This is about a topic, which developers are not really fond of: communication. We tend to sit in front of the computer for hours, not talking to anybody, letting our dear little synapsis do whatever they do etc., but the last thing we can really do well is to explain to others what seems to be absolutely clear to ourselves.
Today we had a meeting with our team about our build process. Well, the first part was easy: I talked about make / ant / maven to make my colleagues aware of some build tools and showed them an ant script that did the usual stuff, customized for our projects. It just took a few minutes until I heard some comments like “we didn’t need a build process on the mainframe for decades, why now on Windows/Java?”. I was quite glad, that we had a strict order from audit department, so I could blame audit that we have to do this “useless stuff”. Hopefully, they realized later on that a build process is really useful…
But the more difficult part was the discussion about how a build process can or should change the deployment process. It turned out that it was very difficult for most people (including me) to describe the different possible process steps (code review, branching, tagging, automated and manual testing etc.). We talked a lot, but suddenly I realized what we needed: a story.
When you talk with other people about processes, about user interaction or similar things, make up a short story with small steps like the following:
- We decide to freeze the code and deploy it and then
- We do a final code review and then
- We create the distribution and then
- We run our automatic test tool against the distribution and then
- We actually deploy it.
I don’t care for the details of the steps here, but the point is that you should try to embed your tools, your proposals or whatever in such a small story. We had quite a discussion about whether the deployment “should be atomic”. But what does this really mean? In practice? I couldn’t understand what my colleague meant before I used a story like the one above. Then suddenly we didn’t talk about atomic or not, instead we could say: in step 5 we deploy exactly the same distribution which has been created in step 3 OR we recreate the distribution in step 5, relying on the fact that neither the source code nor the general setup changed in the meantime.
You have probably been in similar situations again and again. Next time try to wrap your problem or proposal in a small story, your discussion partners being the leading characters. It can shorten a discussion by hours and may give you an easy time.