4 Symptoms of Dysfunction in Software Teams Tuesday, 08 April 2014

Once you’ve been in the industry for a decade or so you start to get a sixth sense of when things aren’t right. However even when your sixth sense isn’t working here are some signals that should raise alarm bells.

1. It Dependencies

Every time you ask someone how something works or where some data is the explanation starts with ‘it depends’.

For example say I enquire how a user’s password is verified, I’d get an answer something like this:

“It depends, if the user registered before 2001 then you need to call the genesis logon system, after 2001 however we switched to active directory, unless the user was a customer of that company we bought in 2005, in which case you’ll need to call the ‘migration’ LDAP they put in place at the time which uses Netscape LDAP so you’ll need JNDI library we patched to work around some bugs. Also if the user is an administrator we keep the credentials in the staff database so you’ll need to do an ODBC look up for that.”

You get the idea, technical debt has built up, poor decisions haven’t been rectified and now there is there a laundry list of ‘it depends’ for every question.

2. Jane Doe

Here’s where we have a systems or component that only one person understands, the cynical might refer to this a mortgage driven development however it often happens because of apathy too. Unfortunately, the system might not be considered sexy to work on and therefore hasn’t been touched other than to keep it ticking over. The trouble is that every time there is a problem only Jane can fix it and she’s not much into do that work either. She’ll do the minimum to keep it ticking over.

The trouble with this is that the system is providing value to the organisation otherwise it could be turned off. It’s very likely if it’s providing value that at some point in the future it will need enhancing and nobody is going to be able to do and that — and then Jane quits.

3. Town Hero

This is the support equivalent of ‘Ask Doe’, it isn’t a case of if this system will fail but when and how dramatically… and it’s always dramatic. When it does go wrong there is only one plucky guy in support who can fix it: our local hero. Undoubtedly he’s not around when things go wrong but everyone knows he’s the only guy that can fix it.

When the inevitable catastrophic failure occurs calls are made to his landline, his mobile and DMs to his twitter account. He’s unreachable, what should we do? We’re doomed. When all seems lost a call is received. He’s been located, but he’s on a beach in Rio. There’s no way for him to connect to take a look. However he’s had an idea he’s VPNing into a server in Hamburg to create a SSH tunnel through the San Francisco DC and from there to the corporate firewall… he’s in! A few minutes later he’s diagnosed the potential problem. People are called to mission control, orders are given, procedures are ignored, changes are made. The hero calls into the bridge and explains the problem, it’s going to be tough and take some time but he can do it — nobody else has a clue what he’s talking about. In the small hours the system is restored, everyone pats each other on the back for pulling together and working as a team — also, more importantly, thank goodness for the hero, what would we do without him?

All is well in the world thanks to that guy, our hero — until next month, when the exact same thing happens again.

The trouble is these systems never get fixed, either because the team that that supports them aren’t qualified to do so, aren’t allowed to do so or because they are too busy, maybe too busy being heroes.

4. Carcinogenic Prototype

This system starts with a great idea, an idea that has a lot of potential. In order to qualify that potential a demo/pilot/prototype is created and as it turns out the potential is realised. The business become very keen to get this prototype into full production — they might just make those targets they thought they were going to miss if this works out. The engineers who built the prototype are pleased because their work is demonstrating value but reticent because it was just a prototype.

The engineers mention this to the group. The system wasn’t designed to go live, it doesn’t scale easily, it doesn’t have good exception handling, it doesn’t do any logging, it can’t be monitored, the list goes on. The engineers are overruled but promised to be given time to fix it up later.

Later never comes because once the system is live feature enhancements come pouring in, the system grows rapidly and sometimes starts to affect other systems too. Unfortunately due to the quality of the system it’s very hard to add features in a clean way and so the technical debt grows, it compounds.

Solution

As with most things in software engineering the technical problems are symptoms of the organisational causes. For each of the symptoms listed above there are numerous organisational reasons for them occurring, I’m going to start to blog each of these organisational issues over time. However at the heart of the problem is a lack of desire to change the status quo, to enforce a level of quality in the engineering and take ownership. Take ownership of your minimum viable quality and stick to it.