Tuesday 25 October 2016

Every Software System is Bespoke

Contrary to what some business folk, project managers and programmers may believe, every software system we build is essentially bespoke. They may well think this LOB application, REST API or web site is very similar to many others that have already been built but that is almost certainly because the feature set and user interface have been dreamt up by copying what has already gone before rather than thinking about what they actually need this time around.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, after all, isn’t the point of hiring experienced people because you want them to leverage all that knowledge they already have to quickly build your system? But what knowledge do they actually bring with them to each new product or project? Unless each one is only a couple of weeks long, which is almost non-existent in my experience [1], then there are way too many different variables to consider this new venture the same as any predecessor.

Okay, so they may be “similar”, but not the same. At least, not unless you and your organisation have absolutely zero desire to learn anything new about the process and tools used to create software. And that’s essentially my point – the industry moves so incredibly fast that something, probably many things, change between each project. But even then that assumes that no learning occurs during the project itself and, once again, unless it’s only a few weeks long that is also highly unlikely to happen.

In the last few years I’ve been mostly working in the enterprise arena on web services using the classic enterprise-grade offerings. The enterprise is generally renowned for its glacial pace and yet in that time the technology stack alone has moved along in leaps and bounds. For example that first API was in C# 4 / .Net 3.5 and now we’re looking at C# 6 / .Net Core with one eye looking at running on Linux machines too. Service hosting has changed from IIS / MVC to self-hosting / OWIN, with Nancy in there somewhere. The database too has switched from the relative safety of Oracle & SQL Server to MongoDB & Couchbase, and in one instance [2]has been a hybrid of the relational and document paradigms. Even the ancillary tooling like the VCS, CI product and testing & mocking frameworks have all changed as well, either to a different product or have received a non-trivial upgrade.

At the same time as the technology stack is evolving so too is the development process. The various organisations I’ve been working in recently have all undergone, or should I say are still undergoing, a major change to a more agile way of working. This in itself is not a one-time switch but a change in mind-set to one of continual learning and therefore by definition is subject to relentless change. Admittedly those changes become more gradual as the bigger problems are addressed but even so the way the teams around you change can still have an affect on your own ways of working – the DevOps message may have yet to reach the parts of the organisation you interact with.

Even if the toolchain and process largely stay the same the way we apply the technology changes too as what was once “best practice” gets replaced by a new “best practice”, thereby making somewhat of a mockery of the whole notion. Maybe once before we were happy to return null references but now we wish to use an Optional type instead, or we realise the inappropriate nature of the Singleton pattern in highly testable codebase.

With all the change going on around us you might rightly question what being “experienced” actually means in this industry, if we apparently can’t carry over much from one project to the next. Clearly this is a little extreme though as there is plenty we do carry over. In reality, although everything eventually does change, it does not all change at the same time. Hence at the beginning I said that no system is ever the same, it can be very similar, but will be far from identical.

As experienced programmers what we carry over are the battle scars. What this should lead us to do is ask those questions that the less experienced know not what to ask in the first place, and often only discover themselves the hard way. We should never assume that just because we did anything one particular way before that that was the only way, or will even still be the best way in this new setting.

It might be a good way to start out but we should always be looking for ways to improve it, or detect when the problem has diverged such that our first-order approximation is no longer fit for purpose. It’s all too easy to try and solve problems we’ve had in the past, the second time around, and then completely fail to notice we’re really solving a different problem, or at least one with enough differences that we should let go of the past instead. In the end you may be right and you actually converge on a similar design to before, congratulations, you were right this time; as long as you didn’t sacrifice delivering more important stuff just to satisfy your hunch.

By all means bring and share your experiences on your next venture, but be careful you do not get blindsided by them. Only solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions if that really is the best thing to do. You might be surprised just how much has changed in the world of programming since then.

 

[1] I’ve spent longer than that just trying to fix a single bug before!

[2] See “Deferring the Database Choice” which also highlights the design process changes too.

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