Technical Debt Credit Rating

A while back I wrote about how closely technical debt paralleled financial debt and then a short follow-up post with the meta-message that, through the right reductionism, certain things will always cost you an inescapable minimum and the decision that you really have is about where you choose to make that payment (I argued that you either pay through the correct design and build initially, or you pay through unnecessarily increased maintenance costs later).

Outlawing technical debt is as foolhardy as always cutting corners - sometimes the right thing to do is to take a hit to get something out sooner or in a certain shape - the problem is in the repayments; in other words, they often don't exist. And if you don't go back and sort your hacks out early they tend to accumulate in the system and before you know it developing on it is like moving through treacle (and the treacle occasionally catches fire). Everything else you do takes that much longer and is that much more expensive (and those are business metrics) and can have unintended consequences - it's a crippling burden just like its financial counterpart.

I have a rule - no one is allowed to take technical shortcuts through a project [where that = incur some technical debt] without showing where, in the same plan, they go back to do some refactoring so that our long-term assets remain sustainable. We're pretty lucky at Sporting Index; most of our stakeholders value technology and recognize how critical it is to the business, so it's a conversation I rarely have to have - but I know many other companies are less fortunate.

So now I think I have a better idea. It came to me while I was thinking about why, if technical debt is so similar to real debt, it doesn't regulate itself in the same way - and I think that's becuase there is no concept of creditworthiness in technical debt, in other words no assessment of a team's ability to 'repay' a quality compromise (read: loan of functionality to the business ahead of when it otherwise would have been ready) alongside all the other outstanding quality compromises that they already have.

But we might be able to simulate that...

Imagine giving each product manager a 'credit rating' of, say, 3 - meaning they could call for unsustainable technical shortcuts 3 times as they worked with the delivery team to determine their solutions. Once those 3 debt points were used, that product manager would be unable to encourage the team to make further quality compromises until at least one of those was paid back. If you have product managers with a demonstrated track record of revisiting earlier deliveries to address technical debt then why not give them 5? A higher creditworthiness ought to enable an individual to take on more concurrent debt as we can be more confident that they'll come back to service it.

I pretty much guranttee that any product manager's cavalier attitude towards shortcuts would change and they'd suddenly treat technical debt as the instrument it really is and use it only where it mattered materially. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a feedback loop.

The downside is that you'd have to be better at tracking this sort of thing and, like any other method, it'll need some discipline when a product manager with maxed out technical debt points wants just one more shortcut. If you've ever had to maintain a spaghetti codebase (as most of us have at some point) then you'll know that these things need closely policed anyway, so perhaps being forced into formally tracking it isn't so bad.

Nobody Wants Computers

Well they shouldn't - they should want what computers will do for them.

Many people turn up to conferences or SIG meetings and ask me how virtualisation or a centralised inventory database or VPNs (or pick something) will help their company. Misguided. My response is always the same - what is your business case and what benefits are you expecting? I do get quite upset when I don't get a good answer to that, because it means someone somewhere is cooking up some technology for technology's sake.

Sales functions are excellent at creating a need around a product they sell - great if you're in that business and I used to be - but it is the functionality your organization really needs that should matter. Talk to me about outcomes, goals, what you want to be able to do from a business capability perspective, and then the right technical solution will fall out of that.

Contorting business processes to fit a specific technology or vice versa - i.e. doing it backwards - only ever works when combined with a healthy dose of luck.

The ISO standard for business plans

If I had a quarter for every time a budding entrepreneur has asked me about what should go into his business plan, then I'd have - let's see - three fifty? I don't know, but put it this way, it's in my top 10 FAQs. My two secrets behind this one are; a) there is no such thing as a standard format or expectation and b) it matters a lot less than you probably think.

Don't agonise over format and presentation - the vital thing is to intimately know your key facts and be able to provide a logical narrative for them. What are your costs? Where does the revenue come from? Who are your customers and how big is the market? How soon will you start bringing in revenue? How is your product different from any competitors (current or future)? What does it cost you to acquire new customers and what is their lifetime value? Have you done this before and who do you plan to work with? Even if you just talk through it you're always better off knowing those things inside and out than having a 200-page glossy document.

And when I say that a business plan matters less than you think it isn't because investors won't want one - they very much will - it's because in the early stages of a new idea what matters most is working product. The best, most detailed, most polished business plan in the world will always be worth much less to a potential backer than a pretty basic, hacked together but functional, beta product.

What kind of idiots are in charge here anyway?

When I coach people about being effective in organizations something that regularly comes up is their ability to influence decisions made at the senior level. Because (with very few exceptions) most people in most organizations are rational and competent professionals with the organizations best interests at heart, any time they feel like their proposals or suggestions aren't being adopted, it can be easy for them to lose a little faith in senior ranks.

I never like hearing that because the truth is (again with very few exceptions) that most executives in most organizations are also rational and competent professionals with the organizations best interests at heart. So why don't your ideas stack up for them?

My advice is usually to look into these two things:

1 - What don't you know that they do - executives will usually have a much broader view of things and can therefore be privy to other information, plans or constraints elsewhere in the organization, that you may not be. Taking into account the things that might be invisible to you, not adopting your recommendations might well be the most beneficial course of action. In my experience, most executives are more than happy to share this information with reports who show an interest in the wider business, so just ask.

2 - What data aren't you being effective at conveying - sometimes the message just isn't getting through and therefore your decision makers don't fully understand what you're proposing and why. It happens to me; I see a lot of proposals for a lot of things (very few ill-conceived) and if the key facts aren't well summarised and the options clear, I am not able to make an effective decision. Again, the solution starts with communication. Ask why, use questioning techniques to check for understanding, find out how your audience wants things presented. I am yet to meet an executive who won't be willing to give that feedback - after all, it helps you both.

Answering these two questions usually gives people the insight they're missing to clear things up and, if it doesn't, then I guess it's always possible that you might be one of those few exceptions...

Things change because people change

Occasionally I get a hard time for spending such a large part of my time with my teams, with the individuals, out on the floor in their work instead of in my office with 'my' work. Occasionally that's also fair - I have a different job than the people who report to me, and the the people who report to them, and that comes with different deliverables.

On the other hand a big part of my job is the performance of my department, the quality of their deliverables, and the continuous improvement of both of these.

New processes, technology changes, new policies, culture and structure are all part of it, but ultimately nothing is ever any different until individuals change their day-to-day actions and behaviours. You will never create lasting change by making rules and proclamations from behind a desk, or just by telling people to 'do better'. Lasting change only comes from sustained leadership focus; coaching and repetition and doing things differently together. When the man on the ground changes then overall results change.

Oh and don't forget my golden rule no. 22867: paperwork is an artifact of effective work - effective work is not an artifact of paperwork.

Let's Ban Agile

Bet that made you look.

Whenever I'm dealing with the wider business and I come across confusion about (or resistance to) agile practices I typically find that, once the few genuine issues are swept up, much of what's left comes down to semantics. And fair enough too - the extensive metadata that has built up around engineering processes is intimidating.

If we put all that aside and just talk about the basic practicalities of doing projects, you are pretty much just looking at an inventory of requirements that must be turned into an inventory of working product. To do that, distinct individuals need to execute specific tasks within certain time constraints (or, more colloquially, who does what by when). From there, we build up some rules to make sure everyone can cooperate effectively around those basics, and it is these rules we'd tend to call our development process/project methodology.

It isn't any harder than that. But, for some reason, we like to make it sound difficult through a plethora of technical terminology.

Instead of iterations, why don't we just talk about tackling big projects a bit at a time? [In fact, I'm yet to discover a better way of solving huge problems than breaking them down into a collection of smaller ones] Instead of backlogs, let's just have a prioritised list of requirements. Instead of standups, let's just have regular and frequent meetings to keep everyone on the same page. Instead of sprint planning sessions why don't we all get together to iron out a detailed plan before we commit to our next chunk of work?

I guess what I really want to ban is unnecessary jargon - at least when dealing with the non-technical contingent of the business. I think we should use common everyday language to describe what are, ultimately, practical and common sense activities.

Just because we're solving complex and difficult problems doesn't mean we need to use complex and difficult processes - in fact, one could make a case for quite the opposite.

The Paradox of Freemium

One of the businesses I advise recently flipped over to a freemium model and – as expected – saw a step change in paying subscribers. It does lead to the question; in a world where we typically make money by making things and then selling them to others, how did we decide that giving valuable things away made commercial sense?

Firstly, for those who may have spent the last few years in a cave, I broadly define freemium as giving away something of substantial value along with an associated upgrade/expansion path which returns benefit to the organisation.

This is already commonplace. So many of the everyday tools I use have an element of freemium to their business model; google apps, zen agile, bitbucket, linkedin, mockingbird, a number of podcasts (which lead to paid-for books or other products), and of course almost every iPhone app I see these days has a fairly comprehensive ‘lite’ version.

For a long time we’ve given away tightly limited trial versions, exposing a very small subset of the functionality (or usage time) in order to coax users into a purchase to unlock the rest, and freemium is almost a reversal of this. Give away quite a rich set of functionality with no expectations, and you’ll pick up a group of buyers for that additional stuff on top.

Making this happen comes down to product design; you have to make sure that you hold back something(s) compelling enough to encourage purchases while making sure that your base product is functional and complete enough to be of significant utility on its own. There are so many ways to slice this, and sometimes the differences don’t even need to be rendered – you might simply impose several distinct licensing terms (free for academic or home use for example).

In one of my all-time favourite Ted Talks, Dan Pink says:

"The mid 1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives. All the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Yen. Do it because you like to do it.

Now if you had, just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, And said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth, who would have predicted the Wikipedia model."

I think those same sober economists would probably have said much the same thing about freemium, and probably much more recently. Getting customers to pay for your product by first giving most of it away wasn’t common sense – and maybe it still isn’t – but you certainly can’t ignore the evidence that it works.

Encouraging Profitable Usage

A couple of weeks ago a friend sent me this article from a mutual acquaintance at CCP. It's all about the continuous struggle that the MMO guys have keeping their in-game economies balanced amongst all the real-world trading of items and game currency.

I was particularly interested in the stats near the end - in a crackdown on gold farming they managed to drop CPU utilisation 30% through a 2% drop in players (banned accounts who were violating these terms). To paraphrase that; 2% of the player base [revenues] were creating 30% of the load [costs] and that my friends, is what I call unprofitable usage of a product.

When you read that last sentence it makes perfect sense, however so few of us on the web think this way. How often have you looked up your top workload creators (page impressions, transactions) and your top revenue creators (purchasers, subscribers) and compared the two? How sure are you that your costliest customers - that you are probably supporting a collection of CPUs to service - are not marginal or worse in terms of value to your organisation? With sites more data rich than ever (read: more back end work per view) and screen-scraping a more widespread way to acquire content it's worth working to discourage this behaviour or at least make conscious decisions to allow it.

This thinking should be taken all the way back to product design - on the web we tend to emphasise users/visitor/subscribers without really thinking through what constitutes profitable usage.

It's not just about nailing people who are out to exploit you either - as a long time data provider my biggest issues have usually been well-meaning customers with lazy integrations. If you're going to build a client on top of a web API it's quick and easy to poll the bejesus out of it round the clock and then react to data in the responses rather than, for example, get a schedule of 'interesting' data and dynamically set up threads pick up smaller changes to discreet items on separate and appropriate timers. Take trades for example; why hammer a Hang Seng Index Options feed after 4:15pm? Or how about our feed - do you need 5 prices a second for this weekend's football fixtures on Tuesday or would hourly pre-match odds and squad changes be more than sufficient that far out? A slightly trickier initial integration but a better and cheaper product (for both parties) thereafter.

And finally I've always found it more effective to encourage good behaviour than discourage bad behaviour. Sometimes this can be as simple as an SLA which guarantees a superb latency up to a certain number of requests and creeps out in bands beyond that. Other times this can be purely commercial - why not extend better pricing to customers who genuinely cost you less to service or a tiered revenue share to those who contribute more to the partnership?

Reporting & Agile

When I talk to people about their experiences with agile development I frequently hear - from the business side - that once all the bureaucracy has disappeared (which no one tends to see as a bad thing), they struggle a bit with the visibility of projects and the reporting of progress.

This view is usually 100% in contradiction with what I hear from the same organisation's development practice - who will usually tell me that visibility has never been greater and that they have an unprecedented degree of transparency and openness with their business partners.

Can they both be right?

When we, as engineers, make statements like the above we're usually referring to the public nature of our SCRUM/XP/etc artifacts - product backlogs and burndown charts are open to anyone in real time, requirements, estimates, and plans tend to be kept in readily accessible web tools, and of course most events in the process (such as daily standups and each iteration's demo) are public forums. What else do you need to have the most detailed, accurate, up to date view of every piece of work anytime you want it?

This is all true, but where we tend to go wrong is in underestimating the underlying complexity of something that inherently makes sense to us. There is actually a significant degree of interpretation - based on technical knowledge built up over years - necessary to answer a simple question such as "how are things going?" through agile artifacts alone; we just tend to be pretty good at doing it in our heads as we go.

Here's a simple example to underline my point. O2 has a pretty nifty self-service portal, and I can use it at any time of the day or night to see what my current mobile phone bill is and how far through my monthly quota of data and text messages I am. It works well for me because they have taken some underlying data about my account, put it through some pre-processing to provide some plain-English conclusions, and presented it on the web conveniently formatted so that I can interpret its meaning. Instead, imagine if they did transparency and self-service as we sometimes do in software delivery and just told me that all the data is there - the same artifacts that they use internally are open to me - and I must draw my own conclusions from some raw material. I guess I would install toad, connect up to their DB, select my rows from the billing table, join that with my rows from the metering table, and dump them into a view that showed me a current bill value along with my unused quota of texts etc. A few of us out there would probably quite like this alternative but, nonetheless, we have to agree that it is unlikely to be a level of service that the majority of O2's customers are going to be happy with let alone know how to use.

So what can we do differently?

Try to aggregate and simplify a bit for your stakeholders; provide just a little more interpretation and presentation on top of the solid data you already keep and it will be much easier for non-techies to make sense of. As long as you are not misrepresenting the underlying facts (easy to do unintentionally whenever summarising data for consumption by others) you'll probably find that your business partners will refer to that as the 'transparency' you've been trying to achieve and they'll thank you dearly for it.

Cloud Congress Done Quick

[well, my bit at least]

Yesterday I spoke at this year’s Cloud Computing Conference covering what cloud computing really is all about (once you peel away the hype) and how to break the back of the adoption problem – what do you put out there and how do you get started? It was the first time I’d ever done a talk that had absolutely no diagrams or pictures whatsoever in the presentation and, considering the plainness of the slide deck, it didn’t go too badly at all.

Excluding the mundane introduction, here’s the reader’s digest version of my key points:

What's in a cloud?

As a relativity new and trendy technology cloud computing is open to a lot of debate and even the 'correct' interpretation changes as the technology matures. We've had web applications for a long time now, so I'm not comfortable with SaaS being thrown into the cloud bucket. I like to define it in the context of how it changes how you deliver software (by abstracting away the complexities, layout, and connectivity of infrastructure from you developers) and how it impacts the way delivery costs are calculated (by exchanging metered billing on a usage basis for CAPEX-heavy up front acquisition).

My test (does your definition of cloud computing rely on the observations of your end users?) is simply to ask yourself "am I saying I am a cloud company just because my users access my product over the web?" If so, then perhaps you need to consider that maybe you might not be. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing new either.

What your FD sees

My next section expanded on the CAPEX vs OPEX shift that cloud platforms enable. If you have got your product design right then - on the web anyway - more usage should equate to more revenue and, with a cloud platform, more usage equates to more cost. See how that works? The cost base grows in line with revenues, therefore smoothing out that lumpy accounting and tricky budgeting activity that is characteristic of large hardware drops throughout a site's lifetime. You've also able to bring new things online relatively quickly (eliminating the ordering/delivery lead time/racking and stacking stages) and you can afford to try out slightly more speculative business cases - if I'm on the fence about a particular feature then I'm much more likely to give it a try if I know I can pack it up quickly and cheaply later if it's turns out for the worst.

Most cloud platforms have pretty good metering systems in place and that allows you a much more granular view of what part of your system is directly responsible for what parts of your cost base. From a business case perspective my advice here is to include all costs and not forget about time as a factor. Sounds a little obvious but when, for example, looking at Amazon's S3 as a storage platform for an analytical data set your total cost is going to include the transferring in and out of data as well as the cost per GB of storing it. Time matters too - I've seen the odd business case for a cloud platform fail to stack up because over a 3 year period more total cash is paid out than total cash spend once the large CAPEX bill is amortized over the same period.

Cloud capabilities

I also touched on some of the less obvious uses for cloud computing because so much emphasis is given to migrating existing systems into the cloud and I don't think enough time is given to considering what additional things that aren't being done now could be brought on because of the inherent properties of cloud platforms. These include private content delivery networks (because the larger cloud players tend to have a good reach), enabling offshore or outsourced development without opening your perimeters to external organizations who may have weaker security policies, neutral territory for integrations or joint ventures, and large scale load testing (because where else will you get hundreds of high spec load generators external to your network and connected over realistically-latent lines).

Development and testing environments are a good way to dip a toe in because, if you're doing it right, you will already have nicely sanitized data (which gets you clear of most of the oft-cited security concerns) and you won't be expecting production-sized load. It's also the best way to get a good feel for the cloud suitability of your production system without making any user impacting changes.

Architecting for the cloud

Many people - mostly those selling cloud integration tools or who charge by the hour - will tell you about how they can help you move your systems into the cloud. Don't kid yourself on. If you're using a half-way decent definition of a cloud platform then there is a lot more to it than is commonly appreciated. There are a number of good design patterns that I believe organizations should start adopting today and not just because they prepare systems for cloud runtime in the future, but also because they're pretty good ideas on their own merits.

It all starts with my favorite - decoupling and creating clear, distinct boundaries between functionality in a system and abstracting the specifics of the implementation which delivers said functionality behind a well defined interface. When you present specific uses of data to a network in this way then, subject to a bunch of common sense rules, you are able to host that individual part of your overall system another way - on different servers, in another data center, or hey, in the cloud! As long as it's reachable by it's consumers - which brings us nicely onto messaging and using state sparingly - you buy yourself the flexibility to move things quite dynamically. A service registry is also highly desirable if you a) have composites made up of many services and b) want to be able to move them and scale up/down dynamically.

All good practices for scalability and availability regardless of your stance on the cloud.

The crystal ball

You're not allowed to speak at an event and not give some predictions. I think there is an old charter or something somewhere. So mine were; barriers are coming down and this will continue with technologies such as private link and private clouds, as with all trendy concepts the waters will be muddy for a while as the word 'cloud' is appended to everything we've already got in order to sell it to us again, and within 5 years I expect to see hybrids (cloud-type platforms in use to some degree) in almost every organization.

Overall a good conference - some top panelists and speakers, and I met some great folks there. Thanks to all the guys and gals at SixDegrees for putting together a worthwhile and fun event.

You can find the slides here.