I talked with a frustrated executive in a computer software company. I was about to visit their central development location for the first time, and he wanted to make sure I asked sufficiently penetrating questions so that I would find out what was “really” going on.
He explained that while he had written software, it was only for a few years in the distant past, and things had changed a great deal since his day. His current job in product marketing didn’t really require him to get into any details of the development shop, and in fact he preferred to stay out of the details for several reasons: (1) he was completely out of date with current technology and methods; (2) he didn’t want his thinking constrained by what the programmers declared was possible; (3) it was none of his business.
He had developed a keen interest in what was going on in the software group, however, because he realized that it had a dramatic effect on his ability to successfully market the product. His complaints were personal and based on his own experience, but they were fairly typical, which is why I’m recounting his tale of woe here.
The Lament
The layman’s lament was an interesting mish-mash of two basic themes:
- I’m not getting the results I need. There are certain results that I really need for my business. My competitors seem to be able to get those results, and I can’t. Basically, I want more features in each release, more frequent releases, more control and visibility on new features, fewer bugs in new releases, and the ability to make simple-sounding changes quickly. Our larger competitors seem to be able to move more quickly than we do.
- I think the way the developers’ work is old-fashioned, and if it were brought up-to-date, I would get the results I need. What they do seems to be “waterfall,” with lots of documentation that doesn’t say a lot. There must be something better, along the lines of what we used to call RAD (rapid application development). They only have manual testing, nothing automated, and they tell me it will be years before they can build automated testing! And shouldn’t they be using object-oriented methods? Wouldn’t that provide more re-use, so that things can be built and changed more quickly? They have three tiers, but when I want to change something, the code always seems to be in the wrong tier and takes forever. They’re talking about re-writing everything from scratch using the latest technology, but I’m afraid it will take a long time and there won’t be anything that benefits me.
Basically, he was saying that he wants more things, quicker, and better quality. He also advanced some theories for why he’s not getting those things and how they might be achieved, but of course he couldn’t push his theories too hard, because he lacked experience and in-depth knowledge of the newer methods. He even claimed, in classic “the grass is greener” style, that practically everyone accomplishes these things, and he was nearly alone in being deprived of them – not true!
The usual dynamics of a technology group explaining itself to “outsiders” was also at work here – if you just listen to the technology managers, things are pretty good. The methods are modern and the operation is efficient and productive. There are all sorts of improvements that could be made with additional money for people and tools, of course, but for a group that’s been under continual pressure to build new features, support cranky customers and meet accelerated deadlines with fewer resources, they’re doing amazingly well. The non-technology executives tend to feel that this is all a front, and that results really could be better with more modern methods and tools. The technology managers, for their part, feel like they’re flying passenger planes listening to a bunch of desk-bound ignoramuses complain about their inability to deliver the passengers safely and on-time while upgrading the engine and cockpit systems at the same time. These people have no idea what building automated testing (for example) really takes, they’re thinking. The non-technology people don’t really want to talk about automated testing, of course – they’re the ones taking the direct heat from customers who get hurt by bugs in the new release, and aren’t even getting proposals from the technology management of how this noxious problem can be eliminated. Well, if you can’t tell me how to solve the problem (and you should be able to), how about this (automated testing, object-oriented, micro-services, etc.)??
It goes on and on. The business executives put a cap on it, sigh, maybe throw a tantrum or two, but basically try to live with a situation they know could be better than it is. Inexperienced executives refuse to put with this crap, and bring in new management, consultants, do outsourcing, etc. Their wrath is felt! Sadly, though, the result is typically a dramatic increase in costs, better-looking reporting, but basically the status quo in terms of results, with success being defined downwards to make everything look good. The inexperienced executive is now experienced, and reverts to plan A.
The technology manager does his version of the same dance. The experienced manager tries to keep things low-key and leaves lots of room for coping with disasters and the unexpected. Inexperienced technology managers refuse to tolerate the tyranny of low expectations; they strive for real excellence, using modern tools and methods. Sadly, though, the result is typically a dramatic increase in costs, better-sounding reports, but basically the status quo in terms of tangible results. The new methods are great, but we’re still recovering from the learning curve; that was tense and risky, I’m lucky I survived, that’s the last time I’m trying something like that again!
The Hope
The non-technology executive is sure there’s an answer here, and it isn’t just that he’s dumb. He keeps finding reason to hope that higher productivity with high quality and rapid cycles can be achieved. In my experience, the most frequent (rational) basis for that hope is a loose understanding of the database concept of normalization, and the thought that it should enable wide-spread changes to be made quickly and easily. Suppose the executive looks at a set of functionally related screens and wants some button or style change to be applied to each screen. It makes sense that there should be one place to go to make that change, because surely all those functionally related screens are based on something in common, a template or pattern of some kind. What if the zip code needs to be expanded from five digits to nine? The executive can understand that you’d have to go to more than one place to make the change, because the zip code is displayed on screens, used in application code and stored in the database, but there should be less than a handful of places to change, not scores or hundreds!
But somehow, each project gets bogged down in a morass of detail. When frustration causes the executive to dive into “why can’t you…” the eyes normally glaze over in the face of massive amounts of endless gobbledy-gook. What bugs some of the more inquisitive executives is how what should be one task ends up being lots and lots of tasks? With computers to do all the grunt work, there’s bound to be a way to turn what sounds, feels and seems like one thing (adding a search function to all the screens) actually be one thing – surely there must be! And if everything you can think of is in just one place, surely you should be able to go to that one place and change it! Don’t they do something like that with databases?
There is a realistic basis for hope
I’ve spent more of my life on the programmers’ side of the table than the executives’, so I can go on, with passion and enthusiasm, about the ways that technology-ignorant executives reduce the productivity, effectiveness and quality of tech groups, not to mention the morale! The more technical detail they think they know, the worse it seems to be.
That having been said, the executive’s lament is completely justified, and his hope for better days is actually reasonable (albeit not often realized).
What his hope needs to be realized is there to be exactly one place in the code where every completely distinct entity is defined, and all information about it is stated. For example, there should be exactly one place where we define what we mean by “city.” This is like having domains and normalization in database design, only extended further.
The definition of “city” needs to have everything we know about cities in that one place. It needs to include information that we need to store it (for example, its data type and length), to process it (for example, the code that verifies that a new instance of city is valid) and to display it (for example, its label). The information needs to incorporate both data (e.g. display label) and code (e.g. the input edit check) if needed to get the job done. This is like an extended database schema; a variety of high-level software design environments have something similar to this.
It must be possible to create composite entities in this way as well, for example address. A single composite entity would typically include references to other entities (for example, city), relationships among those other entities and unique properties of the composite entity (for example, that it’s called an “address.” This composite-making ability should be able to be extended to any number of levels. If there are composites that are similar, the similarity should be captured, so that only what makes the entity unique is expressed in the entity itself. A common example of this is home address and business address.
Sometimes entities need to be related to each other in detailed ways. For example, when checking for city, you might have a list of cities, and for each the state it’s in, and maybe even the county, which may have its own state-related lists.
The same principle should apply to entities buried deep in the code. For example, a sort routine probably has no existence in terms of display or storage, but there should usually be just one sort routine. Again, if there are multiple entities that are similar, it is essential that the similarities be placed in one entity and the unique parts in another. Simple parameterization is an approach that does this.
Some of these entities will need to cross typical software structure boundaries in order to maintain our prime principle here of having everything in exactly one place. For example, data entities like city and state need to have display labels, but there needs to be one single place where the code to display an entity’s label is defined. Suppose you want a multi-lingual application? This means that the single place where labels are displayed needs to know that all labels are potentially multi-lingual, needs to know which the current language is, and needs to be able to display the current language’s label for the current entity. It also means that wherever we define a label, we need to be able to make entries for each defined language. This may sound a bit complicated at first reading, but it actually makes sense, and has the wonderful effect of making an application completely multi-lingual.
In order to keep to the principle of each entity defined once, we need the ability to make relationships between entities. The general concept of inheritance, more general than found in object-oriented languages, is what we need here. It’s like customizing a standard-model car, where you want to leave some things off, add some things and change some things.
There’s lots more detail we could go into, but for present purposes I just want to illustrate the principle of “each entity defined in one place,” and to illustrate that “entity” means anything that goes into a program at any level. By defining an entity in one place, we can group things, reference things, and abstract their commonality wherever it is found, not just in a simple hierarchy, and not limited to functions or data definitions or anything else.
While this is a layman’s description, it should be possible to see that IF programs could be constructed in this way, the layman’s hope would be fulfilled. What the layman wants is pretty simple, and actually would be if programs were written in the way he assumes. The layman assumes that there’s one way to get to the database. He assumes that if you have a search function on a screen, it’s no big deal to put a search function on every screen. He assumes that if he wants a new function that has a great deal in common with an existing function, the effort to create the new function is little more than the effort to define the differences. He assumes that look and feel is defined centrally, and is surprised when the eleventh of anything feels, looks or acts differently than the prior ten.
Because he has these assumptions in his mind, he’s surprised when a change in one place breaks something that he doesn’t think has been changed (the infamous side-effect), because he assumes you haven’t been anywhere near that other place. He really doesn’t understand regression testing, in which you test all the stuff that you didn’t think you touched, to make sure it still works. Are these programmers such careless fools that, like children in a trinket shop, they break things while walking down the aisle to somewhere else, and you have to do a complete inventory of the store when the children leave?
Programs are definitely not generally written in conformance with the layman’s assumptions; that’s why there’s such a horrible disconnect between the layman and the techies. The techies have a way of building code, generally a way that they’ve received from those who came before them, that can be made to work, albeit with considerable effort. They may try to normalize their database schemas and apply object principles to their code, but in the vast majority of cases, the layman’s assumption of a single, central definition of every “thing,” and the ability to change that thing and have the side-effects ripple silently and effectively through the application, does not exist, is not articulated, not thought about, and is in no way a goal of the software organization. It’s not even something they’ve heard talked about in some book they keep meaning to get to. It’s just not there.
I assert that it is possible to write programs in a way that realizes the layman’s hope.
I’ve done it myself and I’ve seen others do it. The results are amazing. It’s harder to do than you would ideally like because of a lack of infrastructure already available to support this style of writing, but in spite of this, it’s not hard to write. Moreover, once the initial investment in structure has been made, the ability to make changes quickly and with high quality quickly pays back the investment.
The main obstacle for everyone is that there is tremendous inertia, and the techniques that provide a basis for the hope, while reasonable and achievable, are far out of the mainstream of software thinking. I have seen people who have good resumes but are stupid or lazy look at projects that have been constructed according to the “one entity – one definition” principle and simply declare them dead on arrival, complete re-write required. But I have also encountered projects in domain areas where there is no tradition at all in building things in this way in which the people have invented the principles completely on their own.
The “principle of non-redundancy” has far-reaching technical consequences and ends up being pretty sophisticated, but at its heart is simple: things are hard to do when you have to go many places or touch many things to get them done. When the redundancy in program representation (ignoring for the moment differences between code, program data and meta-data) is eliminated, making changes or additions to programs is optimally agile. In other words, with program representation of this type, it is as easy and quick as it can possibly be to make changes to the program. In general, this will be far quicker than most programs in their current highly redundant form.
The layman’s hope that improvements can be made in software productivity, quality and cycle is realistic, and based on creating a technical reality behind the often-discussed concepts of “components” and “building blocks” that is quite different from the usual embodiment.
I have no idea why this approach to building software, which is little but common sense, isn't taught in schools and widely practiced. For those who know and practice it, the approach of "Occamality" (define everything in exactly one place) gives HUGE competitive advantages.
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