Week 166

The notes for this week were brought to you from deep in rural Aberdeenshire where I’m hanging out at the Scottish Vision Group conference with my other half.

Skeletons

We’ve spent a significant chunk of the week working on the all seeing eye. As James A explained last week, we’re trying to use this project as an exercise to hone our collective approach to turning an idea into working software. We completed our walking skeleton earlier in the week. A key aspect of this project is talking to Google’s IMAP server and we started off by prototyping some code to fetch messages from the in-box. We were keen to get this code under test as soon as possible and started by mocking and stubbing the Ruby IMAP client code. However, after realising that we were mocking code we didn’t own¹ and exploring the possibility of running a real in-process IMAP server (using JRuby and Greenmail), eventually we settled on rolling our own fake IMAP server.

Storifying

Later in the week we moved on to writing some stories. This turned out to be a bit of an ordeal, but I think we learnt a few things along the way. We noticed that we ended up writing a bunch of stories with a recurring theme in the “So that <benefit>” section. We decided to extract these duplicate benefit descriptions into the project README. Another thought was that perhaps the walking skeleton was more of a crawling collection of bones and there was concern that the lack of some critical functionality would make working on multiple stories in parallel awkward. In any case, I think we’ve agreed that we need to see how the stories pan out as the project progresses before drawing too many conclusions in case the early stages are a special case.

Extreme OO

Tom has been particularly keen to try out a fairly extreme object-oriented approach i.e. using lots of objects and keeping the responsibilities of each to a minimum. I’ve not been in the office for the last couple of days, but it looks like this is coming along nicely. It appears that one consequence of this is that we’re making much more use of mock objects than is our usual style. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out. Something James A has been exploring is whether forcing ourselves to use explicit require statements will highlight excessive coupling. In the meantime, Chris has been doing his best to convince us of the merits of using the word “should” at the beginning of a test name.

Quadrupling

Many of the sessions this week have involved three or four of us sat around a computer thrashing out ideas and even occasionally some code! The fact that we’ve managed to do this for lengthy periods without coming to blows is testament to the patience of the team and their desire to learn from each other. Our latest plan is that only the driver is allowed to speak with the idea that discussions are more focussed and less abstract.

LLP vs Ltd

The focus of our discussion has now moved onto what requirements we have around future Go Free Range joiners and leavers, and whether either of these legal structures helps us implement those requirements. Since we don’t extract banker-sized bonuses from the company every month, we’ve gradually accumulated a decent chunk of capital which is effectively us investing in GFR.

It feels important to have a good shared understanding of what this pot of money is for and who/what owns it. We’ve agreed that, along with leasing an office, the accumulation of this cash has given GFR more of an identity of its own. However, we still have some more pondering to do on how to deal with that capital in the context of new joiners & leavers.

Cash-flow

Chris and James A investigated our long-neglected cash-flow app that Kalv built. Chris also had another look at Float a commercial cash-flow app which integrates with FreeAgent. This looks to have been completely rebuilt since we last looked at it and we’re seriously contemplating using it in anger. Chris spotted a problem with recurring bills in FreeAgent not being picked up in Float, but he had a very quick response from Philip Roberts which is always an encouraging sign.

Feedback

Ross Ferguson, one of our former colleagues on the Whitehall team, wrote about his experiences building the first phase of Inside Government in collaboration with GFR. Hopefully the success of the “in-house build” approach that he describes will encourage other bits of government to move away from the government’s usual disastrous approach to procurement of IT projects.

Miscellany

James A continued development of the wee printer; now you can send the printer a URL and the software will work out how to print the contents of the referenced page. Chris has finally seen the light and has signed up for pinboard after belatedly realising it’s way better than del.icio.us. I can also report that Jase was let out early for good behaviour from his month-long meditative retreat. Welcome back to the world, Jase!

Anwyay, that’s yer lot for this week.

– James.