Thanks to Rob Bell from Kinaxis for sharing his notes from the September 2005 session.

TOPIC

The topic for last night’s session was: Development best practices: a panel discussion on the two or three key practices they introduced in their development teams that really made a difference in quality and productivity. Panel members came from : Autoskill, Macadamian, Corel, Alcatel. The moderator was from Cognos. All participants were managerial staff, mostly VPs and directors.

MY NOTES

Here is a dump of interesting ideas that came up in the course of the evening.

PROCESS

It was clear that good process, although challenging to introduce and maintain, was a critical success factor: Processes highlighted were: Scrum (Agile), Iterative, CMM.

PROCESS IMPLEMENTATION SUCCESS

• Teams need to buy in to the overall goals of a process
• Communication needs to be a non-optional part of every developer’s job description
• Processes need to be selected and adapted to particular projects
• ‘Short cycle’ type processes (like iterative, lean) seem to be more successful
• Iterative process artifacts need to be kept lean. Only create artifacts when you understand who the consumer is and why they need it.
• Once a working process is in place you need to maintain a balance of rigor with a willingness to adapt the process to changing circumstances. HOWEVER, the team must own the process and be empowered to change it once all dependencies of proposed changes are understood and addressed.
• The process IS the product.
• Best process is bubbled up through the team, with the right framework, a clear champion (owner), documentation and ‘on demand’ training. Pushing a process down from the top, even when it’s the product of ‘deep thought’ by senior staff rarely succeeds.
• Having the most experienced and respected developers follow and promote the process leads to faster adoption.

FAILURES

• Long range detailed project plans consistently fail because one day after the plan is complete, things change and it’s no longer relevant.’
• Partially baked process implementations may lead to great risk

CODE INSPECTIONS

• Statistically proven to reduce software development costs
• Should be used in concert with automated testing for maximum benefit
• Daily code reviews, to avoid having to review very large amounts of code at once, are most effective
• Failure to review, or reviews which are slipshod, should have consequences.

COOL IDEAS

• 4 to 6 month internships at different companies to stimulate new thinking
• ‘no tester’ development teams who are responsible for testing. Their laziness will cause them to build great tools to automate testing.
• Daily builds with automated regression tests. Results reported directly to developers for action.
• FORGET POST MORTEMS- Conduct a ‘let’s apply lessons learned last time’ to the beginning of the next project at the kickoff session. That way, ‘lessons learned’ actually get used.
• Daily standup meetings are great for synchronizing teams
• Use wiki to promote communication (http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki)

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