Using Agile Practices to Create an Agile Presentation

What’s the best way to make a presentation on Agile practices? Practice Agile practices.

You could write a presentation “big bang” style, delivering version 1.0 in front of your big audience of 200+ people at Kscope 2011 before anybody has seen it. Of course, if you do it that way, you build a lot of risk into your product. But what else can you do?

You can execute the Agile practices of releasing early and often, allowing the reception of your product to guide its design. Whenever you find an aspect of your product that doesn’t get the enthusiastic reception you had hoped for, you fix it for the next release.

That’s one of the reasons that my release schedule for “My Case for Agile Methods” includes a little online webinar hosted by Red Gate Software next week. My release schedule is actually a lot more complicated than just one little pre-ODTUG webinar:

2011-04-15	Show key conceptual graphics to son (age 13)
2011-04-29	Review #1 of paper with employee #1
2011-05-18	Review #2 of paper with customer
2011-05-14	Review #3 of paper with employee #1
2011-05-18	Review #4 of paper with employee #2
2011-05-26	Review #5 of paper with employee #3
2011-06-01	Submit paper to ODTUG web site
2011-06-02	Review #6 of paper with employee #1
2011-06-06	Review #7 of paper with employee #3
2011-06-10	Submit revised paper to ODTUG web site
2011-06-13	Present “My Case for Agile Methods” to twelve people in an on-site customer meeting
2011-06-22	Present “My Case for Agile Methods” in an online webinar hosted by Red Gate Software
2011-06-27	Present “My Case for Agile Methods” at ODTUG Kscope 2011 in Long Beach, California

(By the way, the vast majority of the work here is done in Pages, not Keynote. I think using a word processor, not an operating system for slide projectors.)

Two Agile practices are key to everything I’ve ever done well: incremental design and rapid iteration. Release early, release often, and incorporate what you learn from real world use back into the product. The magic comes from learning how to choose wisely in two dimensions:

1. Which feature do you include next?
2. To whom do you release next?

The key is to show your work to other people. Yes, there’s tremendous value in practicing a presentation, but practicing without an audience merely reinforces, it doesn’t inform. What you need while you design something is information—specifically, you need the kind of information called feedback. Some of the feedback I receive generates some pretty energetic arguing. I need that to fortify my understanding of my own arguments so that I’ll be more likely to survive a good Q&A session on stage.

To lots of people who have seen teams run projects into the ground using what they call “Agile,” the word “Agile” has become a synonym for sloppy, irresponsible work habits. When you hear me talk about Agile, you’ll hear about practices that are highly disciplined and that actually require a lot of focus, dedication, commitment, practice, and plain old hard work to execute.

Agile, to me, is about injecting discipline into a process that is inevitably rife with unpredictable change.

Why KScope?

Early this year, my friend Mike Riley from ODTUG asked me to write a little essay in response to the question, “Why Kscope?” that he could post on the ODTUG blog. He agreed that cross-posting would help the group reach more people, so I’ve reproduced my response to that question here. I’ll hope to see you at Kscope11 in Long Beach June 26–30. If you develop applications for Oracle systems, you need to be there.

MR: Why KScope?

CM: Most people in the Oracle world who know my name probably think of me as a database administrator. In my heart, I am a software designer and developer. Before my career with Oracle, I worked in the semiconductor industry as a language designer. I wrote compilers for a living. Designing and writing software has always been my professional true love. I’ve never strayed too far away from it; I’ve always found a reason to write software, no matter what my job has been. [Ed: Examples include the Oracle*APS suite and a compiler design project he did for Great West Life in the 1990s, the queueing theory models he worked on in the late 1990s, the Method R Profiler software (Cary wrote all the XSLT code), and finally today, he spends about half of his time designing and writing the MR Tools suite.]

My career as an Oracle performance specialist is really a natural extension of my software development background. It is still really weird to me that in the Oracle market, performance is regarded as a job done primarily by operations people instead of by development people. Developers control at least 90% of the leverage over how fast an application will be able to run. I think that performance became a DBA responsibility in the formative years of our Oracle world because so many early Oracle projects had DBA teams but no professional development teams.

Most of those big projects were people implementing big off-the-shelf applications like Oracle Financial and Manufacturing Applications (which grew into the Oracle E-Business Suite). The only developers that most of those implementation teams had were what I would call nonprofessional developers. Now, I don’t mean people who were in any way unprofessional. I mean they were predominantly businesspeople who had never been educated as software developers, but who’d been told that of course anybody could write computer programs in this new “fourth-generation language” called SQL.

Just about any time you implement a vendor’s highly customizable new application with 20,000+ database objects underneath it, you’re going to run into performance problems. Someone had to attend to those problems, and the DBAs and sysadmins were the only technical people anywhere near the project who could do it. Those DBAs and Oracle sysadmins were also the people who organized the early Oracle conferences, and I think this is where the topic of “performance tuning” became embedded into the DBA track.

The resulting problem that I still see today is that the topic became dominated by “tips and techniques”—lists of tricks that operational people could try to maybe make their systems go a little bit faster. The word “tuning” says it all. I almost never use the word except facetiously, because it’s a cheap imitation of what systems really need, which is performance optimization, which is what designers and developers of software are supposed to do. Even the evolution of Oracle tools for the performance analyst mirrors this post-production tips-and-techniques “tuning” mentality. That’s why most performance management tools you see today are predominantly oriented toward viewing performance from a system resource perspective (the DBA’s perspective), rather than the code path perspective (the developer’s perspective).

The whole key to performance is the application design and development team, especially when you realize that the performance of an application is not just its code path speed, but its overall interaction with the person using it. So many of the performance problems that I’ve found are caused by applications that are just stupid in how they’re designed to interact with me. For example, if you’ve seen my “Messed-up apps” presentation before, you might remember the self-service bus ticket kiosk that made me wait for over a minute while the application tallied the more-than-2,000 different bus trips for which I might want to buy a ticket. That’s an app with a broken specification. There’s nothing that a run-time operations team can do to make that application any fun to use (short of sending it back for redesign).

My goal as a software designer is not just to make software that runs quickly. My goal is also to make applications that are delightful to use. It’s the difference between an application that you use because you must and one that feels like it’s a necessary part of who you are. Making software like that is the kind of thing that a designer learns from studying Don Norman, Edward Tufte, Christopher Alexander, and Jonathan Ive. It’s a level of performance that just isn’t on the menu for operational run-time support staff to even think about, because it’s beyond their control.

So: why Kscope? The ODTUG conferences are the best places I can go in the Oracle market where I can be with people who think and talk about these things. …Or for that matter, who understand that these ideas even exist and deserve to be studied. KScope is just the right place for me to be.