Tag Archives: anti-patterns

Software

In praise of fungible developers

The “fungibility” of developers is a bit of hot topic at the moment. Fungibility means the ability to substitute one thing for another for the same effect; so money is fungible for goods in modern economies.

In software development that means taking a developer in one part of the organisation and substituting them elsewhere and not impacting the productivity of either developer involved in the exchange.

This is linked to the mythical “full-stack” developer by the emergence of different “disciplines” within web software development, usually these are: devops, client-side (browser-based development) and backend development (services).

It is entirely possible for developers to enter one of these niches and spend all their time in it. In fact sub-specialisations in things like responsive CSS and single-page apps (SPA) are opening up.

Now my view has always been that a developer should always aspire to have as broad a knowledge base as possible and to be able to turn their hand to anything. I believe when you don’t really understand what is going on around your foxhole then problems occur. Ultimately we are all pushing electric pulse-waves over wires and chips and it is worth remembering that.

However my working history was pretty badly scarred by the massive wave of Indian outsourcing that happened post the year 2000 and as a consequence the move up the value-chain that all the remaining onshore developers made. Chad Fowler’s book is a pretty good summary of what happened and how people reacted to it.

For people getting specialist pay for niche work, full-stack development doesn’t contain much attraction. Management sees fungibility as a convenient way of pushing paper resources around projects and then blaming developers for not delivering. There are also some well-written defences of specialisation.

In defence of broad skills

But I still believe that we need full-stack developers and if you don’t like that title then let’s call them holistic developers.

Organisations do need fungibility. Organisations without predictable demand or who are experiencing disruption in their business methodology need to be flexible and they need to respond to situations that are unexpected.

You also need to fire drill those situations where people leave, fall ill or have a family crisis. Does the group fall apart or can it readjust and continue to deliver value? In any organisation you never know when you need to change people round at short notice.

Developers with a limited skill set are likely to make mistakes that someone with a broader set of experiences wouldn’t. It is also easier for a generalist developer to acquire specialist knowledge when needed than to broaden a specialist.

Encouraging specialism is the same as creating knowledge silos in your organisation. There are times when this might be acceptable but if you aren’t doing it in a conscious way and accompanying it with a risk assessment then it is dangerous.

Creating holistic developers

Most organisations have an absurd reward structure that massively benefits specialists rather than generalists. You can see that in iOS developer and mobile responsive web CSS salaries. The fact that someone is less capable than their colleagues means they are rewarded more. This is absurd and it needs to end.

Specialists should be treated like contractors and consultants. They have special skills but you should be codifying their knowledge and having them train their generalist colleagues. A specialist should be seen as a short-term investment in an area where you lack institutional memory and knowledge.

All software delivery organisations should practice rotation. Consider it a Chaos Monkey for your human processes.

Rotation puts things like onboarding processes to the test. It also brings new eyes to the solution and software design of the team. If something is simple it should make sense and be simply to newcomer, not someone who has been on the team for months.

Rotation applies within teams too. Don’t give functionality to the person who can deliver it the fastest, give it to the person who would struggle to deliver it. Then force the rest of the team to support that person. Make them see the weaknesses in what they’ve created.

Value generalists and go out of your way to create them.

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Work

The gold-plated donkey cart

I'm not sure if he came up with the term but I'm going to credit this idea to James Lewis who used it in relation to a very stuck client we were working on at ThoughtWorks.

The golden donkey cart is a software delivery anti-pattern where a team ceases to make step changes to their product but instead undergoes cycles of redevelopment of the same product making every more complex and rich iterations of the same feature set.

So a team creates a product, the donkey cart, and it's great because you can move big heavy things around in it. After a while though you're used to the donkey cart and you're wondering if things couldn't be better. So the team gets together and realise that they could add suspension so the ride is not so bumpy and you can get some padded seats and maybe the cart could have an awning and some posts with rings and hooks to make it easier to lash on loads. So donkey cart v2 is definitely better and it is easier and more comfortable to use so you wonder, could it be better yet.

So the team gets back together and decides that this time they are going to build the ultimate donkey cart. It's going to be leather and velvet trim, carbon fibre to reduce weight, a modular racking system with extendible plates for cargo. The reins are going to have gold medallions, it's going to be awesome.

But it is still going to be a donkey cart and not the small crappy diesel truck that is going to be the first step on making donkey carts irrelevant.

The gold-plated donkey cart is actually a variant on both the Iron Law of Oligarchy and the Innovator's Dilemma.

The donkey cart is part of the valuable series of incremental improvements that consists of most business as usual. Making a better donkey cart makes real improvements for customers and users.

The donkey cart team is also there to create donkey carts. That's what they think and talk about all the time. It is almost churlish to say that they are really the cargo transport team because probably no-one has ever expressed their purpose or mission in those terms because no-one else has thought of the diesel truck either.

Finally any group of people brought together for a purpose will never voluntarily disband itself. They will instead find new avenues of donkey cart research that they need to pursue and there will be the donkey cart conference circuit to be part of. The need for new donkey cart requirements will be self-evident to the team as well as the need for more people and time to make the next donkey cart breakthrough, before one of their peers does.

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Java, Programming

The DAO Anti-patterns

DAO is a venerable pattern and one that managed to escape out of J2EE and continues to be used a lot in Java development particularly where Spring is also in use. I have never been fan, either the first time around in the Spring and later incarnations. It’s worth having a read through the original blueprint. One thing I particularly love is the proposed combination of Factory and DAO, I find it representative of pattern thinking: if at first you don’t succeed, try excess. In fairness though probably no-one had the problem that the Factory/DAO set out to solve.

I feel the DAO actually creates more problems than it solves. Firstly there is the issue of what the DAO is actually encapsulating. Originally it was meant to encapsulate different data access methods, it would provide the same data retrieval irrespective of whether it was using JDBC, EJB, homebrew ORM or so on. However I do not think I have ever seen it implemented that way, in fact I don’t really recall ever seeing a DAO that had more than one implementation.

What DAO quickly came to be in practice was a replacement for EJBs. The most common implementation maps a single table to a DAO class that implements finder methods that return Collections of a Domain object (if you’re lucky and Lists if not). I think this accounts for 100% of Java DAOs I have encountered in my career. This is exactly what EJB definitions used to be like, arguably the only step forward is that you are now configuring in code. The step back is that you are now implementing all those finders by hand.

So a DAO abstracts something that is irrelevant (data access strategy), is linked directly to the underlying data model (usually the table) and provides an API that is just as useless.

The problem with those finders is that unless the DAO author thought of the query you want to perform then you are out of luck. Without the metaprogamming heavy lifting of a Ruby or Groovy then finders are a dead-end implementation strategy for querying data.

So for me DAOs are an anti-pattern that suck design energy out of the development team in the form of interminable discussions of what particular DAO a finder method belongs to and how many finders should be provided by the DAO. They provide zero decoupling from the underlying data and actually hold development teams back by introducing an unnecessary abstraction layer that needs to be understood but which adds no value.

So what are the alternatives? Well my preferred pattern is DataMapper, this doesn’t introduce unnecessary abstraction and shows a bit of respect for the underlying data. It allows you to do some vertical Domain modelling but the mapping gives you the flexibility to deal with legacy data schemes.

Another good alternative is to ditch the finders and introduce SearchCriteria and Repository. I thought this was a pattern too but it doesn’t seem to have a formal write up, the best example is the Hibernate Criteria but I would urge you to judiciously adapt it to your code rather than just straight up copying the the Hibernate model.

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Programming

The Helper Anti-Pattern

You have a class X, you have a class called XHelper. XHelper contains methods that make it easy to use X.

The problem I have with this antipattern is that XHelper does nothing of value. If the methods are truly related to X then they should actual be class methods of X. However if you need “helper” methods to use the API of X chances are what is really required is a refactoring of X to incorporate the enhancements of XHelper invisibly. You shouldn’t need a helper to use an API.

Take Rails page helpers. A helper to construct the content of a page contains functionality that would be better marshalled in the controller, prior to view rendering. If multiple controllers perform the action then extract it to a service that controllers can invoke on the requests and delegates they are co-ordinating.

What if the Helper class actually refactors common functionality from classes X and Y and is actually called FooHelper because it helps perform Foo in X and Y?

Well, here we are onto something, we have some common functionality which is good and the name of the class reflects its purpose. The same question arises though, could FooHelper’s methods actually reside in Foo? If Foo is purely a function or method call then perhaps all the functionality relating to Foo should be encapsulated in a Foo class that presents the foo method.

Alternatively perhaps there is a better name than “Helper”? As examples, I tend to call collections of class methods that transform instances of one class into instances of another class “Transformers”. Similarly methods that create database connection instances could be called “Providers”. If you cannot make the class a private class instance of the class or classes the Helper is nominally a Helper to, then there is usually a better name for the class lurking around somewhere.

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