Effective management is simply pushing the right buttons and pulling the right levers at the right time. This requires sufficient information, analytic thought, rational decision, and consequential action. Asking questions and thoughtful contemplation are not enough. If you cannot make decisions and act upon them, you are a researcher; you are not a manager.

1. Sufficient Information
    
2. Analytic Thought
    
3. Rational Decision
    
4. Consequential Action

Every healthy human being manages something. You wake up hungry (information) and you think about bacon (thought) and you decide to limit yourself to two pieces (rational decision) and you throw three pieces in the pan (consequential action) just in case one of them burns even though you know you’ll eat it anyway. Okay, we’re not all perfect managers. Actually, I’ve never met one, so I’m not sure there is such a thing. Excuse me while I take a break to finish that third piece of bacon…

What the world needs is yet another blog post on how to manage software development, so why not write it myself I ask. Unable to find a good reason to stop here, I’ll give it a shot. If you continue to read, you and you alone will be responsible for anything you might learn.

There are books, graduate courses, and no end to rambling blogs, so I’ll shoot for brevity and clarity here in Part 1.

1. Know Your Team
   Computers do not yet write software all that well by themselves, so you’re stuck managing the people. Your process or you dictate what they will work on and, by virtue of time constraints imposed, how they will work on it; this is the essence of management.
    
2. Be Decisive and Take Action
   Collaboration is a meaningless waste of time unless it is followed by real decision and actions that lead to positive results. If you cannot make decisions and act upon them, you are a researcher; you are not a manager.
    
3. Be Honest and Fair
   If you say one thing to your team on one day and deny having said it the next day, your team will lose confidence in you and rebuilding that trust may not be possible, so choose your words and promises carefully. And if you make a mistake, admit it readily and apologize where appropriate. Your team will see this as a mark of a true leader.
    
4. Demand Accountability
   When you assert a process rule, enforce it. Hold team members accountable. Start with gentle reminders and further training but do not allow repeat offenders to skate without consequence. If you do, your process is not a process and it will fail.
    
5. Eliminate Needless Meetings
   Developers generally hate meetings with good reason. Most meetings lack an agenda, lead to no discernable action items, and there is rarely a copy of the minutes minutes and action items distributed to attendees. Most software development requires long, uninterrupted periods of time to effectively solve problems and complete complex tasks. Useless meetings in the middle of the day can ruin a developer’s entire day, throwing his productivity into a spiral, so group meetings into a single day where possible to eliminate or reduce the disruptive effects.
    
6. Review Everyone’s Work
   You may not understand the code, but having a developer walk you through the code, discussing the decisions made and showing off just a little will go a long way toward educating you and inspiring your developer. Review and discuss documentation, designs and test plans with interest. Spend the time to learn from and guide your team.
    
7. Get Yourself Out of the Meetings Cyclone
   Decline a leadership training or management committee meeting from time to time in order to do some real managing. Remember, the word “manage” has its root in manus (hand). If you don’t put your hands on it, you can’t possibly manage it.
    
8. Create and Shepherd Processes
   Everyone knows how to manage and can do so if you give them a process that establishes guidelines for what information should be considered, what decision making process should result, and how those decisions will become actions within the constructs of the process you have created.

Well, that’s enough for part one. More on the same topic later.

This morning I read a post by Seth Godin, a favorite of mine, which presented and discussed an essay written by Paul Graham of Y-Combinator called Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

I regret that this cogent essay and essayist have escaped my notice until now. It reveals what every programmer knows and has experienced with regard to meetings, and I’ve never found a better treatment of the subject.

It confirms with clarity that programming is a creative art, an act of creation or making. Such work cannot be effective and productive with multiple disruptive meetings every day. And sometimes it only takes one meeting, even a short one, to blow your whole day.

Why?

The content and contention in a single meeting can serve to distract a programmer to the point of rendering him effectively useless for the remainder of the day. This is true not only for the programmer but for anyone whose primary function is to make things of complexity.

Consider preventing the daily standup from becoming a meeting in which the resolution of identified impediments is attempted. And never allow the standup to devolve into an ad hoc project status review and planning meeting with the question, “When will you have X feature done?” being asked.

Consider piling all such meetings to which makers must be in attendance into one single day of the week, perhaps Friday or Monday to ensure the largest contiguous uninterrupted period for making, preferably in the late afternoon, so that we get every ounce of making from our makers that the company’s hard won cash can buy.

It’s more than something to think about. It’s something a manager could manage if the manager simply chose to do so, and it’s something a maker would appreciate more than can be expressed in written word.

I’ve long been taught and believed that the truth will set you free. But fear is a powerful counter to belief, especially when that fear is rooted in the compellingly powerful human instinct to survive, to preserve your livelihood.

I was reading Ken Schwaber’s The Enterprise and Scrum today and came across the following passage which I deeply appreciated. Ken is writing about to the development team’s fear of telling the Product Owner that they cannot deliver on their commitments for a Sprint.

When I discuss this kind of fear at the courses I teach, the attendees’ own fear is palpable. The soon-to-be Scrum users don’t think that the transparency, or truth, is acceptable where they work. They tell me that they will be fired if they tell the truth. Truth isn’t what their customers want to hear. They tell me their customers will find someone else who will lie to the them if they don’t. I have seen this in class after class for five years. People in product development think that their customers want to hear news only if it is good news and would rather hear a lie than the truth. “Lying” is a harsh word. But what else do you call saying that something is true when you know it not to be true? What else do you call misleading someone with information or holding back information that would have led them to better decisions? The Product Owners want to believe in magic, and the developers support their belief by lying. “Can you do this project by this date?” “Sure, no problem.”

The developers are aware of the complexities that cause changes to their original estimates. They are aware that the customer is unhappy. If a project manager is approached by a customer 60 percent of the way through a project and asked how the project is going, the project manager doesn’t really know. She knows that some things are going well. She also knows that some things are not going so well. She also knows that she hasn’t checked up on some things that could prove critical. However, saying “I don’t’ know” is unacceptable, so project managers have learned to say, “Right on,” “Right on target,” “Piece of cake,” or anything equivalent that will get the customer to go away and leave them to try to get everything on time, on cost. Basically, they lie. It is simpler than exposing all the nuances and complexities that add up to “I don’t know.”

Project managers might also believe that lying saves time. But because Scrum relies on transparency, misrepresentation undercuts the entire application of Scrum. If the Product Owners do not know exactly where things stand at any point in time, they will be unable to make the best decisions possible about how to achieve their goals. They need the best information possible, whether they view it as good or bad.

I don’t know anyone in this business who cannot relate to Ken’s assessment. I am coming to the conclusion with every additional year I spend in the role of code monkey that anyone, with proper preparation and context, can handle the truth, even non-technical folk. I am learning to reject the often held notion that these people are just not able to appreciate the nature of complexity.

Yes, Product Owners not only must have the truth but in fact they can handle the truth even when the truth is not welcome news. I have seen Product Owners ignore the truth but I have never been fired because I told the truth. What Product Owners have a very difficult time handling is the sudden discovery of the truth after having been lied to for long periods of time.

Whether we choose to tell the truth from the start or to lie to ourselves and our Product Owners, eventually, as the Bard would be wont say, the truth will out.

So I still believe that the truth will set you free. Fear will leave you miserable and in chains with the secret knowledge that the truth will be discovered sooner or later by those from whom you’ve hidden it. Freedom is so much easier than we sometimes think.

Nothing in this post is original. It’s just my reduction of the principles of class design from Uncle Bob in his Principles of OOD. If you don’t want to read, listen to the Hanselminutes interview with Bob. I just want to record my thoughts on these items here for posterity.

SOLID is just another acronym but if you are writing code it’s one you ought to know about.

SRP – Single Responsibility Principle: “A class should have one, and only one, reason to change.”

OCP – Open Closed Principle: “You should be able to extend a class’s behavior without modifying it.”

LSP – Liskov Substitution Principle: “Derived classes must be substitutable for their base classes.”

ISP – Interface Segregation Principle: “Make fine grained interfaces that are client specific.”

DIP – Dependency Inversion Principle: “Depend on abstractions, not on concretions.”

These are not new ideas and I’ve not visited these lately nor can I claim to practice these principles in everything I do. In fact, I’m sure that I don’t, but I am convinced that the more I follow these principles, the better my code will be.

I’m going to spend the next few days reabsorbing these and reading the PDF docs on the www.objectmentor.com site. If you want to follow along with me, start at the top of this post and follow the links.

Happy reading!

We are looking for a very technical enterprise meetings architect for a large, well established organization in the Washington, DC area. You need to have extensive meetings orchestration experience and be an expert with PowerPoint-centric meetings architecture. You should also have some experience with multimedia animations playback. Advanced direct, teleconferencing and mixed-setting slide or teleprompter reading skills also desired.

A qualified candidate should be an expert in all aspects of the PowerPoint slide development process, including advanced transition and animated playback techniques. Candidates must possess dynamic monotonal verbal script delivery skills and be able to work well within large and sparsely attended meetings. Candidates must be able to translate business meeting requirements into technical meeting architectures and designs while leading a team of meeting engineers in the rapid development, testing and deployment of complex, content rich PowerPoint presentations.

Candidates must have a real passion for PowerPoint and be self-directed, confident and able to perform the task of expanding relatively simple content in thousands of pages of written documentation to accompany large slide decks packed with dense, monotonous text. Candidates should have a face and be able to articulate the written word clearly and in bold tones. Candidates should also be familiar with modern pointing devices such as laser pointers in addition to traditional uses of the stick and index finger to provide emphasis when presenting the finished meeting product.

Meetings Architect Specific Duties:

• Mastery of building and maintaining enterprise meetings frameworks in response to business needs.
• Mentor meetings development staff while implementing best practices and improving meetings design and development processes.
• Work closely with business principals to understand enterprise meetings requirements.
• Translate meeting requirements into workable meetings architectures.
• Present tested, production ready meetings to executive staff for deployment in the field.
• Accompany executive presenters in the field to provide advanced PowerPoint backup and support in critical presentation delivery scenarios.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Ability to apply a broad array of skills and technologies to solve meeting presentation problems.
• Ability to utilize PowerPoint, all versions, and Windows Paint and screen capture tools.
• Ability to rapidly convert a one page outline or two minute conversation into a 60 slide presentation and 230 page accompanying notes and documentation handout.
• BS in Library Science or English or equivalent technical training and professional work experience.
• A minimum of 8+ year's cumulative experience developing enterprise meetings on the Microsoft PowerPoint platform and other technologies i.e. Windows Paint, etc.
• Ability to troubleshoot and diagnosis complex PowerPoint problems.
• Strong composition and obfuscation skills, as well as excessively verbose written and verbal communication skills.

Submit your resume today!

Before you make up your mind about LightSwitch prior to beta release, watch the new video on Channel 9. Before you decide that LightSwitch is for non-developers, watch Joe Binder in this video extend a LightSwitch application with a Silverlight user control and a custom WCF RIA Service.

The key point, I believe, made in the video is that EVERY LightSwitch application is essentially a 3-tier application. The extension of the Data Access tier with WCF RIA Services makes it possible to extend those tiers into the enterprise infrastructure easily.

The demo also makes a very important point. When you write a real LightSwitch application, you will be writing code. While LightSwitch might be appealing to non-professional or hobbyist or business types, whoever uses it successfully will in fact end up writing code. Will they have to be an expert developer. Not if they have support from the enterprise pros that build the infrastructure for the business.

I still want to see and play with the beta before making up my mind, but what I’ve seen so far looks very promising.

Two days ago, Microsoft unveiled Visual Studio LightSwitch. I heard about it first on Somasegar's blog and have followed the chatter and the growing list of blog posts and comments. I watched the Channel 9 preview video and the VS Live keynote video introducing LightSwitch. And then I watched them again making notes.

I'm deeply disappointed in a number of bloggers I regularly read and their many commenters that have parroted their sentiments. I won't name them here. Their negative reactions demonstrate an ill informed prejudice and predisposition to discount all 4GL tools without careful analysis and thoughtful evaluation.

Based on my careful notes of the demo videos and "official" blog posts about the tool, these bloggers and many commenters have made statements and critical judgments of LightSwitch that are demonstrably false or grossly inaccurate. And the first early beta is not even available yet. This rush to judgment ill becomes the professional stature and experience of these otherwise well respected members of the .NET development community.

From a certain point of view, I understand the nearly autonomic reaction of these .NET development community leaders. Professional developers have long dealt with the problems that so often plague solutions created by a host of desktop 4GL tools such as Access, FoxPro, FileMakerPro, PowerBuilder and many others. These tools have been highly successful in the business world seeking to just get something working that they could afford. In enough cases to be considered a plague by many professional developers, these solutions have far exceeded their limits as the business grew and ran into some of the hard and harsh limitations of these tools.

Many professional developers have been put into that crucibal of having to tell the business owner that their pet solution will not scale, has to be completely rewritten, and the effort will cost mega dollars to get a similar solution that will scale and grow with their business. The business owner doesn't want to spend the money, so he insists that the developer just make the 4GL solution work. Happy developers then fire their client. Needy and miserable developers then swallow their pride and spend more hours in frustration dealing with a 4GL too they come to hate more often because the solution wraps around a database that was designed by someone who thinks of dinner when you say the word table.

Scott Adams owes his fame and fortune in no small part to the advent of ill conceived 4GL tools and the more horribly designed solutions created with them by the pointy haired bosses who fancy themselves tech savvy.

So I understand the rush to judgment, but the facts are not there to support the negativity and biased ignorance I've seen in so many recent blog posts and comments.

Anyone can actually take the time to watch the videos and read the official blog posts and carefully consider what they have learned. Any professional presented with a tool for solving a problem that has never been satisfactorily solved in the past who automatically dismisses the latest attempt does himself and those who respect his opinion a disservice.

Here is what I've learned after reviewing the demostrations and taking detailed notes and carefully considering the possibilities without making invalid comparisons to the host of 4GL tools on the market today.

• LightSwitch is NOT a 4GL in the traditional sense of closed source, desktop bound, proprietary database, with few if any extension points.
• LightSwitch is a set of .NET assemblies and Visual Studio designers and project templates that produce a model based on XAML from which a Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services solution is generated.
• LightSwitch is a .NET solution and can be extended in Visual Studio Pro (and up) with standard Silverlight control projects and server side support projects.
• LightSwitch supports three data sources: SQL Server (and SQL Azure), Sharepoint 2010, and most importantly WCF RIA Services. In fact, SQL Server access in the 3-tier solution is done via WCF RIA Services and Entity Framework. I was not able to determine exactly how Sharepoint access is supported under the covers but would assume that the same solution is generated, with WCF RIA Services providing access to the Sharepoint list libraries and other Sharepoint data on the host server.
• There is certainly an incoherent marketing message from Redmond on the subject of the target audience but it is clear that while marketing speak would have business buyers believe that they will be able to write applications without code, the fact is that some coding skill will be required to write even the simplest of applications in LightSwitch where commonly found business rules such as validations and computed values on existing data sets are required.

Based on what I've seen so far, it seems the sweet spot for LightSwitch might be the entry level developer or what one blogger called the "productivity developer" with professional support from senior developers and architects constructing back end systems, designing databases and providing safe and simple WCF RIA Services for the less experienced developer to consume to deliver line of business applications that may never need the skilled hands of the top notch developers.

I want to learn more about LightSwitch and see it and play with it before I make up my mind about its usefulness. I want to see how easy it is to extend and expand a LightSwitch application in Visual Studio Pro as promised but not demonstrated. I want to learn more about the extension points. And I want to see and perhaps participate in providing constructive and informed feedback. More importantly, I want to see what the Microsoft team does with that feedback.

Bottom line. It's far too soon to judge. Let's get the beta and provide Microsoft with some constructive feedback instead of the diatribes I've seen so much of in the last couple of days.