Ten character classes your project team needs

A dungeon-crawling party requires a good mix of character classes to be successful. If everyone is a wizard there's nobody who can fight off the orc warband. Similarly, a software development team needs a range of character traits and aspects to successfully deliver working software which meets the project's goals. Here's my take.

Scavenger

The Scavenger understands the importance of not re-inventing the wheel. To this end they acquire an encyclopaedic understanding of our languages' built-in libraries, the existing features of our system and other systems in the wider organisation, and open-source libraries.

Unless given a precise list of the project's wants a Scavenger will become a Mutant Renegade, scouring the post-atomic wasteland for useless relics, which are broken or undocumented or both.

Aspect: "Here's one we made earlier"
Traits: Focused laziness, Unfocused research, GitHub

Rat King

The Rat King understands that software development is a communal task. Consequently they work to forge a collection of disparate individuals into a team. Their remit includes facilitating meetings and arranging after-work socials. Despite their fearsome appearance and collectivist instincts the Rat King is extremely sensitive to what each person brings to the party, and strives to ensure that introverts and teetotallers are included without feeling pressurized.

Unless met with a smidgeon of friendly scepticism a Rat King will become a Facebook.

Aspect: "We must hang together or we will surely hang separately"
Traits: Teamwork, Communications, Contacts

Paladin

The Paladin is the defender of the project but is also committed to the ideal of a project which is worth defending. They ensure everybody follows best practice, adheres to coding standards and observes the agile ceremonies.

Unless there's a Rogue to balance them a Paladin will become a Grand Inquisitor (although maybe without the thumbscrews).

Aspect: "Just do it right"
Traits: Rigour, Weird inner light

Rogue

The Rogue is pragmatic where the Paladin is dogmatic. They have a swashbuckling approach to getting things done. They understand the concept of technical debt, they just tip the trade-off toward delivering stuff over following the rules. Very fond of observing that there's no such thing as "best practice".

Unless kept in line a Rogue will become a Cowboy. Yee-hah!

Aspect: "Let's do the show right here"
Traits: Resourcefulness, Acute bullshit detector, Cynefin

Mad Scientist

The Mad Scientist has a deep technical understanding of software development, both practice and theory. They are obsessed with innovative and extremely clever solutions to business problems.

Unless your business problem actually requires an extremely clever solution a Mad Scientist will become an Evil Supervillain, who will derail the project (but, to be fair, will not destroy the entire planet. Probably).

Aspect: "My monster lives!"
Traits: Single-mindedness, Visionary

Lab Assistant

The Lab Assistant is vital to delivering the work of a Mad Scientist. They document APIs on wiki pages, they write build scripts and unit tests, they productionize the PoC code. In short, they undertake all the tedious essential tasks which would distract a Mad Scientist from their creation.

A Lab Assistant to an Evil Supervillain is still a Lab Assistant, but the wiki pages are half-complete, the unit tests don't run and the code isn't fit to be checked into source control.

Aspect: "Here is the brain you wanted"
Traits: Flexibility, Service to the higher cause

Major-domo

The Major-domo helps the project run smoothly by taking care of all the little things everybody else forgets. They clean the whiteboard before a meeting starts, they bring Sharpies and Post-It notes to the retrospective, they write Jiras for the stories we just agreed we needed and they circulate minutes after decision-making meetings.

Unless other people occasionally do some of these tasks a Major-domo will become a Resentful Skivvy.

Aspect: "I'll add that to my To-Do list"
Traits: Well-stocked stationary cupboard, Scrivener

Court Jester

The Court Jester says out loud the things everybody else is thinking. They aren't afraid to appear ridiculous in order to make a point. Their role is to speak truth to power.

If they go too far a Jester becomes an Angry Ranter, ignored and shunned by everybody.

Aspect: "The true fool stays silent in the face of foolishness"
Traits: Humour, Insight, Lack of inhibition

Bounty Hunter

The Bounty Hunter lives for finding and fixing bugs. They are never happier when writing test cases to reproduce a bug or stepping through lines of code in debug mode. They understand that fixing production code is more important than delivering a new feature.

Unless kept on a tight leash a Bounty Hunter will become a Mindless Delver or a Tinkerer.

Aspect: “To defeat the bug, we must understand the bug”
Traits: Sense of purpose, Perseverance, Debugging

Druid

The Druid has an understanding of ecosystem beyond our project's bounded context. They know what the business seeks to achieve and how our project furthers those goals. They also know about other projects in the organisation, and work to ensure our project integrates with them harmoniously.

Unless given a clear sense of our project's priorities and direction a Druid is still a Druid, just servicing the needs of other projects.

Aspect: "Listen to the trees, dude"
Traits: Awareness, Empathy, Balance

Multi-faceted characters

Obviously these aren't main character classes. A project team comprises base classes such as Developers, Testers, Analysts, Architects, heck maybe even a Project Manager. What I list here are ancillary classes, which modify a base class. An Architect, a Developer, an Analyst or a Project Manager can benefit from having a touch of the Druid about them. Any Developer should spend some time being a Bounty Hunter or Scavenger. Different circumstances demand different class behaviours. When there's a major outage in Production we need Rogues to fix it, not Paladins muttering about process and sign-off. But after Production is back it is the Paladins who make sure the problem and its resolution are properly documented, and appropriate preventative measures put in place. Most people on the team will flow through several of these class behaviours, even over the course a single sprint.

When we're forming a new team to deliver some piece of software we focus on the hard skills. the main character classes. We need this many Developers, this many Analysts, a UX expert, an SEO specialist, and so forth. These are the easy things to define. But the success of the project will in large part depend on the soft skills and temperaments of the individuals in the team. This is a lot harder to measure. It's why personality tests like Myers-Briggs and Insights exist: some people think they're hokum but they provide a framework for assessing the make-up of a team in an age when we're uncomfortable casting horoscopes or taking auguries from the liver of a freshly-slaughtered goose. Using RPG character classes as metaphors for desirable behaviours has the advantage of jokiness. There is a categorical absence of pyschological research underpinning this article. Also it doesn't require us to obtain live waterfowl.

One last thing. The next time you find yourself at a retrospective with no marker pens and nothing to write on, look around for a Major-domo. And if you can't spot one why not appoint yourself to the role?

Epilogue

That final paragraph makes me sad for the times when retrospectives happened in a room with other people, with a whiteboard covered in post-It notes. Let's hope we can do them like that again.

A new law of office life

I posted my Three Laws of Office Life a long while back. Subsequent experience has revealed another one: Every office kitchen which has a sign reminding people to do their washing-up has a concomitant large pile of unwashed crockery and dirty cutlery.

People wash their own mug and cereal bowl, but are less rigorous with the crockery from the kitchen cupboard. This phenomenon will be familiar to anybody who has shared a house during their student days or later.

Don't think that installing a dishwasher will change anything: it merely transfers the problem. Someone who won't wash up a mug is even less likely to unload a dishwasher. There is only one workable solution, and that is to have no office kitchen at all. (Although this creates a new problem, as vending machine coffee is universally vile and the tea unspeakable.)

So the Pile of Washing Up constitutes an ineluctable law, but it is the fourth law and we all know that the canon only admits sets of three laws. One must go. Since I first formulated these laws cost-cutting in the enterprise has more-or-less abolished the practice of providing biscuits at meetings. Hence the old Second Law no longer holds, and creates a neat vacancy.

Here are the revised Laws of Office Life:

First law: For every situation there is an equal and apposite Dilbert cartoon.

Second Law: Every office kitchen which has a sign reminding people to do their washing-up has a concomitant large pile of unwashed crockery and dirty cutlery.

Third Law: The bloke with the most annoying laugh is the one who finds everything funny.

Code quality metrics

Whenever two or three developers gather together they will argue over the best tool for editing code. Once they've chewed the spearmint out of that they will commence a heated discussion on ways to measure code quality. But I think this cartoon by Thom Holwerda pretty much nails it.

What... is your favourite colour?

Yesterday somebody called Pradeep posted a question in the OTN PL/SQL forum asking for careers advice. He is a VB programmer working in a Microsoft code factory (in India I would guess). He wanted to know what the Oracle job market was like, because he wanted thinking of training as an "oracle developer".

The reaction from some of the forum regulars was dismissive. Here is a sample:

"There are so many career/job opportunities in IT that to ask on a forum like this for career direction advice is just ... Well, just not a good idea.

But put yourself in Pradeep's position. (Note the following is an extrapolation: I don't really know his circumstances). A combination of the commoditization of IT and outsourcing has produced software sweatshops, where you, the developer equivalent of a sharecropper, churn out code chunks to be assembled into systems elsewhere. It's repetitive, stultifying and without much room for personal growth. Even if you do hear of a better job you know you are surrounded by dozens of other sharecroppers who stand just as much chance of getting it as you.

So Pradeep has thought to himself, Oracle is a famous company but he doesn't know anybody who works as an Oracle developer. That means he is going to face much less competition for any Oracle job which might arise. You might find this optimistic but it is thinking outside of the box. He then shows further initiative by posting a question about Oracle careers on the OTN forums. Because he thinks that the people who answer questions there will be helpful - which they are - and they will have the relevant knowledge - they all have careers in Oracle development.

What he hadn't anticipated was that quite so many people regard the PL/SQL forums as a suitable place for rehashing Monty Python jokes and discussing antiquated programming languages but not for offering careers advice. It's a funny old world.

The Guru's burden

Those of us who answer questions in forums or add a comment to a blog will recognise the truth of this cartoon from the ever-reliable xkcd comic.

OOW2K7: Billy Joel - A clarification

An anonymous commenter, as they are entitled to, has objected to my opinions on Billy Joel. I don't think there's any point in debating musical taste. We can't blame somebody for the music they enjoy because it works too low down in the limbic system. They are not a bad person just because they like Billy Joel; I am not a bad person just because I don't.

The thing is, Billy Joel, along with Abba, dominated the airwaves in my formative years. Like the Swedes he is a consummate crafter of earworms. Simply thinking about Billy Joel means I'm going to have the line "Working too hard will give me a heart attack (ack, ack, ack)" running around my brain for ages. I'm just hoping that reciting "running around my brain" will derail Joel in favour of Dillinger. All together now: "A knife a fork a bottle and a cork/That's the way we spell New York".

Right on.

OOW2K7: Non-fake tales from San Francisco

One of the things at OpenWorld which continues to astonish me is the rudeness of people in the audience. At the UKOUG we start each session with a reminder to switch off mobile phones, or at least silence them. Here, people not only have their mobile phones on, they actually take calls whilst the presenter is talking. This is not an isolated event: it has already occurred in three out of the seven sessions I've attended so far. Also people conduct conversations during the presentation, and not in whispers either. This is particularly strange given that, outside of the conference hall, Americans are generally far more courteous and better mannered than most English people these days.

Another thing which is shocking to the out-of-town visitor is the sheer number of beggars on the street. One guy I saw yesterday was holding a sign which said I need a girlfriend. I'm not quite sure what he was expecting to be dropped in his cup. There was another guy playing a drumset improvised out of buckets and plastic containers whose sign included his e-mail address. I didn't catch whether it had a PayPal number too.

This year OpenWorld is a green conference. This primarily means that we could choose to have the conference directory as a thick book or a lightweight USB drive. The catch is we need to have a device which takes a USB drive. For those of us who left our laptop at home the dead-tree option is the appropriate technological choice. However I have seen a couple of people attempt to plug their OOW pen drive into a laptop in the Conference internet villages; unsuccessfully, because these babies are totally locked down. The other interesting green initiative is the opportunity to pre-order an Oracle-branded messenger bag which will be made out of recycled conference material. This item will be even more fashionable than that Sainsburys carrier bag because of the absolute coolness of the Oracle logo.

The OTN team are giving away T-Shirts in the OTN lounge. The front features a SQL statement:

SELECT Java, Linux, PHP, DotNet, Python, Ruby
FROM  OTN
WHERE Self BETWEEN 'Newbie AND 'Expert'

So, apart from the fact that it doesn't mention PL/SQL and the fact that the statement is invalid due to the missing quote, it's a pretty good attempt.

Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco would like us all to explore more of the city than a two-block radius of the Moscone Centre:

"You can continue on the F line to Pier 45, walk into the back and experience the fish processing, which is totally frenetic and interesting. Why not see and experience another side, which is the fact that San Francisco remains the largest fish processing center on the West Coast."

Why not indeed.

OOW2K7: Steven Feuerstein - A clarification

Whilst I'm in the mood for clarification I suppose I should make clear that Steven Feuerstein did not threaten me with a steak knife. He pretended to threaten me with a steak knife and I exaggerated for comic effect.

OOW2K7: Doug Burns - A clarification

In my post about the ACEs' dinner I described Doug Burns as being extremely jet-lagged. Some people have interpreted this as meaning Doug had taken too much drink. This is not the case. Doug really is jet-lagged. Honest he is. Anytime you see Doug with a beer in his hand you can be sure it's definitely for medicinal purposes only.

xkcd on SQL injection

Top geek humour comic xkcd has just published a strip about SQL injection. Check it out.

Update

Other people enjoyed this strip too. John Emmons for instance. And Tom Kyte, of course. And Boing Boing, ditto. And Pete Finnegan. In fact I was probably the last person on the whole internet to post about it. Sigh.

Oracle WTF is back!

Jubilation sweeps the blogosphere, or at least the small corner of it where Oracleers hang out. Oracle WTF is back in the hands of its rightful owners. Huzzah!

William and others (not least the WordPress groupies out there) might be amused by the news that Blogger's Anti-Spam bots recently managed to suspend one of Google's own blogs. At least we can see that the ASbots act without fear or favour.

Satire

Fake Steve Jobs has been channelling Larry Ellison over the weekend.

"I’m the guy who screwed IBM out of its own database business with its own technology. It was a beautiful thing. I invented Oracle. Maybe you’ve heard of it."

FLE has a pop at Sir Elton John and Marc Benioff; it's not often you'll see those two names in the same sentence.