Continous delivery predicts organisational performance

This spring Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim published a vulgarisation of their four-year research endeavour into the impacts of Continuous delivery on the organisation. The book is called Accelerate - the IT revolution. Starting with intuition based on years of first hand experience they took on the task of formalising their assumptions to be able to test using research based on surveys. It turns out that many of the assumptions were correct but there were a few surprises.

Continuous delivery predicts organisational performance

The baseline is that Continuous delivery gives software delivery performance, which in turn is a predictor for organisational performance. This is a  key finding. It gives us confidence that we're very likely to get substantial bottom-line benefits if we invest into improving continuous delivery.

There are a few other benefits established by the research team.
Continuous delivery also reduces the amount of rework that has to be done, in fact high performers spend as much as 22% more time on New work when compared to low performers. Interestingly they also spend less time in meetings.

Continuous delivery also has a good impact on identity, meaning that people identify with their company. It also gives us less burnout and less deployment pain. Not surprisingly it also has a great impact on job satisfaction

Continuous delivery also puts pressure on the organisation to become more healthy with regard to how information flow between people and departments. They use the concept of Westrum organisational culture. In this sense it acts as a regulator towards the enterprise gangrene of power-struggle between managers.

Fruit you can expect when you nurture the roots of the continuous delivery tree

But let's have a look at the key finding, and what they mean by Continuous delivery, Software delivery performance and Organisational performance.

Continuous delivery

This is the practice of teams independently delivering into production safely, quickly and sustainably. The key principles here are

• Quality inside
• Small batches
• Computers do repetitive stuff, people solve problems
• Continuous improvement
• Everyone responsible (for the global outcome)

The concrete practices that have been found to have a strong impact on the level of continuous delivery are

• Version Control
• Including configuration data and deployment tooling
• Deployment automation
• Continuous integration
• Trunk-Based development
• Branches are very, very short-lived
• Test automation
• Including that the majority of tests can easily be run on a local dev machine
• Test data management
• Shift left on security
• security is built in as features are developed, as supposed to later.
• Loosely coupled architecture
• Empowered teams
• Teams make most decisions without outside approval
• Monitoring
• Proactive notification

Software delivery performance

This means that we go quickly from idea to production which is good for minimising time to market. That we deploy frequently, which is good for developing just enough and have less features that are rarely or never used. That whenever we do introduce a bug or some down time it is quickly restored and finally how often we deliver bugs.

• Lead time
• Deployment frequency
• Mean time to restore
• Change fail percentage

Organisational performance

This the basic investors KPI, how profitable is the company, how  productive is it and how big a market share does it have. Basically what we need to motivate top management.

Research methods

I still have some questions as to how they distinguish between correlation and causation. While they do explain this in the book, my knowledge in statistics and research methods does not allow me to judge their explanation

Conclusion

Scientific findings establish a predictive relationship from continuous delivery to organisational performance. Going towards continuous delivery you can expect to get organisational performance. In particular any "Continuous delivery" transformation could use this as an overarching goal, as it is both likely to succeed and focuses on outcomes, rather than practices. You also get happier employees which in turn will fuel the organisational performance.

Obtaining time for training and going to conferences

I know some employees that’d like to train more, to go to conferences, present at conferences and train during working hours. Few employers allow that to the extent that the employee would want to, some don’t even feel entitled to order books on behalf of their company. This generates frustration, and to me inefficiency at work, because developers need to continuously learn a lot and learn with a wider perspective than only the working environment can ever offer.

In an ideal world, companies would take responsibility for continuously training every employee.

Welcome to the real world.

If you want to improve, you’ve got to take responsibility for your future and put in the work.

— John Ⓐ De Goes (@jdegoes) October 3, 2018

I’ve seen this tension and frustration in just about every company, from high profile consulting agencies where training is encouraged and expected, still one or two individuals would prefer to spend even more time training and preparing conference presentations, to some low profile consulting agencies where one boss explained to me: 

I have a problem with letting people train a lot. The company makes an investment through training fees and non billed time. The return on investment is negative, because the more they learn the greater the salary they can get elsewhere, but I can’t pay them much more because developer fees are limited. No matter the skill level I can’t charge above a certain level, so the more I invest the sooner they’ll leave

Now that’s sad, really really sad, but what would you do if this was your company?

Interestingly company owners never have a problem with their personal balance, neither do freelance developers. Why? It’s not because they’re special people in any sense. It’s because they are in a self regulating system. The more they train the less they "produce" in the short term, training is an "investment" in the future and they both reap the benefits and pay the bill. The system will balance without authoritarian decision and consequent frustration.

https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1435901

Now I have a bold idea both for business owners and for employees negotiating a new job. It came to me several years ago when a client wanted to hire me as an employee instead of as a contractor. The job was interesting so I asked myself what do I value as a freelance, what exactly do I like about it? It became very clear to me that I liked to have the freedom to decide. In particular what conferences I’d go to, what books I’d buy, when I needed to be away from work to train. So I stated my conditions: 25 days a year of training and going to and/or speaking at conferences with a budget of max 10k€ on training courses and travel expenses. After that we could negotiate salary, making it very easy for the future employer to calculate the total cost, salary, expenses, non-project time etc and compare it to the benefits of my activities. Naturally they had never encountered a demand like it before, nevertheless it was easily accepted. While I never ended up working with them for other reasons, I was confident that I wouldn’t have felt feel frustrated had I ended up working there.

As you can see I value time for training a lot, but not everyone does to that extent and that’s perfectly OK. We’re not all the same, some people prefer day to day work because lets face it it can be very interesting, and some value maximising salary. The point here is to give the opportunity to everyone to choose how much they’re investing in the future and how much we’re cashing out now.

Using this clear deal of clearly reserving the expected time and budget for knowledge development, people can even use companies like the low profile consulting agency as trampolines for their career, accepting lower salary in return for greater investment, a productive partnership.

In short when an employee goes to training or prepare a presentation the company benefits a lot from it, but so does the employee. When benefits are mutual so should cost be, otherwise heavy investment is not sustainable. So following this idea of shared costs, almost anyone can find a good balance with almost any company.

www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=136005

Possibly there’s even more value to it. Some people haven’t quite internalised that we have to learn more than we can learn by daily work. And I think it can help them, as well as the organization as a whole, to ask people during the hiring process

How much training etc would suit you? We will provide a minimum, but we can also help you if you’d like more.

I suspect such a question could help people think about it and take responsibility for their future development.

What do you think? Have you tried something similar? If you know of people and companies who does this or would like to try it yourself, I’d love to hear about it!

Type Driven Development pattern: Small types

TLDR; Small types in type driven development facilitates composability much like small objects do in OO. By small types I mean few constructors and little data in each.

One of my first experiences in Idris was to try to implement a FizzBuzz where the types would be so strong that they'd ensure  the code could only be correctly implemented.

FizzBuzz is a game where the input is a number between 1 and 100. The output is a string, "Fizz" if the number is divisible by 3. "Buzz" if the number is divisible by 5. "FizzBuzz" if it is both divisible by 3 and 5 and just the number otherwise. eg counting from 1

1, 2, fizz, 4, buzz, fizz, 7, 8, fizz, buzz, ...

My first implemention enforces the correctness by taking as arguments proofs that the given number is either divisible by 3 or a proof that it is not divisible. That way can call the constructor Fizz if and only if you can provide proof of division by 3 and a proof of non division by 5.



So just by defining a type FizzBuzz and the signatures of the constructors of this type we have no possibility of making a mistake in the implementation. Nice! Here's are the types and signature of methods.



IF you're curious about the implementation it's here

Besides being a major challenge, for me, in mastering dependent types and understanding that types can act as proofs, it actually worked out quite OK. Certainly it does not allow for incorrect code, so it was a successful experience. Sure it is a bit of verbose and contains a bit of pseudo-duplication.

But not extensible
Now there's an extension to FizzBuzz, namely Bang. Bang is the word for every multiple of 7, for instance given the number 21 we should return FizzBang. Now without Bang there are 4 possible results, Fizz, Buzz, FizzBuzz and the number. Now here's where things become interesting because with Bang there are 8, so the problem of verbosity and pseudo-duplication gets a lot worse. Clearly the first solution isn't very extensible

A better solution
A different approach is to decompose the type FizzBuzz into smaller orthogonal types. Lets consider the type Fizz (either a IsFizz or a Not IsFizz), the type Buzz, then FizzBuzz can be modeled as a tuple (pair) of Fizz an Buzz (the full code).



If we add the functionality of Bang then all we have to do is create a new type Bang, and a new composed type a 3-tuple of Fizz, Buzz and Bang. We don't have to break the existing type FizzBuzz nor the former function, we could possibly even keep the former method, a good example of the open-closed principle. Open-closed-principle with dependently typed code!

Possibly we'd fear that by making the types less closed we'd be able to code an incorrect solution to fizzbuzz. But that's still not possible.

Learnings
Keeping types small in the sense that they contain little data (few arguments) and have few constructors, favours reuse through composition. It might seem obvious in hindsight, but I discovered this much in the same way that I discovered the use of small objects in OO.

Some people say that strongly typed languages like Idris doesn't allow for extension, that they'd be closed by design. What I learned from this experience is that while that certainly applies to a type and functions on existing types, we can still compose types in new ways. Given of course that our types are small enough.

Bug generator: Non constrained construction

A bug generator is a style of code that is likely to contain bugs or produce bugs in the future as the code is extended by making them more likely. This is of course an anti-pattern. There are corresponding Prevention Patterns, basically less error-prone alternatives. Now that the term is defined, lets dive into today's bug generator, namely non constrained construction.

Non constrained construction means that it is possible to construct an invalid object. Examples are 1) mandatory parameters are set after construction using a setter 2) No validations in the constructor, for instance instantiating a PhoneNumber using any string. 3) Several parameters of the same type in the constructor. Inversion of the order parameters becomes likely. Example the constructor takes 3 strings


Bug: Object created without mandatory parameter
Some instance variables are added with setters. There is no guarantee that every user of the object thought of setting at least the mandatory ones. One single instantiation without the mandatory parameter suffice to create a bug, that takes the form of null pointer exceptions or a reference to undefined (JS) at  runtime. It can also take the expression of inconsistent behaviour if the depending code handles null as a special flag (see Null-Flag bug-generator). Alternatively it complexifies all the client code with checks to see if the parameter has been set. Remember those if (object != null) { .. } blocks?

Prevention pattern: All mandatory parameters in constructor
It is extraordinary easy to prevent this type of bug, simply by enforcing all mandatory parameters in the constructor(s). 

If there are several combinations of parameters we can use  several constructors or for languages that allows only one constructor we can use static factory methods, that enumerate the valid ways instantiating an object. e.g.

    
private constructor(mainCourse, starter?, dessert?) {...}

public static withoutDessert(mainCourse, starter) {
return new Menu(mainCourse, starter)
}

public static withoutStarter(mainCourse, dessert) {
 return new Menu(mainCourse, null, dessert)
}

Bug: Object contains invalid data
We might instantiate a phone number assuming that we always feed a string containing the country code country code. So when we try to call this number we get a failure or we call someone in another country. Likewise we might accept some IBAN number without validating the key. Later when we post it to some webservice that does validation, then we need to report an error to the user in an asynchronous way like sending an email, sms etc. Handling bad data late is always more costly than just rejecting it on input.

Prevention pattern: assertions in the constructor

Do validations in the constructor. You can mostly get away with throwing an error and only catching it at the top level, like a generic error handler, a very common pattern in the world of REST services is to map Error objects to HTTP status codes via a generic handler.

The reason we prefer doing the validations in the constructor rather than doing them before construction is because it  guarantees that the validation is made.

Bug: Constructor parameters are switched

For instance our menu from above takes strings mainCourse, starter and dessert as parameters. It is very easy to switch the order

Prevention pattern: Type parameters 
Introduce distinct types for each parameter i.e. MainCourse, Starter and Dessert. This makes it impossible. While this might seem a bit clunky in some mainstream languages it's also a step towards the removal of primitives which adresses another problem, namely the bug generator Primitive Obsession.

Prevention pattern: pass a map/dictionnary or use a parameter object or yet a builder
if each parameter has a name that is visible in the code we reduce the chance of a bug. It is harder to put something in front of the wrong name, like

    { dessert: 'pizza royale', mainCourse: 'chocolat mousse'} 

than it is to make a mistake of order. You might recognize the concept of Connascence of name vs position

Bug: Object not fully initialized before use
Let's imagine an object where we have to call an initialisation method after instantiation like the well known init(). The code gives no guarantee that this will always be done For instance forgot to call init(). The effect of this bug is not dramatic as  in most cases it'll just confuse the developer for a long time as to why the app doesn't work correctly. It rarely slips into production, just slows down the development.

Prevention pattern: call init() in the constructor
Whenever possible.

Prevention pattern: use a factory method
So that the fragile sequence is only in one place. Or refactor so that you pass the result of the init() method to the constructor. i.e the init() method becomes static and/or is moved away from the class all together. e.g.

public constructor(resultOfInit) {}

Prevention pattern: when two objects references each other
When there's a cyclic dependency between two objects, this can be eliminated on the type level by interfaces but the runtime dependency might remain. Then one must be instantiated before the other. We have at least two options for solving this. 1) It might be possible to extract a third object on which the two others depend on, thus eliminating the cyclic dependency, but more often 2) we make this more explicit, like Spring's @PostConstruct. The benefit is that it becomes easy to find all such objects.

There's no particular conclusion to make. It documents the problems and a range of alternative solutions. 

Credits to Peter Kofler whith whom we detailed the bugs and prevention patterns

Bug Generator: Use of indices

Let me just start by stating what I mean by a Bug Generator. It's a style of code that is likely to contain bugs or produce bugs in the future as the code is extended. This is of course an anti-pattern. There are corresponding Prevention Patterns, basically less error-prone alternatives. That being said, let's dive into the Bug Generator Use-of-indices.

Use of indexed access is low level, off-by-one errors are very common. Also index out of bounds can happen. Usually we can simply avoid this by using higher level constructs such as for-each-loops and higher-order functions such as map and filter.

Bug: Off-by-one errors

We access the data by some index. The problem can range from some simple error in a loop construct. For instance we use <= instead of < in loop. To harder-to-spot errors like passing the index to some function and using the index while modifying it by a -1 or +1. 

A basic example of this. Say we need to find the first cat in a list of animals. The bug will only occur when there is no cat in the collection

Bug: Index-out-of-bounds 

Variation of the above bug. This is off-by-one where we actually step outside the array.

Prevention pattern: use lambdas and higher-order-functions

higher order functions like map, filter, some/first, etc have already implemented the looping and we just have to provide a function that the higher order function will use on each element.

Prevention pattern: for-each-loop

If we really must use imperative style

Prevention pattern: link the structure length to the index calculation

E.g. modulo on length. An example would be picking cards from a deck. Lets assume that whenever we get to the end of the deck we're supposed to start from the beginning. A naïve implementation would be to

Prevention pattern: Wrap the array and index in a class (they are nearer).

This is particularly useful when the same calculation is done in several places. Whenever we have a class it is easy to find the code we need to manipulate the date inside. Another advantage is that the behaviour becomes easily testable when isolated in a class.

It'd be very easy and natural (i.e. likely) that we'd test getNextCard both by calling it many times in a row and with large values of someStep.

This solution is related to the Bug generator Primitive-Obsession that will probably be described in the future.

Credits to CodeCop (Peter Kofler) with whom I've worked a lot to explore the concept of Bug Generators. We sketched out this pattern together.

Bug pattern - Hidden testable code

When there's a bug it is very likely the existing design contributed to it's existence. This suggests that there are corresponding design anti-patterns, patterns of code that are latent bugs

This time lets look at the pattern Hidden testable code

Hidden testable code

By Loveteamin [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Problem: Easily testable code is hidden inside hard to test code. For this reason the code is either not tested or the tests are not as thourough as would be needed.

Schematically it looks like this


Solution: It is very very cheap to fix this. Just an Extract Method automatic refactoring in order to extract a Pure Function that can be extremely easily tested.



Recently I came across an example of this bug generator pattern. It had a first bug that was fixed and tests weren't added because it was considered too costly to add tests for it. However the idea of testing an extracted function was not even considered. Two weeks later it became clear that this piece of code contained a second similar bug. The code had some very extensive transformation logic between two calls to a web service and two calls to the persistence layer. Below is a shortened version of it. The problems were both errors in the pure transformation logic.



Once extracted and thoroughly tested the logic can be both refactored and extended with confidence. Bugs will have a much harder time hiding in this kind of light.




The idea that we can cleanse the system from most of the bugs is called BugsZero. You can learn more about it here, and by various talks by Arlo Belshee, available on youtube.