Software is Not Coding, It’s A Cooperative Game of Communication by Bruce Nielson

BruceNielson — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:04:25 GMT

In my post on “code is really design” post, I mentioned that I would further address the paradox that software is created in “thoughts units” but the most important people to the success or failure of a project are the sponsor and customer. In this post, I’ll explore that paradox further by discussing Alistair Cockburn’s idea of Software as a cooperative game.

In Agile Software Development, Cockburn says:

Software development is therefore a cooperative game of invention and communication. There is nothing in the game but people’s ideas and the communication of those ideas to their colleagues and to the computer.

In Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams, he writes:

[Successful teams] view developing software as an evolving conversation – an economic-cooperative game, actually. In any one move they go forward and create reminders for each other.

But in what sense is software a game and how does this help us understand software development better?

I’ve never been fully comfortable with Cockburn’s calling it a “game.” I’m not sure images of Monopoly and Halo (which is what comes to my mind, anyhow) is what he intended.

It’s helpful to refer to other non-software examples that Cockburn uses. One of my favorite of his examples is making laws in a legislature.

Can You Estimate How Long it Will Take to Pass a Law?

Imagine if the republicans asked the democrats, “How long will it take you guys to pass that new health care law of yours?”

Now in theory, the democrats should be able to estimate this. It’s just a bunch of words on a pieces of paper, right? Someone has to sit down to write it, they have to talk to experts, they have to run a few numbers and come up with a budget, then they have to pass it through a committee, then bring it to the floor, and finally get a vote. So the question the republicans are asking seems reasonable on the surface.

But in reality, part of what the democrats have to estimate is how long it will take them to convince enough republicans to pass a version of the bill. If this step were unnecessary, making an estimate would probably be easy. But if the democrats need to actually convince some key republicans to vote for the bill to get it passed, then part of their estimate will have to be an estimate for how long it takes to keep revising the bill until the republicans accept it – if ever.

Once we realize that is the case, the republican’s question seems less legitimate. The Republicans have a significant say in determining when the bill is “done” and the democrats don’t actually control that part of the process. The democrats cannot, even in principle, make an estimate for how long it will take to pass the law.

I see software much like this. We have customers and sponsors on the one hand and the development team (programmers, testers, designers, project managers) on the other hand. But instead of capturing ideas into specific laws to be interpreted by other humans, they are cooperating together to capture business rules into an automated programs that will be interpreted by computers.

There is nothing else going on when we make software. There is no analogy here to building a house or a wall, or anything else physical. When my customers ask me “how long will it take to program the fitz-bart module?” I am literally incapable of answering them because part of my estimate would have to be how long they will choose to iterate before they accept the software as matching their needs. There is literally no limit to how many times they might choose to keep tweaking the requirements and I’ve been in cases where they never become satisfied with it.

If I didn’t have to worry about customers having to accept the software, estimates would be a lot easier. But with customer acceptance required, it’s impossible to estimate anything beyond the first iteration of the creation of the module.

An Alternative – Cooperation

Now consider an alternative example. Lets say that both the republicans and democrats both are anxious to pass a health care bill and they both have more or less synchronous goals. Now is it possible to estimate how long it will take to pass a health care law?

Absolutely!

Why? Because now both sides are working together to meet a target date. This means both sides are motivated to make the date and, more to the point, both will be willing to accept some compromises to meet that date.

Software works the same way. If the customers/sponsors and the development team both want to make a certain release date or a specific budget target, there is almost always a way to come up with a workable (though usually manual, and thus less than ideal) solution to any software problem such that you can meet those goals. It just requires both sides to agree that they will make the target date or the target budget and to be willing to negotiate on scope until they match those goals.

The Law of Lossy Requirements by Bruce Nielson

BruceNielson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:15:00 GMT

Lossy Compression

In computer science, compression is an indispensible tool. Anyone familiar with .zip files knows what I mean. Interestingly, there are two kids of compression, lossless and lossy. Lossless compression is like .zip compression, you put a file of, say, 100kb in and the end result is a file of, say, 50k. But when you reverse the process, you get back your original 100kb file.

Lossless compression relies on the fact that in real life information contains patterns. Just imagine taking this post and finding the most common used words in it. Then replace the most common word with a the tag “<1>” and the next most common with “<2>”, etc. The end result would generally be a smaller file, yet by replacing “<x>” with the original words you could recover the original file in its entirety.

I used to wonder what possible use lossy compression could ever be. Why in the world would I ever want to save off a compressed version of my files if I couldn’t get them back to their original state ever again?

Of course for files, lossy compression is useless but for computer graphics it’s quite useful. Because the human eye is not capable of picking up all the details in an image it’s possible to reduce the details in the image without the human eye being able to tell the difference.

What’s even more interesting is that you can continue to increase that lossy compression on an image until the human eye can tell the difference, yet the brain will still be able to tell what the image is. It just looks a bit more blurry.

In fact, you can continue to compress and compress using lossy compression to any size. At some point you end up with a single solid color, of course, which isn’t useful, but even if you take a very large image – let’s say 1024 x 1024 pixels – and shrink it via lossy compression down to the equivalent of a 16 x 16 image, the human brain fills in the details and still makes sense of the image.

Requirements Are Lossy Compression

If Code is Design, one of the most under appreciated points of software development is that requirements are equivalent to lossy compression of graphics, only in reverse. (See also Tell Me What To Do, Not How to Do It for an example of this.)

What we call “requirements documents” (or even “design documents”) are really a blurry picture of what is to be built. In other words, requirements and design documents by definition do not contain all the details.

Why do we do this? There are actually many reasons, but here are two key reasons:

1. Until the software is actually built, it doesn’t exist. So there isn’t really a choice but to imagine it with broad brush strokes and then refine it into reality.

2. As was discussed in a previous post, human beings more easily understand abstractions rather than precision. If we didn’t have abstract and blurry views of the design, no one but the programmer would ever understand what is to be done. Actually, even the programmer would only understand it in chunks and not holistically.

The Law of Lossy Requirements

If you followed my argument so far, then The Law of Lossy Requirements will now make sense to you. This law states:

All requirements documents are a lossy compression of the business rules. If you made it non-lossy, the cheapest way to document it would be in code.

Therefore there are two corollaries to this law:

Corollary 1: There will never be a point where you know all details of what software is to be created until the software is completed.

Corollary 2: There is no such thing as documenting everything in the software because to do so would require synchronizing essentially a second copy of the code.

Software Psychology : Human Factors, Requirements, Coding As Design, Estimation

Software is Not Coding, It’s A Cooperative Game of Communication by Bruce Nielson

The Law of Lossy Requirements by Bruce Nielson