The Holistic Programmer
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The document discusses the concept of a "holistic programmer" who takes a whole-team approach. A holistic programmer sees the big picture even when working on parts, communicates well with the team, and shares responsibility. The challenges of seeing the whole picture while minding details and having business and technical people understand each other are addressed. The solutions involve generalizing specialists who learn new skills, taking responsibility for multiple tasks, and processes like "ready-ready" and "done-done" that improve communication. The holistic programmer aims to foster team learning and get better through communication and inspection/adaptation.
The Holistic Programmer
- 1. Holistic Programmer Agile India 2012 17-2-2012 Bangalore India
- 2. Holistic - A Definition The parts of a solution are interconnected and can only be understood in reference to the whole
- 3. The Holistic Programmer ● Attempts to see the whole picture even when working on the parts of a solution ● Communicates with and supports the whole team
- 4. About Me Jonas Auken ● Dane living in New Delhi ● Computer Science and Science of Religion ● Developer ● Architect ● Product Owner by Proxy ● Coach ● Agile Evangelist
- 5. Agenda The Challenge ● Seeing the Whole Picture ● Minding the details The Solution ● Generalizing Specialists ● Communication
- 6. Quality is holistic ● is not the number of defects ● is not a liquid that can be poured on when the product is done - like icing on the cake ● is implementing solutions, not software components
- 9. Problem 1: Whole Picture The team must have responsibility for the whole solution
- 10. Solution 1: Whole Team ● Traditionally, optimization of work splits solutions into smaller tasks given to individual people ● Whole work goes the other way - individual people are solving complete solutions ● But that's not really viable - or is it?
- 11. Waterfall Model
- 12. Whole Team
- 13. Whole Team Responsibility ● Quality ● Clean code ● Well formed product backlog ● Look and feel ● Performance ● Success AND failure "The whole team should feel responsible for all aspects of the product." Mike Cohn - Succeding with Agile
- 14. Discussion Are you a slice programmer - or a part of a whole team? Think about the last feature you developed - did you work on it end to end? Think about your team - what do you do to be a whole team?
- 15. Problem 2: Details Each team member must have responsibility for every detail
- 16. Solution 2: Generalizing Specialists ● Take responsibility for other tasks than your own ● Learn new skills that enable you to take on more different tasks ● Communicate!
- 17. Agile Process - Scrum Analysis => Business Expert Database => SQL Programmer User Interface => Front End Developer Unit Tests => Tester User Acceptance Test => Usability Expert Even in Scrum, we have silos...
- 18. Generalizing Specialist - A Definition 1. Has one or more technical specialties 2. General knowledge of software development 3. General knowledge of the business domain 4. Actively seeks to gain new skills Scott W. Ambler - Generalizing Specialists: Improving Your IT Career Skills
- 19. Skills evolving over time
- 20. Why Generalizing Specialists? 1. Improved communication and collaboration 2. Less documentation 3. Improved flexibility 4. Less handover, less risk 5. Fewer bottlenecks
- 21. Discussion ● Are you a specialist or a generalist? ● Or are you a generalizing specialist? ● What do you do to learn new skills?
- 22. Problem 3: Communication Technical people must understand business people (and vice versa)
- 23. Solution 3: Processes Ready - Ready Done - Done
- 24. Ready - Ready ● Estimated < 1 iteration ● User Story complete ○ Business rules clarified ○ Error handling described ○ Test cases written ● Text and mockup ready ● User Story reviewed ● Automated test described ● Technical dependencies clarified ○ Backends ○ Services ○ Data
- 25. Done - Done ● Functionality done ● Design reviewed ● Deployed to test environment ● Unit and integration tests successful ● Automatic tests successful ● User Acceptance Test successful ● Code coverage > 90 % ● Documented ● Code reviewed
- 27. Teamwork ● Nurture whole team commitment ● Rely on specialist but sparingly ● Do a little bit of everything all the time ● Foster team learning ○ Design teams for learning ○ Find concrete ways to share knowledge ○ Exhibit behaviour that reinforces learning ○ Teams must have a motivating challenge ○ Create a supportive learning environment Mike Cohn: Succeding with Agile
- 28. The Holistic Programmer ● Be part of the team ● Share responsibility with others ● Inspect and adapt ● Get better! ● Communicate
- 29. Questions & Comments What's on your mind?
- 30. References Scott Ambler: Generalizing Specialists: Improving Your IT Career Skills http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/generalizingSpecialists.htm Kent Beck: Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change Mike Cohn: Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum