Today there was an interesting discussion between Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and David Heinemeier Hansson on the nature and use of Test-Driven Development (TDD), where one writes tests first and then writes code.
Each participant in the conversation had different personal preferences for how they write code, which makes sense. However, from each participant’s personal preference you could extract an identical principle: “I need to observe something before I can make a decision.” Kent often (though not always) liked writing tests first so that he could observe their behavior while coding. David often (though not always) wanted to write some initial code, observe that to decide on how to write more code, and so on. Even when they talked about their alternative methods (Kent talking about times he doesn’t use TDD, for example) they still always talked about having something to look at as an inherent part of the development process.
It’s possible to minimize this point and say it’s only relevant to debugging or testing. It’s true that it’s useful in those areas, but when you talk to many senior developers you find that this idea is actually a fundamental basis of their whole development workflow. They want to see something that will help them make decisions about their code. It’s not something that only happens when code is complete or when there’s an bug—it’s something that happens at every moment of the software lifecycle.
This is such a broad principle that you could say the cycle of all software development is:
Observation → Decision → Action → Observation → Decision → Action → etc.
If you want a term for this, you could call it the “Cycle of Observation” or “ODA.”
What do I mean by all of this? Well, let’s take some examples to make it clearer. When doing TDD, the cycle looks like:
- See a problem (observation).
- Decide to solve the problem (decision).
- Write a test (action).
- Look at the test and see if the API looks good (observation).
- If it doesn’t look good, decide how to fix it (decision), change the test (action), and repeat Observation → Decision → Action until you like what the API looks like.
- Now that the API looks good, run the test and see that it fails (observation).
- Decide how you’re going to make the test pass (decision).
- Write some code (action).
- Run the test and see that it passes or fails (observation).
- If it fails, decide how to fix it (decision) and write some code (action) until the test passes (observation).
- Decide what to work on next, based on principles of software design, knowledge of the problem, or the data you gained while writing the previous code (decision).
- And so on.
Another valid way to go about this would be to write the code first. The difference from the above sequence is that Step 3 would be “write some code” rather than “write a test.” Then you observe the code itself to make further decisions, or you write tests after the code and observe those.
There are many valid processes.
Development Processes and Productivity
What’s interesting is that, as far as I know, every valid development process follows this cycle as its primary guiding principle. Even large-scale processes like Agile that cover a whole team have this built into them. In fact, Agile is to some degree an attempt to have shorter Observation-Decision-Action cycles (every few weeks) for a team than previous broken models (Waterfall, aka “Big Design Up Front”) which took months or years to get through a single cycle.
So, shorter cycles seem to be better than longer cycles. In fact, it’s possible that most of the goal of developer productivity could be accomplished simply by shortening the ODA cycle down to the smallest reasonable time period for the developer, the team, or the organization.
Usually you can accomplish these shorter cycles just by focusing on the Observation step. Once you’ve done that, the other two parts of the cycle tend to speed up on their own. (If they don’t, there are other remedies, but that’s another post.)
There are three key factors to address in Observation:
- The speed with which information can be delivered to developers. (For example, having fast tests.)
- The completeness of information delivered to the developers. (For example, having enough test coverage.)
- The accuracy of information delivered to developers. (For example, having reliable tests.)
This helps us understand the reasons behind the success of certain development tools in recent decades. Continuous Integration, production monitoring systems, profilers, debuggers, better error messages in compilers, IDEs that highlight bad code—almost everything that’s “worked” has done so because it made Observation faster, more accurate, or more complete.
There is one catch—you have to deliver the information in such a way that it can actually be received by people. If you dump a huge sea of information on people without making it easy for them to find the specific data they care about, the data becomes useless. If nobody ever receives a production alert, then it doesn’t matter. If a developer is never sure of the accuracy of information received, then they may start to ignore it. You must successfully communicate the information, not just generate it.
The First ODA
There is a “big ODA cycle” that represents the whole process of software development—seeing a problem, deciding on a solution, and delivering it as software. Within that big cycle there are many smaller ones (see the need for a feature, decide on how the feature should work, and then write the feature). There are even smaller cycles within that (observe the requirements for a single change, decide on an implementation, write some code), and so on.
The trickiest part is the first ODA cycle in any of these sequences, because you have to make an observation with no previous decision or action.
For the “big” cycle, it may seem like you start off with nothing to observe. There’s no code or computer output to see yet! But in reality, you start off with at least yourself to observe. You have your environment around you. You have other people to talk to, a world to explore. Your first observations are often not of code, but of something to solve in the real world that will help people somehow.
Then when you’re doing development, sometimes you’ll come to a point where you have to decide “what do I work on next?” This is where knowing the laws of software design can help, because you can apply them to the code you’ve written and the problem you observed, which lets you decide on the sequence to work in. You can think of these principles as a form of observation that comes second-hand—the experience of thousands of person-years compressed into laws and rules that can help you make decisions now. Second-hand observation is completely valid observation, as long as it’s accurate.
You can even view even the process of Observation as its own little ODA cycle: look at the world, decide to put your attention on something, put your attention on that thing, observe it, decide based on that to observe something else, etc.
There are likely infinite ways to use this principle; all of the above represents just a few examples.