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April 25th, 2011:

Test-Driven Development and Embracing Failure

At the last London XpDay, some teams talked about their “post-XP” approach. In particular, they don’t do much Test-Driven Development because they find it’s not worth the effort. I visited one of them, Forward, and saw how they’d partitioned their system into composable actors, each of which was small enough to fit into a couple of screens of Ruby. They release new code to a single server in their farm, watching the traffic statistics that result. If it’s successful, they carefully propagate it out to the rest of the farm. If not, they pull it and try something else. In their world, the improvement in traffic statistics, the end benefit of the feature, is what they look for, not the implemented functionality.

I think this fits into Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, where he distinguishes between the ordered and unordered domains. In the ordered domain, causes lead to effects. This might be difficult to see and require an expert to interpret, but essentially we expect to see the same results when we repeat an action. In the complex, unordered domain, there is no such promise. For example, we know that flocking birds are driven by three simple rules but we can’t predict exactly where a flock will go next. Groups of people are even more complex, as conscious individuals can change the structure of a system whilst being part of it. We need different techniques for working with ordered and unordered systems, as anyone who’s tried to impose order on a gang of unruly programmers will know.

Loosely, we use rules and expert knowledge for ordered systems, the appropriate actions can be decided from outside the system. Much of the software we’re commissioned to build is about lowering the cost of expertise by encoding human decision-making. This works for, say ticket processing, but is problematic for complex domains where the result of an action is literally unknowable. There, the best we can do to influence a system is to try probing it and be prepared to respond quickly to whatever happens. Joseph Pelrine uses the example of a house party—a good host knows when to introduce people, when to top up the drinks, and when to rescue someone from that awful bore from IT. A party where everyone is instructed to re-enact all the moves from last time is unlikely to be equally successful1. Online start-ups are another example of operating in a complex environment: the Internet. Nobody really knows what all those people will do, so the best option is to act, to ship something, and then respond as the behaviour becomes clearer.

Snowden distinguishes between “fail-safe” and “safe-fail” initiatives. We use use fail-safe techniques for ordered systems because we know what’s supposed to happen and it’s more effective to get things right—we want a build system that just works. We use safe-fail techniques for unordered systems because the best we can do is to try different actions, none of which is large enough to damage the system, until we find something that takes us in the right direction—with a room full of excitable children we might try playing a video to see if it calms them down.

At the technical level, Test-Driven Development is largely fail-safe. It allows us, amongst other benefits, to develop code that just works (for multiple meanings of “work”). We take a little extra time around the writing of the code, which more than pays back within the larger development cycle. At higher levels, TDD can support safe-fail development because it lowers the cost of changing our mind later. This allows us to take an interim decision now about which small feature to implement next or which design to choose. We can afford to revisit it later when we’ve seen the result without crashing the whole project.

Continuous deployment environments such as at Forward2, on the other hand, emphasize “safe-fail”. The system is partitioned up so that no individual change can damage it, and the feedback loop is tight enough that the team can detect and respond to changes very quickly. That said, even the niftiest lean start-up will have fail-safe elements too, a sustained network failure or a data breach could be the end of the company. Start-ups that fail to understand this end up teetering on the edge of disaster.

We’ve learned a lot over the last ten years about how to tune our development practices. Test-Driven Development is no more “over” than Object-Orientation is, it’s just that we understand better how to apply it. I think our early understanding was coloured by the fact that the original eXtreme Programming project, C3, was payroll, an ordered system; I don’t want my pay cheque worked out by trying some numbers and seeing who complains3. We learned to Embrace Change, that it’s a sign of a healthy development environment rather than a problem. As we’ve expanded into less predictable domains, we’re also learning to Embrace Failure.

1) this is a pretty good description of many “Best Practice” initiatives
2) Fred George has been documenting safe-fail in the organisation of his development group too, he calls it “Programmer Anarchy
3) although I’ve seen shops that come close to this