We Interrupt This Program...

We interrupt this tutorial to interject an observation about goals, methods and promises. Goals we have for ourselves as people and as professionals; the method we use to pursue those dreams; perhaps most importantly, the promises we make, both to ourselves and to our customers, about what we're doing and why.

I consider this after reading the Website for some consultants who've done some (relatively nice, relatively low-key) link-dropping on LinkedIn. I'm not naming them here, not because I don't want to draw attention to them (their own site is very clean and well-done), but because the point that I'm going to be making here isn't just limited to them - we, as a craft and an industry of Web development, have some Serious Problems™.

The "problem" is nicely summarized by this group's mission statement:

Our mission is to produce the perfect implementation of your dreams.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

As a goal, implied but left unspoken, absolutely nothing; both as practitioners and as clients, we tend to set ever-higher goals for ourselves. Indeed, that's the only way the "state of the art" - any "art" - can advance. But we who practice the art and craft of software (including Web) development (as opposed to the engineering discipline of hardware development) have a history of slashed-beyond-reality schedules and budgets coupled with a tendency for stakeholders not to hear "if all goes well" as a condition to our latest schedule estimate. We have a history, perceived and actual, of promising more than we can deliver. Far more attention is paid by non-technical people to the "failures" and "broken promises" of software than to things done right. For a craft whose work is accruing increasing public-policy and -safety implications, the effect of unrealistic expectations, brought about by poor communication and technical decisions being made by people who aren't just technically ignorant but proud of the fact, is disturbing. What started as a slow-motion train wreck has now achieved hypersonic speeds, and represents a clear and present danger to the organisational health and safety of all stakeholders.

I don't mean to say that projects always fail, but an alarming number of them do. If, say, dams or aircraft were built with the same overall lack of care and measurable engineering precision that is the norm in commercial software development, we'd have a lot more catastrophic floods, and a lot few survivors fleeing the deluge by air. When I entered this craft thirty years ago (last May), I was soon led to believe that we were thirty to fifty years away from seeing a true profession of "software engineering". As a time frame beginning now, in 2009, I now think that is almost laughably optimistic.

Why have things gotten worse when we as a tool-building and -using society need them to get better? Some people blame "The Microsoft Effect" - shipping software of usually-dubious quality to consumers (as opposed to 'customers') who have bought into the (false) idea that they have no realistic choice.

It's more pervasive than that; commercial software development merely reflects the fashion of the business "community" that supports it, which has bought into one of the mantras of Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of Innovation", namely "don't worry, be crappy." Not that Kawasaki is giving bad advice, but his precondition is being ignored just as those of other software people have been: the key sentence in his "don't worry, be crappy" paragraph is "An innovator doesn't worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it's truly innovative" (emphasis mine). In other words, if you really are going to change the world, nobody will notice if your Deus ex Machina 1.0 has clay feet as long as you follow up quickly with a 1.1 that doesn't...and follow that with a 2.0 that changes the game again. But that space between 1.0 and 1.1 has to be fast, Kawasaki argues (in the next paragraph, titled "Churn, Baby, Churn"), and the version after that has to come along before people (like possible competitors) start saying things like "well, he just brought out 1.1 to fix the clay feet in 1.0." If the customers see that you're bringing out new versions as fast as they can adapt to the previous ones, but that each new version is a vastly superior, revelatory experience compared to the earlier release that they were already delighted by, they'll keep giving you enough money for you to finish scaling the "revolutionary" cliff and take a (brief) rest with "evolutionary" versions. Business has not only forgotten how important that whole process is to their continued survival, but they've removed the capability for their bespoke software (and Web) infrastructure to use and reuse that model. All that remains is "it's ok if we ship crap; so does everybody else." That's the kind of thinking that made General Motors the world-bestriding Goliath it is today - as opposed to the wimpy also-ran it was (emphatically NOT) half a century ago. We really don't need any more businesses going over that sort of cliff.

What we do need, and urgently, are two complementary, mutually dependent things. We need a sea change in the attitude of (most) businesses, even technology businesses, towards software - to realise and acknowledge that the Pointy-Haired Boss is not merely a common occurrence in the way business manages software, but actively threatens the success of any project (and business) so infested. Just as businesses at some point realise that "paying any price to cut costs" is an active threat to their own survival, they need to apply that reality to their view of and dealings with the technical infrastructure that increasingly enables their business to function at all.

Both dependent on that and as an enabler of that change, the software and Web development industry really needs to get its house in order. We need to get away from the haphazard by-guess-and-by-golly estimation and monitoring procedures in use by the majority of projects (whose elaborate Microsoft Project plans and PowerPoint decks bear less and less resemblance to reality as the project progresses) and enforce use of the tools and techniques that have been proven to work, and have an organised, structured quest to research improvements and New Things.. Despite what millions of business cards and thousands of job advertisements the world over proclaim, there is no true discipline of "software engineering", any more than there was "oilfield engineering" in widespread use before the New London School explosion of 1937. Over 295 people died in that blast; we have software-controlled systems that, should they fail, could in fact hurt or kill many more - or cause significant, company- or industry-ruinous physical damages. We should not wait for such an event before "someone" (at that point, almost certainly an outside governmental or trans-governmental entity) says "These are the rules." While I understand and agree with the widespread assertion that certification tests in their present form merely demonstrate an individual's capability to do well on such tests, we do need a practical, experiential system - probably one modelled on the existing systems for engineering, law or medicine. Not that people should work 72-hour shifts; there's enough of that already. But rather that there should be a progression of steps from raw beginner to fully-trusted professional, with a mix of educational and experiential ingredients to ascend that progression, and continuing educational and certificating processes throughout one's entire career. The cost for this is going to have to be accepted as "part of the system" by business; if business wants properly competent engineers, and not just the latest boatload of unknowns with mimeographed vendor certs, then they're going to have to realize that that benefit does not come without cost to all sides. The free ride is over - for all the stakeholders at the table.

Best Practices Alleged; Your Mileage May Vary

Yahoo! quite often releases interesting/useful/thought-provoking tools for people doing "serious" Web development. I add the modifier to specify that we're usually not talking about the Joe Leet three-page magnum oopus; a lot of what they do and talk about really only pays huge returns when you work with a site as large and complex as, well, Yahoo!.

Recently, they brought out a couple of nifty tools that integrate into the Firefox browser's Firebug Web-developer-Swiss-Army-knife extension. One of these, YSlow ("why [my site] slow?") does some interesting evaluations and calculations against whatever page (with secondary requests) you throw it at. Its "Performance" tab shows how your page matches up against Yahoo!'s new "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site." At first blush, a lot of these make perfect sense; "Avoid Redirects", "No 404s", and so on. YSlow, on the other hand, evaluates against a slightly different set of guidelines to those on the Best Practices Page:

1. Make fewer HTTP requests
2. Use a CDN
3. Add an Expires header
4. Gzip components
5. Put CSS at the top
6. Put JS at the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS external
9. Reduce DNS lookups
10. Minify JS
11. Avoid redirects
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Configure ETags

"Huh?", our hypothetical Web pseudogod Mr Leet might well ask. "What the heck is an 'ETag'? Or a 'CDN'? Does any of this even apply to me?" Well, Joe, yes and no. For instance, content-delivery networks like Akamai or ATDN, as you might well know by hearing the names, scatter servers at strategic places around the planet with the aim of reducing the time it takes to get data from huge, media-content-heavy sites like CNN.com or the like, down to your browser at the end of a surprisingly long chain. Does everybody who puts a site up need something like this? Does the average small-to-midsize business? Usually not, unless you really are a Web Hype-Dot-Oh site that shoves exabytes out every day to wow the yokels or the investors. For the local pizza joint with a site containing maybe forty files, tops, with a couple of megabytes of images, a CDN is thermonuclear overkill. As many Web-development sites have pointed out for the last decade, there's quite a bit you can do to speed things up and lower bandwidth usage without spending the big bucks on this.

Why do I blather on about this when I started talking about best practices and YSlow? Because for practices to be "best", they first and foremost have to be appropriate for the use at hand. Buying a Lamborghini Countach to go down to the corner store for some sodas will quite likely get you yelled at by the Significant Other (followed by your bank). But if Lewis Hamilton showed up at pole position in a '72 Ford Pinto... you'd hear the laughter from St Paul to São Paolo.

Use the tools and techniques appropriate to the task at hand. There's a lot that small Website developers can learn from Google and the tools they publish. Getting an "A" score has a certain karmic appeal, and most of the optimizations required are straightforward anyway (tweaking how your Web server serves your data, for the most part). But is this worth all the geek love it's been getting?

Until someone with the developer credibility and experience of a Yahoo! stands up and explains a better set of practices for the SMB developer, the answer seems to be "yeah, probably". We who make our living (or our diversion) from the creation, care and feeding of Web sites are, for the most part, artisans posing as engineers, with inconsistent knowledge or practice of our craft; we dream of building the online equivalent of the Empire State Building but wind up with the Cologne Cathedral; a wonder, yes, but surely 600 years was well beyond the original estimated schedule! Agreed-upon standards (so that, say, a page appears identical in different browsers),; a shared, common body of knowledge; even (gasp!) widespread, vendor-neutral certifications of professional competence will eventually become common in software (including Web) development for the same reasons as, say, in architecture. The artifacts involved (skyscrapers, Web sites) have important social and policy implications, and inconsistent competence in practice poses a real and serious danger to the public at large. Sooner or later, it's going to be uneconomic for the present ad hoc system to advance the state of the art, or to meet the needs placed upon its products.

Best practices are good; best practices that actually work for the stated purposes in a broad variety of praxis are much better. But to get there, we're going to need to collaborate and communicate effectively, and to do that, we're going to have to make sure everybody involved is speaking the same language to describe the same things. If we don't, we'll continue to be stuck in pretty much the same place we are now — with a bunch of shade-tree mechanics running around in the pits at the Monaco Grand Prix...only doing a lot more damage.

Comments are welcomed, as always.