I’ve been working on a talk for Smalltalks 2014 about Discovering Alexander’s Properties in Your Code and Life.
I don’t want it to be an esoteric review of Alexander’s properties.
That won’t satisfy my audience or me.
I want to impart information about how Alexander’s physical properties might translate to properties of our software code as well as illustrate poignant personal examples in the physical world.
But equally important, I want impress upon my audience that process is vital to making lively things (software and physical things). In his, The Process of Creating Life: Nature of Order, Book 2, Alexander states,
“Processes play a more fundamental role in determining the life or death of the building than does the ‘design’.”
Traditionally, building architects hand off their designs as a set of formal drawings for others others to build. Does this remind you of waterfall software development? There isn’t anything inherently wrong with constructing formal architectural drawings…but they never end up reflecting accurately what was built. Due to errors in design, situational decisions based on new discoveries made as things are built, better construction techniques, changing requirements, limitations in tools or materials, a building is never exactly constructed as an architect draws it up.
Builders know that. Good ones exercise their judgment as they make on the spot tactical re-design decisions. Architects who are deeply involved in the building process know that.
Alexander is rather unhappy with how buildings are typically created and suggests that any “living” process (whether it be for building design or software or any other complex process) incorporate the following ten characteristics.
He challenges us software makers to do better, too:
“The way forward in the next decades, towards programs with highly adapted human performance, will be through programs which are generated through unfolding, in some fashion comparable to what I have described for buildings.”
As software designers and implementers we know that nothing is ever built exactly as initially conceived. Not even close. Over the past decade or so we have made significant strides our processes and our tools that enable us to be more effective at adaptively and incrementally building software. My thoughts on some ways we have tackled these characteristics are interspersed in italics, below.
Characteristics of Living Processes
1.Step-by-step adaptive. Small increments with opportunity for feedback and correction.
Incremental delivery, retrospectives, stakeholder reviews
Repetitive incremental design cycles:
Design a little– implement–refactor rework refine–design…
Design/test cycles: Write specifications of behavior, write some code that correctly works according to the specification, test and adapt…
Tests and production code equally valued
2. Whatever the greater whole is always the main focus of attention and the driving force.
Working deployable software, minimally-marketable features
3. The entire process is governed and guided by the formation of living centers (that help each other)
Code with defined boundaries, separate responsibilities, and planned for interconnections
4. Steps take place in a specific sequence to control the unfolding.
We have a rhythm to our work. Whether it is test-first or test-frequent development, conversations with customers to define behavioral “specifications”, or other specific actions. In order to control unfolding we need to understand what we need to build, build it, then refine as we go. And we have tools that let us manage and incrementally build and record our changes.
5. Parts created must become locally unique.
Build the next thing so it fits with and expands the wholeness of what we are building. Consider our options. Refactor and rework our design. Make functions/classes/code cohesive. Bust up things that are too big into smaller elements. Revise.
6. The formation of generic centers is guided by patterns.
We have in mind a high-level software architecture that guides our design and implementation.
7. Congruent with feeling and governed by feeling.
Instead of just making a test pass, see if what you just wrote feels right (or if it feels like an ugly hack). Reflect on how and what we are building. Don’t be merely satisfied with making your code work. How do you feel about what you’ve just built? How do those using your software react to it? How do those who have to maintain and live with your code feel about it?
8. For buildings, the formation of structure is guided by the emergence of an aperiodic grid, which brings coherent geometric order
Software is structured, too…we’ve got to be aware of how we are structuring our code.
9.Oriented by a form language that provides concrete methods of implemented adapted structure through simple combinatory rules
We use accepted “schemas” to create coherent software systems. We have software architecture styles, framework support, and even pattern languages emerging…
10. Oriented by the simplicity transformation, and is pruned steadily
We can consistently refactor and rework our code with the goal of simplifying in order to enable building more functionality. We rebuild to create sustainable software structures. Even if we come back to some old working code and see how to simplify it, we can rework it taking into consideration what we’ve learned in the meantime.
Yet, let’s not be complacent. Agile or Lean or Clean Code or Scrum practices don’t address every process characteristic Alexander mentions. I am not sure that all these characteristics are important for building lively software. Alexander is not a builder of software systems, although he spent a lot of time talking with some pioneers and leaders of the software patterns movement.
Some process ideas of Alexander sound expensive and time consuming. Do we always need to reflect on how we feel about what we code? Sometimes we need to build quickly, not painstakingly. We need to prove its worth, and then refine our software. Our main thought may be on just simply making it work, not how it makes us or others feel. So how do we add liveliness to this quickly fashioned software? What’s a good process for that? Mike Feathers wrote about Working Effectively With Legacy Code, but there is a lot more to consider. Maybe that quickly fashioned software has tests, maybe it doesn’t, maybe some parts have a reasonable structure, and maybe other parts should be tossed.
We often build disposable and hopefully short-lived software. Problems crop up when that code gets rudely hacked to extend its capabilities and live past its expiration date.
There are most likely different processes for creating lively software, based on where you start, where you think you are headed, and how lively it needs to be (not everything needs to be fashioned with such care).
People are continually building new and better tools and libraries. There is a rich and growing ecosystem of innovative open source software. Process matters. I think we have a lot still to learn about building lively software. It is a heady time to be building complex software systems.
