We need to remember that testing is just one tool we have towards a particular goal – verifying and validating software. In many cases, other tools and techniques that do the same thing can very much supplement or even replace testing. The best example of a formal system we all know and love is the type system. In a statically typed language, I don’t have to test for type errors. They are formally proven out of the code (unless you’re the tool who passes void* everywhere). That cuts down on the amount of testing I have to do for V&V, as well as supplements testing as a design tool. While TDD gives us clean, modular designs that are very decoupled from each other, the type system gives us help with design-by-contract and cleaner mechanisms of dispatch. They both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Does it work the other way? In other words, I’ve given an example of where we have another tool that limits what we have to test. But can we find a mapping from the hard-to-test to a tool? Not always, but in many cases, yes. In particular, I want to talk about the testing of GUI’s.

First, following a MVC design pattern helps dramatically with testability. Fact is, testing the controller and model leverages far more traditional techniques. The view has always been the problem – how do we test GUI code? Certainly we can just stick to our guns on TDD, mocking out nearly all the library calls we make to our GUI framework, possibly writing drivers that control mouse and keyboard input to pick and poke the interface. These sometimes have their place, especially if you can leverage pre-existing resources. Remember, though, testing is done primarily for V&V. Is there another way to validate and verify our GUI software?

Enter XAML. Or QML, or HTML for all that matters. Each of these fits the same slot – it is a language for specifying the layout of GUI’s. The most important aspect of each of these is that none of them are Turing complete. This drastically limits the amount of damage we can do to ourselves, and also dramatically expands what we can prove about our code automatically. Specifying a layout in one of these markup languages rather than in a universal Turing complete language like C++ is both easier and far less bug ridden. It’s simply impossible to make certain mistakes. Knowing that an XAML document is well-formed and parseable gives much greater guarantees than knowing a program is well-formed and compilable. And we know how important keeping a program in a compilable state is!

Moving from these restricted domain specific languages into graphical forms is also much easier than trying to graphically specify a C++ program. In fact, a designer working with a tool generating XAML makes the V&V loop so tight it nearly disappears.

I think the fact that strict GUI code like the above doesn’t really require testing isn’t all that new. Most corporations doing ‘enterprise-y’ work already know this subconsciously, using languages like C++ or C# with rich tool support for their markups. It’s in the younger dynamic languages without as much support that we fall back into thinking we need to test GUI’s. We do not need to test GUI’s, at least not in the traditional way. GUI’s are, quite frankly, easy today, and incredibly well specified. Leverage these specifications in a DSL designed for GUI’s rather than poking and prodding all your slots and signals to make sure you didn’t screw up in building your GUI. Stop testing and learn to love proof-by-construction that these type of DSL’s give us.

For many professional schools, like Law or Medicine, the LSAT or MCAT is a great denominator. It makes up the burden of your application materials, and doing well on either almost guarantees you a made man/woman. Compare this to getting a job, where most of the decision process is made during interviews and based on a resume. Getting into law school is tough, and may be the hardest thing some people do, and it isn’t exactly fair, with well-known biases. But getting a job is unfair in an entirely different way. First, there’s no known hurdles to jump through, unlike law school. The LSAT is a tough, but concrete, hurdle. Getting a job requires a bunch of weird arbitrary strokes of luck for the most part, rendering it a crap shoot for all practical purposes. Furthermore, you’re up against completely unknown and unfamiliar biases. Did you miss that last interview because you were black and the interviewer was white? He certainly seemed put off when he first saw you.

Getting into law school requires a tough, biased but well understood measure to be levied against you. Getting a job is based on no uniform measure at all, and a great many problems can come with that.

Law schools would very much like to drop the weighting on the LSAT (currently it’s required to be a legitimate law school) and more heavily weight other parts of the application, which to remind you, are mostly essays, a resume and references. The most concrete thing I can gather from an essay about you is how well you can write – lucky for us the LSAT already tests for that. Far less concretely, I can get a vibe for the culture you come from both by how you write and what you chose to write about. It’s like having a one-sided conversation, where you’ll get no feedback from me, yet I’m asking you to pour out your soul. Even worse are the resume, which is used primarily to see if you’ve worked anywhere with a name brand and went to a name brand school*, and the references which amount to whether you know anyone who’s already been to that school.

By putting less emphasis on the standardized test, schools will be given far more leeway to simply chose people like them, rather than people who are qualified. You already see this in many business schools, who bemoan fit as the most important thing in an application. Law schools will start to look more and more for fit, rather than qualification, and use it as an excuse to reject whomever doesn’t fit their stereotype of the day of the successful lawyer. Fit in the past kept out Blacks from higher education, Jews from the Ivy Leagues, and is being used right now to cut down on the number of first generation Asian Americans in business schools. It also provides justification for legacy applications – after all, if your parents fit, then you most likely do too.

Standardized testing isn’t the problem, standardized tests are. Don’t lessen the impact of a universal measure that is well-known and hard to corrupt, instead focus on eliminating biases in the tests as we find them. To say a standardized test is biased in favor of current students reading application essays and former students performing interviews is a farce.

(* The trick here with business schools, at least, is to require a cover letter and resume up front. They don’t use them as genuine application materials per say, but instead use them to see how well you can write a cover letter and resume. Remember, business school rankings are determined in a large party by who gets hired and what their salary is on graduation. People coming in to schools who already are good at applying for jobs have a leg up here, and thus are less risky than other students. In this way, many business schools tend to work like a self-reinforcing filter system, vouching for those who are already vouched for, and getting jobs for people who can already get them, than a true education system which improves upon any base ability.)

Thus, our crusaders real agenda has arrived. We’ll regurgitate truisms and scary facts about how you need to change your sinful ways, oh gluttons, because we believe you simply haven’t understood us yet. You are, after all, well, kinda stupid.

Why don’t fatties lose weight? Especially after a heart attack? Surely they know the health risks they undertake by… oh wait, maybe they don’t. Maybe we should tell them. Maybe the next time I’m at the grocery store and some single mom is buying ice cream for her kids’ birthday party, I’ll make sure she knows that ice cream is unhealthy, and that she’s going to kill herself. After all, it’s obvious she’d only buy ice cream because she were ignorant.

Enough of that. While I’ll commit a mortal sin here and argue against this article using anecdotal evidence, I guarantee if someone were to look for the statistics to back this up, they’d find it. Why don’t fatties diet? What an absurd question. Everyone I know who is overweight or believes themselves to be is either dieting right now or has in the recent past. From fad diets like the Zone and Ornish, to weight loss clinics, to Jennie Craig, to paleo-nonsense and organic foods. Overweight people are trying their damndest. This doesn’t jive with the collected sermons that fatties are both lazy and stupid, and that’s why they’re in the straits they are. It allows otherwise nice people to look down with disgust upon you, and justifies one of the few remaining bigotries left. You see, obesity isn’t a health condition, it’s a moral condition.

That underlying theme permeates all we hear, and we make implicit little jumps from it whenever we try and analyze this issue. For instance, did you know that people who’ve had a heart attack fail to lose weight afterwards? Let’s de-obesitize this. People who’ve suffered from a condition fail to follow up on a treatment that helps with that condition. “Hrm,” we all say, “the treatment must be pretty harsh for people to risk their lives like that.” A reasonable conclusion. Adding obesity back in, we suddenly change our minds: “Aha! It’s the obese! It’s not a harsh treatment, it’s the fact that as we know, fatties are lazy and stupid, that’s why they don’t stick to their treatment.” Our conclusions should be based on the data, not the type of people we’re concluding about.

Why don’t obese people lose weight after a heart attack? The hell if I know. I can tell you that most of them probably attempted to lose weight before the heart attack, and the majority probably tried after the heart attack. But do we measure effort? No, we instead measure results – no weight lost – and then blame effort. We turn a blind eye again and again to how hard many people are trying to fit into the cookie cutter figures we expect in society, so that we can blame them again and again for their lack of discipline and moderation.

Convenient for us, but bigotry is sadly too familiar to us to not recognize it. Why, indeed, could we be so stupid to fall for this again.

Rob says that interruption is unavoidable in the modern work place, and then somehow follows with a non-sequiter about pair programming. I have nothing against pair programming, but it is not a golden hammer. It is just another tool in the chest. Some people liken it to a continuous peer review, which it can be if used successfully. But it can also very much be likened to a continuous meeting.

It’s a slippery slope to go from pair programming back to the bull pen. As Peopleware very successfully argued years ago, measurable progress, in terms of features completed and defects prevented or fixed, increases when distractions decrease. I could write a whole ranting blog post about why manager’s like pair programming (hint, it’s the same reason managers like meetings and bull pens) but that’s not really the point here. The point is that sometimes you need to collaborate, sometimes you need to be alone. And when I say alone, I mean alone alone. Private offices, chat/phones/twitter off, and allowed to concentrate.

“But SkepticalMethodologist!”, you might respond, “That implies management is harder than simply taking one philosophy (collaborate/work alone) and taking it to its extreme!” Yes, and I’m sorry I’ve scared you so. Management… nay, Leadership requires reacting to the problem at hand in its context and solving it with the best tool available for the job. It cannot be outsourced to some guru or methodology. It also implies that if you want to succeed, you need to have ways to easily switch between collaborating and working alone. This implies some excess in capability – if we don’t focus on one thing the whole time (collaboration/working alone), we can no long afford to neglect alternative methods. That means, yes, you should have private offices. But yes, you should have open spaces with white boards a plenty! And no, they will not always be in use!

The second point I disagree with Rob on is his argument against specialization. The argument goes that if you have a specialist, then you have a risk, and risks can sink you. There are a few things wrong with this – the most glaring is that successful companies did not succeed because they were so insured against risk that nothing could sink them. Instead, they succeeded because they took risks, rolled the die, and won. Which I guess gives Rob less consulting work to do, as entrepreneurs who understand that a great deal of success is luck probably aren’t willing to shell out as much in ‘guaranteed success’ consulting fees. Another is deconstructing this argument to a classic management laziness that would rather hire and fire a commodity product (generalists) than something hand crafted and unique (specialists).

Most importantly, though, is that frequently a business must do one thing well. That’s more or less what a business in a free market – it’s a specialization, an optimization of the local economic space. It does one thing better than it’s competitors, well enough, in fact, to make an economic profit.

Focusing on generalists won’t get you that.

The main risk of having specialists is losing them. The response should not be to only hire people who are easily replaced, but go to the human root of the problem and decrease turnover that way. Why is your specialist leaving? If you can’t afford to compensate your specialists or you treat them like shit, well then, hiring generalists just make it easier for you to be a cheap asshole. They don’t increase the chances of your success at all. Certainly there are reasons outside of your control in people leaving – perhaps their spouse got a job elsewhere and they aren’t willing to telecommute, or they want to shift careers altogether, or their hit with health problems, etc…

Engineers deal with these kinds of risks with redundancy. After all, a team of general practitioners is simply not as qualified to deal with my brain fog as a single neurologist. And if that single neurologist fails, I get a second opinion. Having a specialist is not a risk. Having only one specialist and not having plans to get another is. Having two specialists, or more, is expensive. It’s hard to either pay them, as a start up providing a salary, or get their buy in, if they want a piece of the company. Too bad! That’s your job as a leader. Making your job easier doesn’t help the company grow. Solving high level problems like finding expertise in the domain you’re trying to break into is. And I’m sorry it’s so hard. Really, I’m fighting back tears here.

The theme of both of these points is slack. You need slack to react, to stay agile, and to turn your company from a cupcake bakery into a hedge fund in the blink of an eye. Companies that can change and adapt thrive. Adaptation takes slack, and yes, slack can be expensive. But worth it.

Slow news day.

This is on the feet of the American Academy of Pediatrics over-reach involving the same energy drinks. Don’t get me wrong: most kids probably don’t need energy drinks. But then again, most adults probably don’t need them either. Allowing individual consumers access to certain goods based solely on need is something the Medical Profession has gotten used to, but safety concerns aside, it’s a market killer. So long are the goods are relatively safe, who are we to deny someone their energy drink? The only justification a consumer ought to need is that they like the taste.

What really got under my skin regarding the NPR story, though, is an attempt to blame ‘big caffeine’ for our tired students. Leftist Luddites love to reminisce about the ‘good old days’ as much as rightist Luddites do, but instead of blaming a breakdown of morals or some other such nonsense, leftists like to bring in evil corporations as the source of all that irks us today. “It’s sugar and caffeine and technology and texting that keep our kids up these days!” they’d whine, “Kids need sleep, we have no idea what the consequences of these newfangled gadgets and chemicals will do to them!”

Only we know exactly what sleep deprivation does to kids. We’ve been doing it for well over a century now. Kids seeking out caffeine is an attempt to self medicate, not the problem itself. It’s like blaming anti-biotics for an ear infection. The fact is that now, and in the past, schools start absurdly early, especially for growing brains which we know tend to have delayed sleeping schedules quite naturally. I’m not going to out myself as a Tea-Partier here, I think the government does a lot of good. But our kids being tired all the damn time? That’s the government’s fault.

A few schools have trialed pushing back start times to something reasonable for adults, an even smaller minority have tried something reasonable for kids. While I haven’t seen any large scale results in yet, it’s about what you’d expect. Tardiness drops, absenteeism drops, test scores go up. Why wouldn’t they? For the first half of the usual school day (which I might remind you in many places starts at 7am, requiring kids to be up as early as 5:30am), Kids are basically zombies – the more alert ones smart enough to drink a before-mentioned energy drink. Around lunch they come out of the fuzz. Moving back start times more or less doubles the effective school day and halves the pain. Hell, even if schools did nothing (which I’m not convinced they’re all that effective as is) simply allowing kids to sleep on their normal schedules would increase test scores, regardless of whatever worksheet their being tasked to fill in the blanks for today.

Corporations aren’t preying on children. They’re filling a much needed gap created by nonsense government decisions, primarily driven by momentum and bureaucracy. After all, why wouldn’t schools start so absurdly early? They always have. Let’s not let new findings about adolescent and child sleep psychology change what we know kinda sorta half-assed works. Instead, let’s just blame evil corporations.

The stakeholder being the customer is the easiest case. In more subtle cases, the stakeholder is marketing, or management. In the most devious of cases, the stakeholder is you.

Case in point: source control and project management. Who makes the decisions on the use of these tools? Which ones to go with, how the policies are set up, and so on. Very rarely is it the actual user of the system! Prime example of ignoring stakeholders. Instead, the decision goes to some minority party with a very small stake, who is either wowed by some diagram or impressed with how lazy he can be in the use of the product. Thus, source control programs like Team Foundation Server are born: complex to merge, diff, branch, and other bread and butter tasks. But easy as hell to ‘manage’. You can lock down that sucker tight.

Why on earth do project managers get to choose modeling tools that are lucky if they generate working software? Why do corporate reps chose source control tools? Why does IT get to decide what browser you use?

Don’t let minority stakeholders make decisions at the expense of the majority. If you are a majority stakeholder, it is up to you to make sure your voice is heard – remind the minority that it is in fact you who will be using this tool and process the most. More importantly though, if you are a minority stakeholder, it is up to you to remember that random luck might occasionally give you the power to make decisions – you must make wise ones that identify the true majority stakeholders and not succumb to laziness or egoism on your part. Remember that speeding up the 99% majority by 5% has a higher return on investment than doubling your productivity as a 1% stake holder.

There’s a good amount of evidence that contrary to popular belief, we aren’t eating drastically more calories than we used to, nor do we laze the days away on our couches. The best evidence we have to date (and this is a surprisingly hard thing to study) says we move about the same amount, and eat about the same amount. This certainly isn’t the only argument against the highly popularized ‘calories-in-calories-out’ view of obesity, but it’s the widest reaching.

Interestingly, though, when alternative theories are put forward, such as “We’re all getting older”, and “We’ve stopped smoking” or even “Perhaps its a virus”, the blow back is tremendous.  “WEIGHT LOSS IS SIMPLE!”, the zealous masses froth, “EAT LESS AND MOVE MORE!” It doesn’t take much prying to figure out why they aren’t convinced by the evidence out there that weight is more complicated than that. You see, their fundamental theory they’re defending has nothing to do with weight loss or weight gain, it’s this: Fat people are lazy fucks. The questioning of calories-in-calories-out implies that there are, indeed, fat people out there who somehow manage to put down the mountains of ice cream and Doritos long enough to diet and it did not lead to long term weightloss.  Even worse, it implies that there are fat people out there who climbed on one of the myriad of hysterical contraptions (it seems there’s a new one every month) designed to ‘hit their fat burning zone’, and stayed at it for hours a day, and found that those contraptions too did not lead to long term weightloss.

In other words, questioning calories-in-calories-out implies there are fat fucks out there who aren’t so lazy.  In fact, it implies that there are fat fucks out there who might very well be more disciplined than the rest of us.

“IMPOSSIBLE!” the crowds shout. How can they question the evidence piled against calories-in-calories-out, herein referred to as the ‘Aristotelian’ view of weight loss?  “EASY!” they scream, “RESEARCH INVOLVED FAT FUCKS! WE ALL KNOW FAT FUCKS LIE ABOUT EXERCISE AND DIET!!!”

So let’s recap really quickly: our fundamental theory is that fat fucks are lazy.  And all evidence to the contrary can be thrown right out, because, you see, fat fucks are liars.

OK, we get it.  You don’t like fat people. Indeed, nothing seems to make you happier than seeing fat people starve, walking in place on a moving belt that goes no where for hours at a time. You’re allowed your opinions. I mean, after all, for a large part of our history people didn’t like Blacks, Jews or Gays. I think it worked out okay for them. Hey, they even invented more and more wild explanations to justify their hatred too, kind of like you. So at least you have company.

The sad thing is, many of the very researchers and medical professionals involved in this debate are themselves proponents of fat bigotry. So are we going to be able to act like rational adults here and try and get to the bottom of why we weigh more than we used to, and whether or not it’s a bad thing, without stirring up irrational spittle-mouth hatreds of people based on body shape?

Fat chance.

Fit is precisely what you don’t want.

Why are you hiring?  Because you need fresh ideas, you need someone to bring something to your outfit that you don’t currently have.  ‘Fit’, while an incredibly subjective term prone to almost as much abuse as religion or politics, generally means the new guy or gal doesn’t ‘rock the boat’.  We can go on working as we’ve worked before with the new blood; they ‘fit’ our team and culture.

But your team and culture was precisely what was broken in the first place.  Your team or culture lacked something that caused you to need to go out and hire someone new.

Besides not needing someone that ‘fits’, realize that ‘fit’ is used most of the time as a general blanket term for outright discrimination.  Not necessarily in race or gender (although don’t rule those out), but social bracket, alma mater, regional dialect, fashion, personality or any number of other things that may cause growing pains.  “He’s not like us,” one might think, “he doesn’t fit.”

Say, for instance, two people are up for a job.  I know one of them as an acquaintance, but the other is a mere stranger.  Obviously, I can’t chose to hire the first simply because I know him, but I certainly can convince myself the second doesn’t ‘fit’.  Ta da!  Nepotism light, but now we call it ‘fit’.

Hiring isn’t easy.  In fact, I believe hiring is the most difficult and important decision you make, and can make or break a project, company, and team.  Relying on weasel words like ‘fit’ to get out of making these difficult decisions can only hurt us.

Find someone new.  Find someone fresh.  Find someone with rock solid quantitative measures that is going to change the way you work.  Find someone that leaves an impression on your team for the better.  Finding someone that already ‘fits’ is the path of least resistance, and begets the concrete when we should be seeking the malleable.  ‘Culture’ begins to set in as a cancer, and eventually you only hire carbon copies of yourself.

Then you get these tool makers with ‘enterprise’ level support.  A tool might be a nice toy, but unless it works for ‘enterprise’ level companies, then we’re not interested.  There seems to be some resonance between this notion of an ‘enterprise’ and the large teams mentioned previously.

I have it on good authority from various sources I cannot recall enough to cite properly right now that one of the best measures of probable project success is the size of the budget and team.  Interestingly, this is an inverse relationship.  The larger your team, the larger your budget, the more likely you are to fail.

I believe we’ve become consumed with this notion that large projects need a lot of resources. But recall, only in an academic or research setting do projects actually fail for technical reasons.  In virtually all other settings, industrial and commercial, project failure is due to other factors.  Namely, coordination and communication, precisely things that do not scale with increased resources!

The reason our methods that work so swimmingly for small teams don’t seem to ‘scale’ is not that we haven’t had the chance to work in a more rigorous ‘professional’ environment.  It’s because nothing scales to that level.  That’s not to say large projects cannot succeed, but instead to say that the best thing you can do to a large project is to take people and resources away until it is a small one.

There are a few reasons I’d throw out there, such as communication overhead, which I’ve already mentioned.  Mentioning just those tempts our PHB’s to think that if they just held more meetings they would increase communication.  Or perhaps they could mandate another 500 pages of documentation per function.  When it comes to coordination issues, perhaps the solution isn’t shrinking budgets and org charts, but instead keeping an iron fist control on everything and not letting a single decision be made without your input.  Surely that would keep things coordinated, right?

Sadly, in addition to communication and coordination overhead, we have Fred Brook’s idea of Conceptual Clarity to deal with.  Conceptual clarity is the idea of a clean, well understood design entirely within the head of a single person.  When a single person builds a system, there’s a clarify of thought and motive that is evident in nearly every single design decision made in the system.  When you break that system apart across multiple people, that clarity is reduced.  When you break it apart more, clarity all but disappears.  We have tools, techniques and methods that attempt to improve this clarity, such as code contracts, encapsulation and other forms of information hiding.  These at best scale at O(log(n)).  They’re great techniques, you should of course use them, but they aren’t going to allow you to increase your roster from 10 developers to 100.

Takeaway: Small project methods don’t apply to large projects.  This is because nothing applies to large projects.  The lesson here is that small is beautiful, avoid project growth like the plague.