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Two Birds with One (Safety) Stone

We recently received a health bonus at Industrial Logic. Each employee was given $500 to spend on his or her health with two conditions: a) we spend the money by the end of 2013, and b) we report back to the rest of the company on what we spent and why.

At first I was a bit skeptical. I’m in my mid-forties and have been steadily getting out of shape over the past 5 years. And I’ve got many failed experiences with diets and exercise programs, although I know it can be done. More specifically, I had built a running habit that I kept for 15 years and used to have a much better diet – so I knew I could do it even though I have failed to do so over the past few years.

Also, I know what doesn’t work for me. Gadgets don’t work – I’ve got many unused gadgets. Gyms don’t work, I’m self-conscious at gyms and don’t really like taking the time to go to one far away. Diets don’t work, I always yo-yo back.

So all the obvious routes have already been tried and didn’t work for me. And I just don’t have the motivation or belief that trying the same thing again will work this time around. So what can I do differently?

Well – I know that if I can build a habit – like the one that I broke with running – then it really becomes easy. But how?

A bunch of internet searches and a cool TedX video later and I’ve got a plan that I’m working on for health and fitness. Then I started thinking about all the great ways that this idea – of getting really good at building habits – can help us do a better job at helping our clients get the most out of our products and services.

At Industrial Logic, we’ve been working steadily on creating an Anzen culture – a culture of safety – for our clients and ourselves. One of those ways has been validated learning – i.e. making sure all of our offerings not only deliver valuable content, but result in observable behavior change. Which is where all the habit work comes in – the best way we know to make behavior changes stick is to form a habit. And by leveraging the latest in behavioral science, we can really make things safer – and better – for everyone.

2 Comments

Posted by samadisy on January 2, 2014 in Uncategorized

Inverting Traditional Approaches to Teaching TDD: A Ridiculously Small Step to Build the Habit

29 Dec

Recently I had a conversation with Ingmar van Dijk who is one of the most talented technical coaches out there, and we were discussing how we can do best for our clients in our testing and refactoring classes. More specifically, we had agreed that most of our clients are not working on green-field codebases and although learning testing and refactoring skills is a good first step, it is not enough to really tackle the hard problems.

We were discussing how mastering TDD, and making it an everyday habit was a multi-month process for both of us from the moment we were introduced to it, until the time we had the skills and abilities to actually perform TDD on all our code.

And we agreed that this probably one of the major reasons that the technical practices like TDD and BDD are not as widespread in the community. They are difficult and that impedes them “catching on”.

Ingmar had suggested the idea that we start with the skills needed for working with legacy code FIRST, and then perhaps go back to the intricacies of TDD and refactoring later. It seems like putting the cart before the horse…. But after a couple of weeks away from the conversation I think he is right.

Think about it – one of the reasons we don’t build a habit is that we don’t have the ability to do TDD on all our code after we are introduced to it. So it is hard to pick one regular trigger. But what if we learned a few micro-skills that would allow us to work with existing code first. And then AFTER we built the habit of writing (very simple) tests for our code before we touched anything, THEN we came back to honing our TDD skills.

This would mean, we would start with:

1) Breaking dependencies in existing code,

2) Creating characterization tests,

3) Build the code in a test-after method regularly.

Then, after the habit is built for testing all code that we work on, we go back to test-first development and refactoring and refine our skills?

3 Comments

Posted by samadisy on December 29, 2013 in Uncategorized

Tags: habits, TDD, Working with Legacy Code

Test Driven Development and Habits

27 Dec

Habit-forming is my new (short-term?) obsession. And I’m looking back at some of the practices in agile development and what I can learn from the habit=f(motivation, ability, trigger) equation.

Technical practices – test first development, refactoring, requirements driven development, etc…, are some of the most valuable practices in our toolbox, yet, unfortunately are the least commonly practiced. We all know that they are difficult – but is that enough to keep us from doing what we know to be the right thing to do?

The motivation is usually there to certain degrees. In fact, looking back, the most successful teams are those in crisis and they have really serious motivation to help them go through the huge learning curve (i.e. ability in habit-speak).

And the triggers are pretty simple – write a test before you write code. Write an acceptance test before you start the iteration.

The real problem here is the ability – it is a really high bar. If we remember that ability needed and motivation required are proportional – then we need to bring the ability needed down so that you don’t need great motivation. Here’s what we’ve tried so far:

immersion classes (in the early days of eXtreme Programming)
training classes
eLearning (such as Industrial Logic’s technical albums)
mentoring
coaching
pair programming
katas
etc…

But the fact is, those things reduced the hurdle, but evidence shows it is still too high. So, I’ve been thinking, “what ridiculously small steps can we take to help people build the habit first?”.

And since I am currently writing in ridiculously small steps to build my own blogging habit, then I’m not going to worry too much that I don’t have the answer now. But I think I have a really good question. And I’ll let my subconscious work on it for a bit and blog ideas as they come up.

But please, if you think this is worthwhile – think along with me. What ridiculously small steps can we take to make the technical practices habits with more teams and individuals?

An Experiment in Habit-Building

26 Dec

I have a theory that I want to test out and would like to invite you to come along for the ride. I want to blog more regularly. In fact, I want to create a habit of blogging – I have wanted to do such a thing for multiple years (maybe you have too?).

The theory is based on someone else’s theory on habit building: Habit = f(Motivation, Ability, Triggers). What’s cool, is that Motivation and Ability are proportional. That is, if you are trying to build a habit for doing something trivial, then you need very little motivation; all you really need is a trigger.

So, how do you do something trivial? Take a ridiculously small step. Ridiculously small is in meditating for 2 breaths, doing 2 pushups, or …. Or writing 2 paragraphs and blogging them. Just two paragraphs. No reviews. No agonizing on whether this is the right thing to say or how dumb I’ll look to the reader.

So here we go. This is the first such blog. And my trigger will be writing before I go to bed. That’s it.

Welcome!

13 Mar

I am your host, Amr Elssamadisy and I will be guiding you through various tools, techniques, and models that I – and many others – have found useful in building and maintaining software systems. I am a software developer, in the general sense. Yes, that means I code, but I also play different roles on development teams such as coach, lead, test, and even manage every now and then.

I am on a quest to find a way to make software development significantly easier. That includes, but is not limited to, several agile practices, human dynamics, learning theory, and anything else that helps us understand why and how teams succeed and fail in building software.

This blog is a series of bread crumbs I’m leaving in my wake…

– amr (march 18, 2013)

Amr Elssamadisy's Blog