Agile pushes ugliness out of the system

Agile differs from Waterfall in many ways. One significant way is that Agile handles ugliness, and Waterfall doesn't.

Agile starts by defining "ugliness" as an unmet requirement. It could be a new feature or a change to the current one. The Agile process sees the ugliness move through the system, from requirements to test to code to deployment. (Waterfall, in contrast, has the notion of requirements but not the concept of ugliness.)

Let's look at how Agile considers ugliness to be larger than just unmet requirements.

The first stage is an unmet requirement. With the Agile process, development occurs in a set of changes (sometimes called "sprints") with a small set of new requirements. Stakeholders may have a long list of unmet requirements, but a single sprint handles a small, manageable set of them. The "ugliness" is the fact that the system (as it is at the beginning of the sprint) does not perform them.

The second stage transforms the unmet requirements into tests. By creating a test -- an automated test -- the unmet requirement is documented and captured in a specific form. The "ugliness" has been captured and specified.

After capture, changes to code move the "ugliness" from a test to code. A developer changes the system to perform the necessary function, and in doing so changes the code. But the resulting code may be "ugly" -- it may duplicate other code, or it may be difficult to read.

The fourth stage (after unmet requirements, capture, and coding) is to remove the "ugliness" of the code. This is the "refactoring" stage, when code is improved without changing the functions it performs. Modifying the code to remove the ugliness is the last stage. After refactoring, the "ugliness" is gone.

The ability to handle "ugliness" is the unique capability of Agile methods. Waterfall has no concept of code quality. It can measure the number of defects, the number of requirements implemented, and even the number of lines of code, but it doesn't recognize the quality of the code. The quality of the code is simply its ability to deliver functionality. This means that ugly code can collect, and collect, and collect. There is nothing in Waterfall to address it.

Agile is different. Agile recognizes that code quality is important. That's the reason for the "refactor" phase. Agile transforms requirements into tests, then into ugly code, and finally into beautiful (or at least non-ugly) code. The result is requirements that are transformed into maintainable code.

The changing role of IT

The original focus of IT was efficiency and accuracy. Today, the expectation still includes efficiency and accuracy, yet adds increased revenue and expanded capabilities for customers.

IT has been with us for more than half a century, if you count IT as not only PCs and servers but also minicomputers, mainframes, and batch processing systems for accounting and finance.

Computers were originally large, expensive, and fussy beasts. They required an whole room to themselves. Computers cost a lot of money. Mainframes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions). They needed a coterie of attendants: operators, programmers, service technicians, and managers.

Even the early personal computers were expensive. A PC in the early 1980s cost three to five thousand dollars. They didn't need a separate room, but they were a significant investment.

The focus was on efficiency. Computers were meant to make companies more efficient, processing transactions and generating reports faster and more accurately than humans.

Because of their cost, we wanted computers to operate as efficiently as possible. Companies who purchased mainframes would monitor CPU and disk usage to ensure that they were operating in the ninety-percent range. If usage was higher than that, they knew they needed to expand their system; if less, they had spent too much on hardware.

Today, we focus less on efficiency and more on growing the business. We view automation and big data as mechanisms for new services and ways to acquire new customers.

That's quite a shift from the "spend just enough to print accounting reports" mindset. What changed?

I can think of two underlying changes.

First, the size and cost of computers have dropped. A cell phone that fits in your pocket and costs less than a thousand dollars. Laptop PCs can be acquired for similar prices; Chromebooks for significantly less. Phones, tablets, Chromebooks, and even laptops can be operated by a single person.

The drop in cost means that we can worry less about internal efficiency. Buying a mainframe computer that was too large was an expensive mistake. Buying an extra laptop is almost unnoticed. Investing in IT is like any other investment, with a potential return of new business.

Yet there is another effect.

In the early days of IT (from the 1950s to the 1980s), computers were mysterious and almost magical devices. Business managers were unfamiliar with computers. Many people weren't sure that computers would remain tame, and some feared that they would take over (the company, the country, the world). Managers didn't know how to leverage computers to their full extent. Investors were wary of the cost. Customers resisted the use of computer-generated cards that read "do not fold, spindle, or mutilate".

Today, computers are not mysterious, and certainly not magical. They are routine. They are mundane. And business managers don't fear them. Instead, managers see computers as a tool. Investors see them as equipment. Customers willingly install apps on their phones.

I'm not surprised. The business managers of the 1950s grew up with manual processes. Senior managers might have remembered an age without electricity.

Today's managers are comfortable with computers. They used them as children, playing video games and writing programs in BASIC. The thought that computers can assist the business in various tasks is a natural extension of that experience.

Our view of computers has shifted. The large, expensive, magical computation boxes have shrunk and become cheaper, and are now small, flexible, and powerful computation boxes. Simply owning (or leasing) a mainframe would provide strategic advantage through intimidation; now everyone can leverage server farms, networks, cloud computing, and real-time updates. But owning (or leasing) a server farm or a cloud network isn't enough to impress -- managers, customers, and investors look for business results.

With a new view of computers as mundane, its no surprise that businesses look at them as a way to grow.

Spaghetti in the Cloud

Will cloud computing eliminate spaghetti code? The question is a good one, and the answer is unclear.

First, let's understand the term "spaghetti code". It is a term that dates back to the 1970s according to Wikipedia and was probably an argument for structured programming techniques. Unstructured programming was harder to read and understand, and the term introduced an analogy of messy code.

Spaghetti code was bad. It was hard to understand. It was fragile, and small changes led to unexpected failures. Structured programming was, well, structured and therefore (theoretically) spaghetti programming could not occur under the discipline of structured programming.

But theory didn't work quite right, and even with the benefits of structured programming, we found that we had code that was difficult to maintain. (In other words, spaghetti code.)

After structured programming, object-oriented programming was the solution. Object-oriented programming, with its ability to group data and functions into classes, was going to solve the problems of spaghetti code.

Like structured programming before it, object-oriented programming didn't make all code easy to read and modify.

Which brings us to cloud computing. Will cloud computing suffer from "spaghetti code"? Will we have difficult to read and difficult to maintain systems in the cloud?

The obvious answer is "yes". Companies and individuals who transfer existing (difficult to read) systems into the cloud will have ... difficult-to-understand code in the cloud.

The more subtle answer is... "yes".

The problems of difficult-to-read code is not the programming style (unstructured, structured, or object-oriented) but in mutable state. "State" is the combination of values for all variables and changeable entities in a program. For a program with mutable state, these variables change over time. For one to read and understand the code, one must understand the current state, that is, the current value of all of those values. But to know the current value of those variables, one must understand all of the operations that led to the current state, and that list can be daunting.

The advocates of functional programming (another programming technique) doesn't allow for mutable variables. Variables are fixed and unchanging. Once created, they exist and retain their value forever.

With cloud computing, programs (and variables) do not hold state. Instead, state is stored in databases, and programs run "stateless". Programs are simpler too, with a cloud system using smaller programs linked together with databases and message queues.

But that doesn't prevent people from moving large, complicated programs into the cloud. It doesn't prevent people from writing large, complicated programs in the cloud. Some programs in the cloud will be small and easy to read. Others will be large and hard to understand.

So, will spaghetti code exist in the cloud? Yes. But perhaps not as much as in previous technologies.

How programming languages change

Programming languages change. That's not news. Yet programming languages cannot change arbitrarily; the changes are constrained. We should be aware of this, and pick our technology with this in mind.

If we think of a programming language as a set of features, then programming languages can change in three ways:

Add a feature
Modify a feature
Remove a feature

The easiest change (that is, the type with the least resistance from users) is adding a feature. That's no surprise; it allows all of the old programs to continue working.

Modifying an existing feature or removing a feature is a difficult business. It means that some programs will no longer work. (If you're lucky, they won't compile, or the interpreter will reject them. If you're not lucky, the compiler or interpreter will accept them but process them differently.)

So as a programming language changes, the old features remain. Look inside a modern Fortran compiler and you will find FORMAT statements and arithmetic IF constructs, elements of Fortran's early days.

When a programming language changes enough, we change its name. We (the tech industry) modified the C language to mandate prototypes and in doing so we called the revised language "ANSI C". When Stroustup enhanced C to handle object-oriented concepts, he called it "C with Classes". (We've since named it "C++".)

Sometimes we change not the name but the version number. Visual Basic 4 was quite different from Visual Basic 3, and Visual Basic 5 was quite different from Visual Basic 4 (two of the few examples of non-compatible upgrades). Yet the later versions retained the flavor of Visual Basic, so keeping the name made sense.

Perl 6 is different from Perl 5, yet it still runs old code with a compatibility layer.

Fortran can add features but must remain "Fortranish", otherwise we call it "BASIC" or "FOCAL" or something else. Algol must remain Algol or we call it "C". An enhanced Pascal is called "Object Pascal" or "Delphi".

Language names bound a set of features for the language. Change the feature set beyond the boundary, and you also change the name of the language. Which means that a language can change only so much, in only certain dimensions, while remaining the same language.

When we start a project and select a programming language, we're selecting a set of features for development. We're locking ourselves into a future, one that may expand over time -- or may not -- but will remain centered over its current point. COBOL will always be COBOL, C++ will always be C++, and Ruby will always be Ruby. A COBOL program will always be a COBOL program, a C++ program will always be a C++ program, and a Ruby program will always be a Ruby program.

A lot of this is psychology. We certainly could make radical changes to a programming language (any language) and keep the name. But while we *could* do this, we don't. We make small, gradual changes. The changes to programming languages (I hesitate to use the words "improvements" or "progress") are glacial in nature.

I think that tells us something about ourselves, not the technology.

Oracle's Java Headaches

Oracle, after its purchase of Sun Microsystems, has found that it owns a number of things including MySQL and Java. MySQL presents obvious problems, as it competes with Oracle's big, expensive database. But Java also presents problems.

Oracle has two challenges with Java. The first (and obvious) challenge is money. Specifically, how does Oracle "monetize" Java? Extracting money from programming languages is possible; Microsoft succeeded with BASIC, Visual Basic, and C#. (Although the last was really profitable through Visual Studio, not the language itself.)

Extracting money from Java remains elusive. Oracle's latest attempt to sue Google has failed. It was a "whale" strategy, designed to obtain a large amount from a single entity. With the loss in court, will Oracle look for a different strategy, perhaps one that looks for fees from more (and smaller) entities?

Revenue is one headache for Oracle. A second headache exists, one that is less obvious, and may show up in the expense, not revenue column.

Oracle's history has been with SQL, a language designed in the 1970s for accessing data. As a programming language, it has been remarkably stable, with only a few changes since its inception. In contrast, programming languages like Visual Basic, C, C++, and C# have seen frequent and sometimes significant changes. Java, too, has seen changes, and it has the "JCP", the Java Community Process, which allows just about anyone to recommend changes to the Java language.

This second challenge is more subtle, and possibly larger, for Oracle. After decades of a stable, unchanging language, is it capable of managing a fast-moving programming language? After decades of maintaining the Oracle database (which I'm sure had lots of internal changes and lots of changes requested by Oracle's relatively few high-paying customers) is Oracle ready to maintain a product used by "the rest of us"?

This is the bigger issue for Oracle. Maintaining the Java code base, adapting it to new platforms, adding features to the language, and putting up with all of the pesky requests from pipsqueaks (highly opinionated pipsqueaks, some of us are) is going to be expensive.

So Oracle is in a squeeze. On one side, Java has no significant revenue. On the other, it has expenses (possibly higher than the expenses for the Oracle database). How will Oracle navigate these straights?

I see a few possible ways forward:

Find a funding mechanism Perhaps licenses, perhaps advertising. Perhaps a version of Java for the Internet of Things.

Tie Java to the Oracle database Make Oracle the easiest database to use in Java.

Keep Java but stop development A fast was to reduce costs, but also a fast way to anger users. (On the other hand, Oracle seems to care little about user opinion.)

Spin off Java If Java doesn't fit into Oracle's strategy, why bother to keep it?

The last is an interesting idea. IBM might be interested in Java. Google almost certainly would. Microsoft probably not so much -- except perhaps to prevent Google from acquiring it.

DOS, Windows, sharing, and mobile

Windows, when it arrived on the scene, changed the world of computing. Prior to Windows, DOS ruled the computing world, and it was a limited world. Windows expanded that world with new capabilities. In some ways, mobile operating systems (Android and iOS) move us back towards the ways of DOS.

IBM PCs (or compatibles, or near-compatibles) running DOS were simple devices. They could run one program at a time; running multiple programs at once was not possible. (Technically, it was possible with a "terminate and stay resident" function call, but such programs were few. For this essay, I'll stick to the "regular" programs.)

Windows brought us an expanded view of computing. Instead of running a single program at a time, Windows allowed for multiple. Windows provided a common way to present text and graphics on the screen, to print to printers, and to share data. Windows was a large step upward from the world of DOS.

Mobile operating systems -- Android and iOS -- provide a different experience. Instead of multiple applications and multiple windows, these operating systems present one application (or "app") at a time. Multiple apps may run, but only one has the screen. Thus, you can listen to music, check e-mail, and get a text message all at the same time. Mobile apps keep the multitasking aspect, but reduce the interaction to one app at a time.

Reducing the number of interactive apps to one is a reduction in capabilities, although it is a simpler experience, and one that makes sense for a phone. (I think it also makes sense for a tablet.)

What I don't see in the mobile operating systems (and what I don't see in Windows, either) is improvements in the ability to share data across applications. DOS had files and pipes (concepts lifted from Unix). Windows added the clipboard, and then Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and later, drag-and-drop. The clipboard was popular and is still used today. DDE never got traction, and drag-and-drop is limited to files.

Sharing data across applications is difficult. Each application has its own ideas about data. Word processors hold characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and documents. Spreadsheets hold numeric values, formulas, cells, rows, columns, and sheets. Databases hold rows and columns -- or "documents" (different from word processor documents) for NoSQL databases. The transfer of data from one application to another is not obvious, and therefore the programming of such transfers is not obvious.

But Windows has had the clipboard for thirty years, and DDE and drag-and-drop for almost as long. Have we had no ideas in that time?

Perhaps our current mobile operating systems are the DOSes of today, waiting for a new, bold operating system to provide new capabilities.