I enjoy continually learning from Robert Martin (Uncle Bob). Sometimes I disagree with him but usually only until I’ve thoroughly processed what he is trying to teach me. In his latest missive on 8thlight.com, Uncle Bob writes a stunningly cogent brief called Screaming Architecture in which he makes a critical point: software architecture is all about the use cases of a system and NOT the framework.

“Architectures are not (or should not) be about frameworks. Architectures should not be supplied by frameworks. Frameworks are tools to be used, not architectures to be conformed to. If your architecture is based on frameworks, then it cannot be based on your use cases.”

Focus on the use cases and perhaps even group them into logical hierarchies with tidy “40,000 foot level” epochs that describe the thing you are building. Is it a customer relationship management system? The first thing we should notice in an architecture, whether document or code, is that this is a CRM system. Presentation, delivery, storage and communication frameworks are all secondary, just plumbing, not the architecture.

“A good software architecture allows decisions about frameworks, databases, web-servers, and other environmental issues and tools, to be deferred and delayed.”

I’m not completely at this point in my journey toward architectural perfection but I recognize the need to strive for this idea of producing architectures that are designed to solve the problems of the users first rather than designed fit within the strictures of a framework while addressing the use cases after the fact.

I recommend you read the full article. Take Uncle Bob’s advice, as I intend to do, and focus more strongly on architecture for your use cases on your next project. Use frameworks carefully and work to keep your business code independent of your frameworks and thus imminently more testable. And don’t forget your tests.

I’ve recently been interested in the subject of respect and the question of whether respect is given or earned. My conclusion is that respect is given most often when it is earned and certainly most easily when that is so. In contemplating and researching this subject, I ran across a post by Bret Simmons that I liked very much called 10 Ways to Earn Respect as a Leader in the Workplace.

I recommend you read the full article but I’ll share a few of my favorites here along with some personal thoughts about each one.

Get to know your co-workers and their families.
This is the author’s first point and I think most important one. It is very hard to give respect to someone who has no empathy and does not appear to be genuinely interested in you and your personal circumstances. A little bit of real care can earn a lot of respect.

Communicate clearly and regularly.
If one does not hear from or speak with his manager on a regular basis, it is impossible for the first point to occur. And if a person is left in the dark with respect to what is happening within the organization, an atmosphere of fear and a feeling of neglect can result in poor attitudes and even overt disrespect.

Make generous use of self-deprecating humor.
When I work with someone who refrains from making deprecating remarks about others but has the self confidence to take a jab at himself from time to time in order to put others at ease, I’m more likely to feel comfortable working with that person and will certainly have more respect for him.

Admit when you screw up.
Nothing can destroy the respect you have earned more rapidly than dodging responsibility for your own mistakes. Nothing can more irreversibly damage your own reputation more powerfully than when you throw a subordinate or coworker under the bus rather than owning up and facing the music. At the same time, the opposite is true. If I have a boss who takes responsibility for mistakes made and asks the team for their support as she takes corrective action, I will have just that much more respect for that person.

Stand behind your staff during times of difficulty.
When mistakes are made by subordinates or coworkers, stand by them. Don’t abandon them in an attempt to save yourself. Chances are you will all survive but you will have lost their respect forever. The author writes, “If you can’t stand behind one of your team members, then you don’t belong in management and you’re certainly not a leader.”

I remember listening to this wise counsel three years ago from Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Today my mother reminded me of it and I enjoyed reading it again. If you have ever faced tough times or felt like you were on the losing end of a game, in sport, in work, in life, I hope this article will pick you up.

I would like to highlight one of the points Elder Wirthlin makes, perhaps my favorite:

Learn to laugh – When things go wrong, we can choose to be angry or sad or depressed, but if we choose to laugh, we can get through the present difficulty and more easily find a solution.

“The next time you’re tempted to groan, you might try to laugh instead. It will extend your life and make the lives of all those around you more enjoyable.”

When the stresses of work or a commute or a family crisis threaten to bring you down, laugh. It truly is the best medicine!

I spend perhaps six hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year hitting the keys. At my slow average typing speed of 30 words per minute (I can type faster but I’m not constantly hitting the keys, so I’m guessing here) and assuming I spend thirty years of my life doing this, my total keystrokes (assuming an average of 6 keystrokes per word) will be:

60 minutes * 6 hours * 5 days * 50 weeks * 30 years * 30 words * 6 keystrokes = 16,200,000 keystrokes

Percentage of my work output firing off an ill conceived email providing advice to someone who does not care or want the advice and will certainly not waste time reading the missive: 0.01%

Today I wasted 0.01% of my available productivity.

I’ve already consumed nearly 50% of my available keystrokes, so I’m posting this to remind myself to conserve my energy and use what remains of my personal utility more wisely.

Important note to self. Do not waste time writing perfectly good advice and sending it to someone who could not care less about your opinion. Instead, read a good book. Write a new blog post. Refactor some old code. Or just watch the leaves in the trees dance in the wind. This would be a more valuable use of that time. Time that cannot ever be recaptured.

I like many aspects of my job but one stands out above all others: helping other developers. Nothing gives me as much satisfaction as hooking up the mental chains and pulling a fellow developer out of the code mud in which she or he is stuck.

I grew up on a small farm where there was never any lack for work to do, much of which was tedious and boring. But it was always exciting to get a call from a neighbor asking us to come pull them out of the mud or jump start a car or rescue an animal from some odd predicament. It never took much time, but the simple gratitude of the person helped was the best compensation I’d ever known as a child.

Now my tractor is my brain and my software tools and the chains are made of thousands of hours of experience forging one experience into another and storing these up, mostly for my own work, but also for those enjoyable moments when I take a call from a colleague who is just stuck and needs a little guidance.

My tractor and chain is not better than anyone else’s really. But sometimes I’m in the right place at the right time to help another developer and this aspect of my job is my favorite. Spinning up a GotoMeeting session and helping another developer find and solve a problem may sound dull and boring to some, but it gives me a boost.

Sometimes my colleagues are reluctant to call. (I work remotely.) Perhaps this is because they don’t want to waste my time or because they feel the need to solve the problem on their own. That’s okay. It’s good to solve problems on your own but I do appreciate the opportunity to help when I can.

And that is one of the main reasons I get up in the morning and make the 30 second commute to my basement office. Today, I might get to hook up the chains to the tractor and pull a friend or a neighbor out of the mud.

Hook up your chains to your tractor and become a software development mentor.

Someone once said, “By small and simple things are great things brought to pass.” The context was certainly not enterprise software development but I have come to believe that these words are profound in this context as well.

Every enterprise, medium and large, is challenged with complexity. Their systems and businesses are complex. Their politics and personnel and departments are complex. Their business models and markets and product lines are complex.

And their software is complex. But why?

Because we make it complex. We accept the notion that one application must accomplish all the wants and wishes of the management for whom we work, either because we are afraid to say, “This is a bad idea,” or because we are arrogant enough to think we’re up to the challenge. So we create large teams and build complex, confusing and unmanageable software that eventually fulfills those wants and wishes, sometimes years later—that is, if the project is not cancelled because the same management team loses patience and/or budget to see it through.

Some companies have made a very large business from selling such very large and complex software. They sell it for a very large “enterprise class” price to a business who wants all those nice shiny features but doesn’t want to take the risk of building it for themselves. And then they buy the very large enterprise software system and find that they must spend the next six to twenty months configuring and customizing the software or changing their own business processes and rules to fit the strictures of the software they have purchased.

The most successful enterprise projects I’ve worked on have all shared certain qualities. These projects have produced workable, usable and nearly trouble-free service all because they shared these qualities. The are:

• A small team consisting of:
• A senior lead developer or architect
• Two mid-senior level developers
• A project manager (part time)
• And a strong product owner (part time)
• A short but intense requirements gathering and design period with earnest customer involvement.
• Regular interaction with product owner with a demo of the software every week.
• Strong communication and coordination by the project manager, assuring the team and the customer understands all aspects of project status and progress.

The challenge in the enterprise is to find the will and means to take the more successful approach of “small and simple.”

You may say, “Well, that’s all fine and good in some perfect world, but we have real, hard and complex problems to solve with our software.” And that may be true. Software, no matter how good, cannot remove the complexity from the enterprise. But there is, in my opinion, no reason that software should add to it.

The real genius of any enterprise software architect, if she has any genius at all, is to find a way to break down complex business processes and systems into singular application parts that can be built by small, agile teams like I’ve described, and where necessary, to carefully define and control the service and API boundaries between them.

Must a single web application provide every user with every function and feature they might need? No. But we often try for that nirvana and we often fail or take so long to deliver that delivery does not feel like success.

Must a single database contain all the data that the enterprise will need to perform a certain business function or fulfill a specific book of business? No. But we often work toward that goal, ending up with a database that is so complex and so flawed that we cannot hope to maintain or understand it without continuous and never ending vigilance.

When your project complexity grows, your team grows, your communication challenges grow and your requirements become unwieldy and unknowable. When you take on the complex all in one with an army, you cannot sufficiently focus your energy and your strength and collectively you will accomplish less and less with each addition to your team until your project is awash is cost and time overruns, the entire team collectively marching to delivery or cancellation. And in the end either outcome, delivery or cancellation, feels the same.

By small and simple things, great enterprise software can be brought to pass. Sooner rather than later. Delivering solid, workable, maintainable, supportable solutions. Put one small thing together with another, win the war on complexity and provide real value to your management team. Do this again and again and you’ll have a team that will never want another job because they will have become all too familiar with real success.

I’ve had a series of ongoing discussions with a friend who is also a senior software architect. In recent months he’s become quite dissatisfied with his manager specifically and employer generally. He has put his resume out on the typical job search sites, Dice, Monster, TheLadders, LinkedIn and others, and has been sorely disappointed with the result. Technical recruiters seem to be, with rare exceptions, a sorry lot of would-be telemarketers rejected for lack of integrity by the local call-center-for-hire.

On a daily basis this friend of mine receives emails and calls with a hot job listing that do not generally match his skills or experience like the one that he forwarded to me today, not because he might really be a match but in hopes of sparking a conversation that goes something like this:

• Recruiter: “I know you may not be a good fit for this job, but do you know anyone who is?”
• Candidate: “No. I do not know anyone with this skill set and experience level interested in a 6 month contract.”
• Recruiter: “Okay. I’d like to keep in touch with you and I will definitely call you if something comes through that is a better match for what you’re looking for.”
• Candidate: “Okay, sure. Thanks for the call.”

My friend reports that he has at least three of those conversations per week and at least two or three such emails as the one below per day. I’ve changed the company names and the place to avoid the chance of embarrassing any of them, especially since one or two of them is a household brand name.

Hello,

I am Recruiter with XYZConsulting (formerly ABCConsulting), a dedicated QRS contractor sourcing service, managed by TenCharms. We recruit solely for QRS Contract Positions. Should you accept a contract position, it will be through our preferred partner TenCharms, an independent vendor chosen to manage this program for QRS.

I saw your resume on a job board. I am currently recruiting .net Consultant for a 12 months contract project with QRS – Chicago, IL.

Email me a copy of WORD formatted resume, along with these details:

• Best time & number to speak to you:
• Location:
• Visa Status:
• How soon you can start:
• Work mode, W2, C2C (if self-incorporated):
• Expectations on Compensation:

Position’s name: .net Consultant

Assignment period: 12 months
Location: Chicago, IL

Required skills
Primary Skills: asp.net, vb.net, Oracle / SQL Server, SQL. Secondary Skills: C#.net, MS Access / VBA

As this is an urgent requirement, kindly respond to it at earliest possible.

Best Regards,
Bad Excuse (name changed to protect the guilty)

Recruiter | XYZConsulting (formerly ABCConsulting)
A TenCharms Solution
Dedicated QRS Contractor Sourcing Services

My friend has shown me many other emails that are far worse than this one. Many of them are poorly written, lacking proper grammar and teeming with spelling errors, yet they claim to represent well known companies. I wonder if these companies for whom these recruiters work ever bother to review the practices and general quality of the communications of their agents. Somehow I doubt it.

In some of the emails my friend has forwarded to me, it becomes clear that the recruiting company has employed some shoddy keyword matching algorithm to select from a list of candidates who have put their resumes out into the swamp of job sites (see above mentioned sites). In some of these I have been able to identify one or two specific keywords that match my friend’s resume. I should know. I helped him write it.

Sometimes the keyword match is even close, such as, “architect” or “jQuery.” But since my friend is a .NET architect and the job is for a J2EE architect who also knows jQuery and PHP and Oracle while my friend does not mention Oracle or PHP on his resume at all, it is clear that the recruiter’s matching algorithm, whether it is their own or provided by one of the job sites, is severely lacking in even the most basic intelligence.

Either that or the recruiter is far more interested in spamming the candidate with a job posting that is clearly not a fit in hopes that the candidate will do the job of the recruiter for him or her or it.

To all such recruiters, please for the love of Pete, what’s wrong with you? Stop wasting my friend’s time!

I have worked in several development teams that have a Scrum-like development process where the team has adapted Scrum to their own team dynamics and organizational needs. I was intrigued by a recent MSDN article called Visual Studio ALM Rangers—Reflections on Virtual Teams that formalizes one of these this Scrum-but-not-Scrum processes and calls it Ruck. Here is the authors’ loose definition:

“To ensure that we don’t confuse anyone in terms of the methodologies or annoy process zealots, we provisionally chose to call our customized process ‘Ruck,’ which, in the rugby world, means ‘loose scrum.’”

The article authors share their experience in Microsoft’s ALM Rangers team and “provide guidance for working with teams in less-than-ideal distributed and virtual environments.” I found this introduction compelling and I wanted to try to restate their approach here with a few of my own thoughts mixed in.

The ALM Rangers’ Ruck process is very specific to their needs and team: a highly distributed team and a high degree of variability in team member availability where team members have multiple professional obligations that take higher priority than their work on the team. This is a very challenging situation for a team trying to be Scrum-like and may be closer to many popular open source projects with multiple contributors from around the world, with one very important exception: a fixed ship date.

I’m not advocating that any specific team adopt the ALM Rangers’ Ruck, but the choices and approach taken by this team could be very valuable to other teams faced with creating their own Ruck because they cannot, for whatever reason, get close enough to Scrum to really call their process Scrum.

One of the most important points I found the authors making had to do with adhering to the agile principle of self-organizing teams. They found that their “belief in letting developers choose work from areas in which they have interest” required that they allow teams to self-organize around these areas of interest rather than specific geographies or time zones.

One of the most difficult challenges facing enterprise software development projects is team size and how to break up larger projects into smaller chunks that can be addressed by smaller, more agile teams. The authors observe:

“We’ve learned that smaller projects and smaller team sizes enable better execution, proper cadence and deeper team member commitment. Also, it seems it’s more difficult for someone to abandon a small team than a larger team.”

Another interesting area the authors cover is that of project artifacts used to manage and break down the project into actionable tasks. The particular names of these seem less important than the fact that they are well defined and communicated and used consistently within their Ruck. In creating your own Ruck process, do not skip this important element.

Roles are also well defined. Knowing what position you play on the team at any one given moment can eliminate the need for over-the-shoulder management because each team member knows what their responsibility is. The task of the manager becomes one of coach rather than hall monitor, communicating these roles and responsibilities to team members rather than asking the question, “so what are you working on today?”

One more critical area to define is meetings. Don’s skimp on structuring meetings to achieve what you need to achieve without wasting too much time. As my brother tells me, “It takes a really good meeting to beat no meeting at all.”

And finally, I want to share one more brief excerpt from the authors. Their top recommendations:

“There are many recommendations, skills and practices that will help you improve the virtual team environment, the collaboration and effectiveness of each team member, and the quality of the deliverables. For us, the seven top recommendations include:

1. Clearly define and foster a team identity and vision.
2. Clearly define the process, such as the Ruck process.
3. Clearly define the communication guidelines and protocols.
4. Clearly define milestones, share status and celebrate the deliverables.
5. Implement an ALM infrastructure that allows the team to collaborate effectively, such as TFS and associated technology.
6. Promote visibility and complete transparency on a regular cadence.
7. Choose your teams wisely, asking members to volunteer and promoting passionate and get-it-done individuals.”