A Decade Of Service

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They're OK When You're Used To Them

It's hell having to work on a deadline. It's worse when that deadline involves getting a lot of people to all get to the same place at the same time. It's worse yet when you're dealing with something that always needs to be done better the next time -- and the next time already has its deadline set.

Salesforce is one of those companies that relishes deadlines, and has developed some well-known (but difficult to implement) methods -- they call it ADM, for "adaptive delivery methodology" that is really the application of agile programming practices to everything the company does -- that they think have made them a much better company all the way around. They think they deliver products on a regular schedule, and those products are not only better, but they include a lot of innovation as well. (The video is about an hour long, but the meat is in the first twenty minutes or so.)

ADM, according to Steve Greene, Salesforce's VP of program management, "employs the [get ready for some jargon here] scrum management framework, adopts certain extreme programming practices and is based on lean principles". To save you some reading, "scrum" refers to using small teams. If you're building software, small teams build parts, get them out to people for feedback, and make changes, but nothing about the project is written in stone ahead of time; the decisions to include or not include a function are made at the team level.

ADM is built on seven principles:

1. Eliminate Waste. We'll admit to loving this. Mr. Greene says this includes not only the obvious things like bugs and items that weren't included the last time around. "There's other types of debt, like status reports that nobody reads, meetings that we're in that aren't productive and don't provide any value, but really, the number one waste in software development in our industry is building features that our customers don't want or don't need."
2. Build Quality In. Most companies, Mr. Greene says, use the "waterfall" approach to development, where everything follows a set path that comes from the top down. Every feature is hashed out before any coding is done, all of the decisions have been made, and the testing of the entire product is done at the end of the cycle -- but if something goes wrong or changes, the whole project very nearly starts over, resulting in feature creep, redundant re-checking, and delayed shipping. The single greatest advantages to ADM, according to Mr. Greene, is that everything is vetted as it goes out, so decisions about "what do we do now" are made quickly, on the basis of immediate feedback. That lends stability and consistent behavior to systems, and those systems are the ones customers need and want.
3. Respect People. Mr. Greene says (like almost everyone who manages says) that Salesforce hires the best people it can find -- and it may even be a fact -- and then empowers them using the scrum system to let/make them take ownership of their work. Indirectly, though, Salesforce is also empowering its customers by funneling their feedback directly to those teams -- which reinforces the first two principles even further.
4. Optimize the Whole. Mr. Greene admits that this is tricky. It's easy to say that the whole product is more than the sum of the contributions of dozens of small teams, and that the small teams are more than the sum of each team member -- but that's where optimizing comes in. The culture of Salesforce is such that information flows throughout the company, so the people doing the user interface know what the people working on some critical back-end reconciliation process are doing. There are no secrets.
5. Create Knowledge. Nobody is out of the loop. Mr. Greene sums it up: "Innovation can't flourish in any organization unless you have the consistent and unrestricted flow of ideas, information and knowledge from team member to team member, and from team members to managers and executives."
6. Just-in-time Decisions. Frequently, the best decisions are the ones that aren't made; circumstances have a way of intervening in the best-laid plans. Mr. Greene says, "We want to delay irreversible decisions that we have to make as long as responsibly possible in our development cycle." Doing so allows whiteboards to have items erased and added, and keeps the process of development from having to go through days, weeks and months of research, examination and approval.
7. Deliver Fast. Salesforce teams know when the company is going to ship a major release (every four months), so they can reasonably know what they can deliver -- and what they must deliver. They're on a deadline, and it's their job to figure out what features of a particular system are important and what aren't in order to make that deadline. Developers are expected to "check in" something every day, meaning they have to be able to set their priorities and then get the job done, because everyone else is doing the same thing.

There are several observations one can make about what Salesforce does, and Mr. Greene's comments don't address either, so in a manner befitting an opinionated former publisher, we'll do so for him.

The first is that while Mr. Greene talks mostly about how his company designs, develops and delivers product, the same principles can be applied to running any company (which is the whole point to lean and agile development in the first place) in any industry. It's not so much that it takes a big team to build a car -- it does -- as it is that the people who build and install the radiator should be part of the process that designs how it fits into the car in the first place -- and the work of the whole team should be adjusted based on the feedback from the poor sap that has to change the radiator fluid every six months.

It's not about the efficiency of the company's operations, or making employees feel like their contributions are valued (although both contribute positively to the bottom line, at least in theory); it's about building something that customers want enough to pay for and use regularly.

The second is that it exposes other operations that are coasting for what they are: inefficent and unresponsive to their customers' needs. We have all the respect in the world for Ray Ozzie, who recently announced his retirement as the "chief software architect" at Microsoft. Back in 2005, Mr. Ozzie wrote a well-known internal memo that laid out his vision for Microsoft's direction in the coming years. Without making some less-than-complimentary comments noting the distinction between "what he said" and "what they did", the most interesting part of the memo is the following:

I know that Bill, Steve and the senior leadership team understand that Microsoft's execution effectiveness will be improved by eliminating obstacles to developing and shipping products.

It all starts at the top. What has made Salesforce successful in making the painful transition from "waterfall" development is that the bosses made the commitment to ADM as a business decision, and then gave mid-level management the authority to implement it. "Eliminating waste", as Mr. Greene says, isn't just about bugs and "deferred refactoring;" it's about improving the quality of the people leading development teams. It's about matching skill sets to functions. It's about demanding -- and enforcing -- that people meet deadlines. That's showing respect for the rest of the staff.

Third, there's a difference directing and leading. Simply put, leading is when you work with people you respect (and who respect you) toward a common goal. Decision-making is shared process, even if one person is held ultimately responsible for it; the group feels the responsibility of meeting the goal. The system is three-dimensional; it works on consensus of a whole, with an examination of factors contributed by the team members. Approaches to a problem become more innovative, with the various skills and experiences of the team members contributing.

Directing is two-dimensional; all decision-making is vested in one person, and whether or not he shares the criteria on which he bases a decision is solely his decision as well. It is the group's job to ensure that he meets the goal. To succeed in that situation, one has to pretty much be both all-knowing and ubiquitous. His decisions have to always be good ones.

But it's his responsibility if the group fails.

More News and Notes

That's why they're working in the mall: For once, Microsoft got the marketing right. Last week, it released the Kinect game controller -- not too early to let the shininess wear off before the Christmas shopping season, and not so late that it won't be on shelves when people want to buy it. The launch was not without its bumps, though; GameSpot suggested, implied, hinted, whatever, that the device is racist, an allegation that Consumer Reports and Microsoft dismissed as hogwash.

We actually had the opportunity to see one of these devices in use over the weekend, and they're impressive. They're the perfect gift for someone who gets a little exuberent with a hand-held controller, and it's still probably a good idea to make sure he's some distance from your new flat screen TV.

One giant step for ...: YouTube has been granted a pardon by the Turkish government.

The SAP opera begins: We all remember Mark Hurd, the CEO of HP who replaced Carly Fiorina, who was fired after he tried to hide some personal expenses, and who wound up as the co-President of Oracle, sitting at the right hand of Larry Ellison. What has gotten lost in all the hubbub about Mr. Hurd and Ms. Fiorina (who has been busy but unsuccessfully trying to ride Meg Whitman's coattails in a California election) is that Léo Apotheker, the former CEO of SAP, is the new boss at HP, and that Mr. Ellison and Oracle are suing SAP in a copyright infringement case. SAP has already admitted that it infringed (the court case is over damages) but now HP is seeing its still tarnished reputation being questioned in a case it has nothing to do with -- unless you count those executive types. It isn't helping much that Mr. Apotheker, who started work last week, hasn't been to the office yet. One thing is certain: Mr. Ellison isn't going to go quietly.

Now we know why thermo talks the way he does: He reads the Daily Mail.

When you can't assimilate, replicate: Mark Zuckerborg isn't an idiot; he was sharp enough to resist the offers to be acquired by any number of suitors when he got Facebook going, and sharp enough to know that his strategy of getting a feature out, taking some hits in the press for the feature compromising everyone's privacy, and then removing it was going to put him so far out in front of competitors that eventually, he would be able to become the Hunter and not the Hunted. And so it has come to pass that when Foursquare turned down the paltry $125 million the Hive King offered for its geolocation service, he responded as only he could: Facebook now has its own geolocation service. And while we're on the subject of omnipresence, spam dropped by about 20 percent a couple of weeks ago when the Russian government just announced an investigation. How Chuck Norris-ish is that?

Got Flash? ... or rather, want Flash on your iPhone? Yeah, we know what Steve said, but honest... he didn't mean never... One place you won't find Flash is at document sharing website Scrpd.com, which dumped Flash for HTML5 last May.

We know what the Google fanboys are going to call it: Blekko is the latest entrant into the Search Wars. It's hook: founder/CEO Rich Skrenta says, "The goal is to clean up Web search and get all the spam out of it." We invite you to try it out, and then let us know what you think. Missing from the beta version that, we have to admit, we like in Google: images and videos.

Soon to be on eBay: A Haynes guide to the USS Enterprise; election campaign materials, slightly used but in good condition. $175 200 million OBO.

Happy birthday: Windows and a room with a view.

MySpace is an early adopter: Google has released mod_pagespeed, a free module that can be installed on Apache webservers that promises to load web pages twice as fast as they are loaded without it. For all you CentOS and Ubuntu programmers out there, it's an open source project. Unfortunately, it comes just a bit too late for GeoCities.

In requiem: Theodore Sorensen, one of the best advisers (and speechwriters: "... the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans...") a President could ever have; and coming on the heels of the San Francisco Giants' World Series win, manager George "Sparky" Anderson -- one of baseball's all-time best communicators.

Community service department: We tend to be equal-opportunity snipers, but we like to think we aren't above giving our favorite targets their just due when they do something good, especially when "enlightened self-interest" is the motivation. Such is the case with Apple, which recently refurbished a Chicago subway station. We especially like this quote: "The retail experience doesn't start exactly in your store. It starts when they approach your store." Also, a pronunciation guide for geeks and the secret word.

Cooked goose: It takes a lot of nerve to steal someone's writing and use it as your own -- and even more to, when the author complains, say that you've improved the article. That's what happened to Monica Gaudio, who had a friend tell her about an article lifted by Cooks Source. Turns out the editor, Judith Griggs, not only knows and ignores copyright law -- but apparently, this is pretty commonplace for her; she's even lifted from Paula Deen.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Adopt-A-Guy, and in what must have been inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre, a self-serve DMV terminal -- on La Mancha Way, of course. Finally, one thing you can do on television.

Nata's Corner

I get nervous when I hear about otherwise smart people doing really stupid things. One of those people is a guy named Eric Butler, who recently released a product called Firesheep, a Firefox add-on that lets a user track other users on an unsecured network, and can even let someone take over a Twitter or Facebook account. Butler says he released it to show people the dangers of logging into sites that don't encrypt traffic -- which is probably true, but is also, as former Assistant US Attorney Joe DeMarco said, like "robbing a bank, giving the money to the poor, and claiming you're not guilty of robbery." You would think that a programmer with those skills would give a little more thought to what people can do with his tool -- especially since most Firefox users aren't the "sheep" who will blindly use whatever browser happens to come on their computer, and most of them are likely to know about add-ons too. Facebook knows about the problem, but ultimately, it's a user's choice if he wants to log into a site through an unsecured network, right?

You would also think the guy reads the papers (or at least, a paper's website. Last week, Google took the unusual step of sending out an email to everyone who was a Gmail user telling how it has settled the class-action lawsuit over Google Buzz -- which inadvertently exposed user's data. The European Union is considering tougher privacy laws, and one result of last week's election in the US is that some Republican congressmen are going to make Intenet privacy a priority (just don't hold your breath). One thing is for sure: my other half uses Firefox, and if I get any hint that my Facebook account is being hijacked, this will seem like a Sunday picnic.

I've become a fan of the tech writers at the Washington Post, and here's one of the reasons why: One of the writers who works for both them and PCWorld came up with a list of the 25 Worst High-Tech Habits. I'm going to list them, but you'll have to read the article to see what to do about them.

And one last thing: Lock down your home WiFi network please -- even if it's a hassle.

Milestones

New Geniuses: Two Experts Exchange members earned their third Genius certificates in the last couple of weeks. One of them, andyalder joined EE in September 2009 and picked up his certificate in Hard Drives & Storage. The other is Microsoft MVP mark_wills, who earned his in SQL Server 2008. Earning his first Genius certificate is RiteshShah in SQL Server 2005. Nicely done, folks!

My First Million: Members who reached the 1,000,000 point level in October include broomee9, aburr, ormerodrutter, optoma and oklit.

Milestones:

• capricorn1 is the third member of Experts Exchange to reach 20,000,000 points overall. He has earned 16,000,000 points in the MS Access TA.
• nobus became the 21st EE member to earn 10,000,000 points overall.
• BlueDevilFan is the 12 Expert to have 8,000,000 points in a single TA; his are in MS Outlook.
• LSMConsulting reached 2,000,000 points in his third TA; only four other members -- angelIII, capricorn1, TheLearnedOne and lrmoore -- have accomplished that feat.
• Ray_Paseur has earned 5,000,000 points in the PHP zone.
• sdstuber has earned 2,000,000 points in both the Oracle 10.x and Oracle TAs.