7 Agile Best Practices that You Don’t Need to Follow

There are many good ideas and practices in Agile development, ideas and practices that definitely work: breaking projects into Small Releases to manage risk and accelerate feedback; time-boxing to limit WIP and keep everyone focused; relying only on working software as the measure of progress; simple estimating and using velocity to forecast team performance; working closely and constantly with the customer; and Continuous Integration – and Continuous Delivery – to ensure that code is always working and stable.

But there are other commonly accepted ideas and best practices that aren’t important: if you don’t follow them, nothing bad will happen to you and your project will still succeed. And there are a couple that you are better off not following at all.

Test-Driven Development

Teams that need to move quickly need to depend on a fast, efficient testing safety net. With Test First Development or Test-Driven Development (TDD), there’s no excuse for not writing tests – after all, you have to write a failing test before you write the code. So you end up with a good set of working automated tests that ensure a high level of coverage and regression protection.

TDD is not only a way of ensuring that developers test their code. It is also advocated as a design technique that leads to better quality code and a simpler, cleaner design.

A study of teams at Microsoft and IBM (Realizing Quality Improvement through Test Driven Development, Microsoft Research, 2008) found that while TDD increased upfront development costs between 15-35% (TDD demands developers change the way that they think and work, which slows developers down, at least at first), it reduced defect density by 40% (IBM) or as much as 60-90% (Microsoft) over teams that did not follow disciplined unit testing.

But in Making Software Chapter 12 “How Effective is Test-Driven Development” researchers led by Burak Turhan found that while TDD improves external quality (measured by one or more of test cases passed, number of defects, defect density, defects per test, effort required to fix defects, change density, % of preventative changes) and can improve the quality of the tests (fewer mistakes in the tests, tests that are easier to maintain), TDD does not consistently improve the quality of the design. TDD seems to reduce code complexity and improve reuse, however it also negatively impacts coupling and cohesion. And while method and class-level complexity is better in code developed using TDD, project/package level complexity is worse.

People who like TDD like it a lot, so if you like it, do it. And even if you are not TDD-infected, there are times when working test first is natural – when you have to solve a specific problem in a specific way, or if you’re fixing a bug where the failing test case is already written up for you. But the important thing is that you write a good set of tests and keep them up to date and run them frequently – it doesn't matter if you write them before, or after, you write the code.

Pair Programming

According to the VersionOne State of Agile Development Survey 2012, almost 1/3 of teams follow pair programming – a surprisingly high number, given how disciplined pair programming is, and how few teams follow XP (2%) or Scrum/XP Hybrid (11%) methods where pair programming would be prescribed.

There are good reasons for pairing: information sharing and improving code quality through continuous, informal code reviews as developers work together. And there are natural times to pair developers, or sometimes developers and testers, together: when you’re working through a hard design problem; or on code that you’ve never seen before and somebody who has worked on it is available to help; or when you’re over your head in troubleshooting a high-pressure problem; or testing a difficult part of the system; or when a new person joins the team and needs to learn about the code and coding practices.

Some (extroverted) people enjoy pairing up, the energy it creates and the opportunities it provides to get to know others on the team. But forcing people who prefer working on their own or who don’t like each other to work closely together is definitely not a good idea. There are real social costs in pairing: you have to be careful to pair people up by skill, experience, style, personality type and work ethic. And sustained pair programming can be exhausting, especially over the long term – one study (Vanhanen and Lassenius 2007) found that people only pair between 1.5 and 4 hours a day on average, because it’s too intense to do all day long.

In Pair Programming Considered Harmful? Jon Evans says that pairing can have also negative effects on creativity:

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption … What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed,” says a New York Times article castigating “the new groupthink”.

And in “Still Questioning Extreme Programming” Pete McBreen points out some other disadvantages and weaknesses of pair programming:

• Exploration of ideas is not encouraged, pairing makes a developer focus on writing the code, so unless there is time in the day for solo exploration the team gets a very superficial level of understanding of the code.
• Developers can come to rely too much on the unit tests, assuming that if the tests pass then the code is OK. (This follows on from the lack of exploration.)
• Corner cases and edge cases are not investigated in detail, especially if they are hard to write tests for.
• Code that requires detail thinking about the design is hard to do when pairing unless one partner completely dominates the session. With the usual tradeoff between partners, it is hard to build technically complex designs unless they have been already been worked out in a solo session.
• Personal styles matter when pairing, and not all pairings are as productive as others.
• Pairs with different typing skills and proficiencies often result in the better typist doing all of the coding with the other partner being purely passive.

And of course pairing in distributed teams doesn't work well if at all (depending on distance, differences in time zones, culture, working styles, language), although some people still try.

While pairing does improve code quality over solo programming, you can get the same improvements in code quality, and at least some of the information sharing advantages, through code reviews, at less cost. Code reviews – especially lightweight, offline reviews – are easier to schedule, less expensive and less intrusive than pairing. And as Jason Cohen points out even if developers are pair programming, you may still need to do code reviews, because pair programming is really about joint problem solving, and doesn’t cover all of the issues that a code review would.

Back to Jon Evans for the final word on pair programming:

The true answer is that there is no one answer; that what works best is a dynamic combination of solitary, pair, and group work, depending on the context, using your best judgement. Paired programming definitely has its place. (Betteridge’s Law strikes again!) In some cases that place may even be “much of most days.” But insisting on 100 percent pairing is mindless dogma, and like all mindless dogma, ultimately counterproductive.

Emergent Design and Metaphor

Incremental development works, and trying to keep design simple makes good sense, but attempting to define an architecture on the fly is foolish and impractical. There’s a reason that almost nobody actually follows Emergent Design: it doesn't work.

Relying on a high-level metaphor (the system is an "assembly line" or a "bill of materials" or a "hive of bees") shared by the team as some kind of substitute for architecture is even more ridiculous. Research from Carnegie Mellon University found that

… natural language metaphors are relatively useless for either fostering communication among technical and non-technical project members or in developing architecture.

Almost no one understands what a system metaphor is any ways, or how it is to be used, or how to choose a meaningful metaphor or how to change it if you got it wrong (and how you would know if you got it wrong), including one of the people who helped come up with the idea:

Okay I might as well say it publicly - I still haven't got the hang of this metaphor thing. I saw it work, and work well on the C3 project, but it doesn't mean I have any idea how to do it, let alone how to explain how to do it.
Martin Fowler, Is Design Dead?

Agile development methods have improved development success and shown better ways to approach many different software development problems – but not architecture and design.

Daily Standups

When you have a new team and everyone needs to get to know each other and more time to understand what the project is about; or when the team is working under emergency conditions trying to fix something or finish something under extreme pressure, then getting everyone together in regular meetings, maybe even more than once a day, is necessary and valuable. But whether everyone stands up or sits down and what they end up talking about in a meeting should be up to you.

If your team has been working well together for a while and everyone knows each other and knows what they are working on, and if developers update cards on a task board or a Kanban board or the status in an electronic system as they get things done, and if they are grown up enough to ask for help when they need it, then you don’t need to make them all stand up in a room every morning.

Collective Code Ownership

Letting everyone work on all of the code isn't always practical (because not everyone on the team has the requisite knowledge or experience to work on every problem) and collective code ownership can have negative effects on code quality.

Share code where it makes sense to do so, but realize that not everybody can – or should – work on every part of the system.

Writing All Requirements as Stories

The idea that every requirement specification can be written as User Stories in 1 or 2 lines on cards, that requirements should be too short on purpose (so that the developer has to talk to someone to explain what’s really needed) and insisting that they should all be in the same template form

“As a type of user I want some goal so that some reason…”

is silly and unnecessary. This is the same kind of simple minded orthodoxy that led everyone to try to capture all requirements in UML Use Case format with stick men and bubbles 15 years ago.

There are many different ways to effectively express requirements. Sometimes requirements need to be specified in detail (when you have to meet regulatory compliance or comply with a standard or integrate with an existing system or implement a specific algorithm or…). Sometimes it’s better to work from a test case or a detailed use case scenario or a wire frame or some other kind of model, because somebody who knows what’s going on has already worked out the details for you. So pick the format and level of detail that works best and get to work.

Relying on a Product Owner

Relying on one person as the Product Owner, as the single solitary voice of the customer and the “one throat to choke” when the project fails, doesn't scale, doesn't last, and puts the team and the project and eventually the business at risk. It’s a naïve, dangerous approach to designing a product and to managing a development project, and it causes more problems than it solves.

Many teams have realized this and are trying to work around the Product Owner idea because they have to. To succeed, a team needs real and sustained customer engagement at multiple levels, and they should take responsibility themselves for making sure that they get what they need, rather than relying on one person to do it all.

What does Code Ownership do to Code?

In my last post, I talked about Code Ownership models, and why you might want to choose one code ownership model (strong, weak/custodial or collective) over another. Most of the arguments over code ownership focus on managing people, team dynamics, and the effects on delivery. But what about the longer term effects on the shape, structure and quality of code – does the ownership model make a difference? What are the long-term effects of letting everyone working on the same code, or of having 1 or 2 people working on the same pieces of code for a long time?

Collective Code Ownership and Code Quality

Over time, changes tend to concentrate in certain areas of code: in core logic and in and behind interfaces (listen to Michael Feathers’ fascinating talk Discovering Startling Things from your Version Control System). This means that the longer a system has been running, the more chances there are for people to touch the same code. Some interesting research work backs up what should be obvious: that the people who understand the code the best are the people who work on it the most, and the people who know the code the best make less mistakes when changing it.

In Don’t Touch my Code!, researchers at Microsoft (BTW, the lead author Christian Bird is not a relative of mine, at least not a relative who I know) found that as more people touch the same piece of code, it leads to more opportunities for misunderstandings and more mistakes. Not surprisingly, people who hadn't worked on a piece of code before made more mistakes, and as the number of developers working on the same module increased, so did the chance of introducing bugs.

Another study, Ownership and Experience in Fix-Inducing Code tries to answer which is more important in code quality: “too many cooks spoil the broth”, or “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”? Does more people working on the same code lead to more bugs, or does having more people working on the code mean that there are more chances to find bugs early? This research team found that a programmer’s specific experience with the code was the most important factor in determining code quality – code that is changed by the programmer who does most of the work on that code is of higher quality than code written by someone who doesn't normally work on the code, even if that someone is a senior developer who has worked on other parts of the code. And they found that the fewer the people working on a piece of code, the fewer the bugs that needed to be fixed.

And a study on contributions to Linux reinforces that as the number of developers working on the same piece of code increase, the chance of bugs and security problems increases significantly: code touched by more than 9 developers is 16x more likely to have security vulnerabilities, and more vulnerabilities are introduced by developers who are making changes across many different pieces of code.

Long-term Effects of Ownership Approach on Code Structure

I've worked at shops where the same programmers have owned the same code for 3 or 4 or 5 or even 10 years or sometimes even longer. Over that time, that programmer’s biases, strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies are all amplified, wearing deep grooves in the code. This can be a good thing, and a bad thing.

The good thing is that with one person making most or all of the changes, internal consistency in any piece of code will be high – you can look at a piece of code written by that developer and once you understand their approach and way of thinking, the patterns and idioms that they prefer, everything should be familiar and easy to follow. Their style and approach might have changed over time as they learned and improved as a developer, but you can generally anticipate how the rest of the code will work, and you’ll recognize what they are good at and what their blind spots are, what kind of mistakes they are prone to: as I mentioned in the earlier post, this makes code easier to review and easier to test and so easier to find and fix bugs.

If a developer tends to write good, clean, tight code, and if they are diligent about refactoring and keeping the code clean and tight, then most of the code will be good, clean, tight and easy to follow. Of course it follows that if they tend to write sloppy, hard-to-understand, poorly structured code, then most of it will be sloppy, hard-to-understand and poorly-structured. Then again, even this can be a good thing – at least bad code is isolated, and you know what you have to rewrite, instead of someone spreading a little bid of badness everywhere.

When ownership changes – when the primary contributor leaves, and a new owner takes over, the structure and style of the code will change as well. Maybe not right away, because a new owner usually takes some time to get used to the code before they put their stamp on it, but at some point they’ll start adapting it – even unconsciously – to their own preferences and biases and ways of thinking, refactoring or rewriting it to suit them.

If a lot of developers have worked on the same piece of code, they will introduce different ideas, techniques and approaches over time as they each do their part, as they refactor and rewrite things according to their own ideas of what is easy to understand and what isn't, what’s right and wrong. They will each make different kinds of mistakes. Even with clear and consistent shared team conventions and standards, differences and inconsistencies can build up over time, as people leave and new people join the team, creating dissonance and making it harder to follow a thought through the code, harder to test and review, and harder to hold on to the design.

Ownership Models and Refactoring

But as Michael Feathers has found through mining version control history, there is also a positive Ownership Effect on code as more people work on the same code.

Over time, methods and classes tend to get bigger because it’s easier to add code to an existing method than to write a new method, and easier to add another method to an existing class than create a new class. By correlating the number of developers who have touched a piece of code with method size, Feathers research shows that as the number of developers working on a piece of code increases, the average method size tends to get smaller. In other words, having multiple people working on a code base encourages refactoring and simpler code, because people who aren't familiar with the code have to simplify it first in order to understand it.

Feathers has also found that code behind APIs tends to be especially messy – because some interfaces are too hard to change, programmers are forced to come up with their own workarounds behind the scenes. Martin Fowler explains how this problem is made worse by strong code ownership, which inhibits refactoring and makes the code more internally rigid:

In strong code ownership, there's my code and your code. I can't change your code. If I want to change the name of one of my methods, and it's called by your code, I've got to get you to change the call into me before I can change my name. Or I've got to go through the whole deprecation business. Essentially any of my interfaces that you use become published in that situation, because I can't touch your code for any reason at all.

There's an intermediate ground that I call weak code ownership. With weak code ownership, there's my code and your code, but it is accepted that I could go in and change your code. There's a sense that you're still responsible for the overall quality of your code. If I were just going to change a method name in my code, I'd just do it. But on the other hand, if I were going to move some responsibilities between classes, I should at least let you know what I'm going to do before I do it, because it's your code. That's different than the collective code ownership model.

Weak code ownership and refactoring are OK. Collective code ownership and refactoring are OK. But strong code ownership and refactoring are a right pain in the butt, because a lot of the refactorings you want to make you can't make. You can't make the refactorings, because you can't go into the calling code and make the necessary updates there. That's why strong code ownership doesn't go well with refactoring, but weak code ownership works fine with refactoring.
(Design Principles and Code Ownership)

Ownership, Technical Debt or Deepening Insight

An individual owner has a higher tolerance for complexity, because after all it’s their code and they know how it works and it’s not really that hard to understand (not for them at least) so they don’t need to constantly simplify it just to make a change or fix something. It's also easy for them to take short cuts, and even short cuts on short cuts. This can build up over time until you end up with a serious technical debt problem – one person is always working on that code, not because the problem is highly specialized, but because the code has reached a point where nobody else but Scotty can understand it and make it work.

There’s a flip side to spending more time on code too. The more time that you spend on the same problem, the deeper you can see into it. As you return to the same code again and again you can recognize patterns, and areas that you can improve, and compromises that you aren't willing to accept any more. As you learn more about the language and the frameworks, you can go back and put in simpler and safer ways of doing things. You can see what the design really should be, where the code needs to go, and take it there.

There's also opportunity cost of not sticking to certain areas. Focusing on a problem allows you to create better solutions. Specifically, it allows you to create a vision of what needs to be done, work towards that vision and constantly revise where necessary... If you're jumping from problem to problem, you're more likely to create an inferior solution. You'll solve problems, but you'll be creating higher maintenance costs for the project in the long term.
Jay Fields Taking a Second Look at Collective Code Ownership

So far I've found that the only way for a team to take on really big problems is by breaking the problems up and letting different people own different parts of the solution. This means taking on problems and costs in the short term and the long term, trading off quality and productivity against flexibility and consistency – not only flexibility and consistency in how the team works, but in the code itself.

What I've also learned is that whether you have a team of people who each own a piece of the system, or a more open custodian environment, or even if everyone is working everywhere all of the time, you can’t let people do this work completely on their own. It’s critical to have people working together, whether you are pairing in XP or doing regular egoless code reviews. To help people work on code that they’ve never seen before – or to help long-time owners recognize their blind spots. To mentor and to share new ideas and techniques. To keep people from falling into bad habits. To keep control over complexity. To reinforce consistency – across the code base or inside a piece of code.