Tag: practices

Handovers, hangovers

Handover like a pro

 

Recently I started to read a book, the one that Christian was praising so many times. I’m just through the first few chapters but already one of the sentences sounds in my head all the time. John Seddon, in “Freedom from Command and Control” writes how there was an improvement made to a process in one of the call centres. He said that “all the information was filed in the form so it was never coming back from the downstream person with the request for missing information”. This one off step was making improvement as it was never coming back.

John explained that it was possible to realise the impact once someone took a step back a took a look at the system and the flow through it as a whole.

 

This made me think about something that my other colleague, Pat did at work. When he was rolling off the project, he WIKIed all the information about it and left the Spike (proof of concept) code in the repository. He also made some comments in a code, whenever it was not entirely clear of its intention. It was one of the best handovers with no direct contact I was ever involved in.

I realised that the handovers should be looked at from a different perspective.

Typical approach is to … drop whatever at someone and let him finish the work. Whenever more information is necessary, it could be chased.

Instead, I should prepare handover in a way that would make it possible for a person who will pick up the work after, to have a brief look (at the code in my case), realise where the info is (wiki, tests, some comments) and move on with the flow.

Funny enough it encourages some good coding and work practices, like:

Handovers are a problem and should be avoided when possible. When programming is involved, Pairing reduces the danger of the need for them. If not, all the members should concentrate on the most important thing, make sure the work keeps flowing through the system and what could I do to make it happen.

Cheers, Greg

How to use simulators during web development

Ski SimulatorThis is probably two topics that I would like to combine into one, as they are related in the context I will be writing about.

In one of the previous articles I wrote about the story wall that we evolved on our project. Christian in his article, described the way we worked not in pairs but in threesomes. Two developers and a QA. This was the way that involved iterative, small-steps, story delivery with constant showcasing to QA. QA was able to instantly check the correctness of a functionality, business logic, even a site layout and provide feedback to devs about it.

As any application (at least majority of them) our application has multiple points of integration to other systems. Database, web services, file system etc. One of the integration points was delivered some time ago and never tested, we were ready for a problems and bugs.

It would be very unwise to stop development because the part of the system needs fixing or some rework carried. We decided that we will shield our selfs with the layer of wrappers around third party systems , that we called Anti Corruption Layer.

The Layer gives as a constant API controlled by ourselves but it doesn’t mean that we can continue our way of working and constantly showcase all the acceptance criteria to our QAs and BAs.

We decided to bring on simulators on a board and hooking them into our anti corruption layer. This is how we achieved it:

Control

It would be very painful to switch simulator on or off using configuration in one of the file. Knowledge about the environment was not sufficient enough as we don’t want simulators to be on or off all the time. What we decided was to create a class called SimulatorDecider that will use two variables to determine if the Simulator should be on or off: current environment and a browser cookie.

The environment variable allowed us to switch simulators off regardless of the cookie, in any environment other than DEV or TEST.

Cookie in web browser is very simple to set and to remove. We created a little page called Cookie Monster that has a simple on/off buttons for setting and removing the Simulator cookie.
The approach gives a possibility to control and switch on/off different parts of the system by using different cookies for each parts.

Simulator

We have a bunch of wrappers around the integration points. The one that we are interested in, the one that we would like to simulate, we decorate with Configurable object and inject SimulatorDecider into it. This is how it works:


interface IFoo
{
  ReturnType DoStuff(ParameterType type);
}

public class Foo : IFoo
{
  public ReturnType DoStuff(ParameterType type)
  {
    // Doing some real stuff that is very important
  }
}

public class SimulatedFoo : IFoo
{
  public ReturnType DoStuff(ParameterType type)
  {
    // Doing some other stuff that is only SIMULATED
  }
}

public class ConfigurableFoo : IFoo
{
  private SimulatorDecider _simulatorDecider;

  public SimulatedFoo(SimulatorDecider simulatorDecider, IFoo realFoo, IFoo simulatedFoo)
  {
    _simulatorDecider = simulatorDecider;
  }
  public ReturnType DoStuff(ParameterType type)
  {
    if (_simulatorDecider.ShouldSimulate())
    {
      return _simulatedFoo.DoStuff(type);
    }
    return _realFoo.DoStuff(type);
  }
}

Because we are using dependency injection container (Yadic) we don’t need to worry about dependencies.
It is also possible to not code SimulatedFoo as separate type and just inline simulated behavior within the configurable type. We made this decision on a base of how complex the simulated behavior should be.

Hope you find this useful when you stuck on integration pice that you don’t know how to carry on 🙂
Comments are welcome as always 🙂

Greg