isn’t viable over the long-term. We try to make sure that we can deliver well thought-out solutions through the features that we provide; something that we can be confident will have a positive impact on our customers and their ability to accomplish to their goals. Once we’ve organized each of the ideas into feature initiatives, we also evaluate iterative approaches that would allow us to iteratively plan for work that might ultimately take more than a single release.

Prioritization

We can’t do it all. We wish we could, and we try, but we really can’t! We know how much we can accomplish in a given amount of time, and we’re always on the lookout for techniques and processes that will improve our development velocity, but we know that it won’t be enough to get everything we all want. Through prioritization we can ensure that the most impactful features are delivered first. This is the phase where we have to argue for our favorites and sometimes let them go. Some of the factors that we consider are: time to implement, degree of innovation, how competitors approach the problem, number of affected customers, bang for the buck, and how long we’ve already been waiting.

Timing

We all know from our own personal experience that if we simply work off a priority list, we can miss opportunities to innovate and optimize. For example, I missed seeing the new movie Pacific Rim last week because I didn’t consider rescheduling a high-priority but time-insensitive appointment. By the way, I am not sure if I’m worse off now, so maybe this is a bad example. But as we work out the implementation details of each new feature and its components, we discover multiple opportunity paths that can all lead to “good” delivery outcomes. We take time to plan these out so that we can rest assured that our timing optimizes our efforts and make changes as needed.

Once the timing of each epic’s features is nailed down, we hand the execution off to our capable Engineering team and monitor the progress as we work towards the next release. We can talk more about the engineering process in yet another blog post, but hopefully this gives some insight into our approach on feature planning.

Cloudifying Your Datacenter

Business, Technology

Whether VMware, HP’s Cloud Service Automation, xCAT or any of the other myriad provisioning solutions, there are so many progressive stages of private cloud. Although that term remains somewhat nebulous, the pieces are familiar:

1. Standardization and consolidation of hardware and infrastructure
2. Virtualization and automation (most of us are around here)
3. Self-service infrastructure (next step)
4. Service lifecycle management
5. Service brokering and hybrid environments

The barriers are also ever present, among them manpower, optimization, guaranteed SLA enforcement and accounting – each increasing the difficulty of making progress or really even getting a good understanding of the end-game for your private cloud. The best place to start your push to cloud is a strong focus on return on investment. Gathering an accurate understanding of current costs and demand is a significant first step, and from there a hope can build around the potential for cost savings. It is no stretch to claim between 10 and 100 times faster deployments, depending on your current setup! Our research has shown that our customers are spending 2-3 times more in manpower and hardware before moving to a cloud.

Another strong selling point for cloud and a potential for savings is the concept of a self-service portal. We’ve all dreamed of facilitating users, in a safe way, so that then can request and manage their own workload without requiring much IT team. Another bonus is the addition of chargeback concepts to help manage resources in an accountable manner. Workload placement and migration is another level of management that is expensive and time-consuming to handle manually. Even setting up the rule sets and auditing policies can be overwhelming.

So if you are focusing on a consolidation of hardware into a single datacenter, consolidating deployment efforts and processes, looking to increase your ROI on your infrastructure, decreasing IT staffing and computing investments or just wanting to add additional machines and VMs without staffing up, Adaptive Computing’s line of cloud solutions can help your success.

Self-service Portal
Using Moab’s service templates, actual service consumers can ask for what they need, when they need it. With chargeback you can govern accountability for resource uses, which will limit overuse and waste. Remember that a free cloud is a recipe for failure. Self service is what makes a your datacenter a cloud, and can facilitate 10-100x increases in deployment speed.

Continuous Optimization
Move from automation to orchestration. VM sprawl, just like server sprawl, can fill up your datacenter quickly! Do you want your VMs to be scattered across your datacenter for better performance, or would you like to consolidate so that you can take advantage of licensing constraints or VLANs. Don’t overlook the value of accurate initial placement with granular service allocation policies that can target by processors, memory, chipset, software licenses or other arbitrary metadata. Also, you can always reserve pockets of your datacenter for certain kinds of work, or work from certain users. Once those services are running, they can be locked down on that hypervisor to secure high availability and security. Now all this can be done manually, but let’s be honest, it’s a lot of work, and your ability to keep in sync with upcoming needs will be limited by staffing and the other fires and stuff your IT staff it doing. You don’t want to just add capacity like we have in the past. Now is the time to efficiently allocate what we already have with a variety of policies around placement, overcommit and allocation.

Integrating Moab in Your Cloud
Dip your toe, try this out. We know that you may want to keep one foot in the traditional IT infrastructure model, or even outsourced IaaS . We know that this perpetuates inconsistent development environments, disparate architectures and different management and security, so pick a single small group to focus on. You want to provide all the capabilities (optimization, chargeback, service catalog, etc.) for a each grouping one at a time so that you can demonstrate the ROI as you work to cloudify (bring standardization, automation and self-service) your datacenter.

Moab Improved by Agile Development

Business, Technology

Software development companies have long been abuzz with talk of agile development. Its virtues have been extolled and significant gains in productivity promised, but not very often do we talk about how hard it is to make the transition to agile development. There are compromises that can come so easily when we face processes and pressures that are difficult to transition away from. Old habits are so welcoming and progress can seem so far away. At Adaptive we experienced the same growing pains. Over the past year and a half we have seen a lot of success from our efforts and it hasn’t been easy. But it’s been worth it. We’ve been able to set more accurate timelines, and the accuracy of those timelines has been available sooner. Each release we have been able to move ahead with confidence that we can scope out the relevant functionality completely with user stories. We’ve been able to target our hiring to bring on the specialists we know that we need to have success. And we’ve been able to plan future features more fairly, having a better understanding of the customer needs we’re addressing and how long it will take to deliver value in each feature.

How does this translate to our product? We’re seeing higher quality, faster performance, longer uptimes, more scalability and more fully rounded-out features. Higher quality comes as feature is subjected to longer durations of targeting testing because we spend less of our release cycle in a no-man’s land between completed features. Performance, uptime and scalability are the result of deeper dives into specific user stories and their impact on the system and its components. Each of our new features is more fully thought out and executed as we have taken more time to examine mainstream and edge customer use cases.

In the end, we’re confident that the investment we’ve made in improving our agile development process has produced the most valuable version of Moab we’ve released, and we expect even better versions in the future!

You Can’t Do It All

Business

I’ve had a couple rough days sliding between tactical and strategic worries as we work to complete a release while planning ahead for the next one. I just drew this up on a whiteboard to provide some context for my concerns. I was surprised by where it ended up so I’ve decided to spend a few more minutes on it and share it.

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While the visibility from the top down and from the bottom up is absolutely critical, you can’t really expect to have all that loaded in your head at the same time. This is aggravated by the size of your organization and certainly becomes unmanageable at different points depending on your mental fortitude and your organization’s setup. Most companies address this problem by creating a hierarchy so that those at the top, your C-levels and other executives, worry about those things at the top of the list, and your middle managers take the middle, and so forth all the way down the list. This can work, but I’m an advocate for dynamic approaches that can quickly compensate for different needs at different times. But I digress. My point here is that when it comes down to it, you can’t really do it all, and there are only two things that can make you feel better about that:

  1. Transparency – it should be simple for someone to take a look at a dashboard or a blog or even a posted printout and see how things are going in an area and where things are headed in the future.
  2. Trust – if you can’t trust (often through delegation) those that are heading up areas of the business then you will never be satisfied that things are running well.

I don’t have all the answers here, but I hope that this helps you to reconsider where you’re at like I have, and I’m glad I did because today (two days later) I’m feeling pretty good.