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Update: Posted this so early my brain wasn’t awake and I hadn’t linked to the feedback links as promised. I’ve updated it so that it’s correct now.

A few people have arrived at this blog looking for the terms, “Giving feedback to defensive people.” Before focusing on the fact that the recipient may be “defensive”, I’ll refer to you to several different posts outlining some principles of giving effective feedback. Read them before continuing on.

Firstly, if you’re giving feedback to a person, ensure that you follow the principles of effective feedback.

1. You intend on strengthening their confidence; or
2. You’d like to help them improve their effectiveness

Many times I’ve heard several people give feedback and it is not in the spirit of either of these. Often, they give feedback with the intent of improving their own effectiveness, not necessarily the recipient. For a variety of different reasons, it’s easy for me to improve my own effectiveness by asking people what to do – something that is both selfishly easy. It takes more courage and effort, putting yourself in the recipient’s shoes to help them out.

Photo taken from Noii’s Flickr stream under the Creative Commons licence

If someone comes across as “defensive”, I’d ask yourself what circumstances they could possibly under that make them so. Perhaps they have other things on their mind, and are preoccupied in a manner that makes it difficult to listen to feedback. The solution? Ask them if now is a good time to give them feedback.

Maybe the recipient associates “feedback” with “criticism” due to others “giving them feedback” ineffectively, fuelling a cycle of defensiveness. The solution? I find it easy to spend a quick minute or two describing the basic principles of feedback, and help them understand you are here wtih the true intent of either strengthening their confidence or improving their effectiveness. I like to emphasis it should be a conversation and that I will try to be a specific as possible, but encourage questioning if the recipient needs clarity.

Another reason the recipient may be defensive is for fear of being judged as a person. The solution? Focus on behaviours and impact, rather than attempting to describe what you think their motives are. This doesn’t mean you cannot have an opinion, however it should be clearly stated about how you interpret the impact, not on how you interpret them as a person.

They may truly believe that whatever situation you describe, they disagree with. The solution? Start with the model I describe here, seeking agreement for observations, then impact, before thinking about recommendations. Any disagreement on the early stages will inevitably lead to disagreements on future stages.

Finally, as a person giving feedback, you need to accept the recipient may choose to acknowledge, disagree with or do nothing with the feedback you gift to them. I remember one incident, quite recently, where a colleague gave me feedback with recommendations. We talked about it, both understanding the variety of forces unbeknownst to each other. At the end of the conversation, I concluded I would have repeated the same behaviour in the same circumstances, however that’s when the feedback donor got frustrated. My lesson, if you’re giving feedback to someone, be prepared to say, “I respect that we disagree on something, and thank you for being prepared to listen.”

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Andy wrote a great blog post trying to relate Shu Ha Ri to the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition. When I posted my thoughts, he suggested I blog about my story, so here it is.

In it’s simplest form, Shu -> Ha -> Ri roughly translates to Follow -> Detach -> Transcend. When I think back to the days when I studied Aikido (where I believe these concepts originate), I considered Shu Ha Ri as the flow of energy, or where you focus the majority of your efforts.

Photo of energy taken from HocusFocusClick’s Flickr stream under the creative commons licence

A Shu person, for example, focuses their energy on simply executing a very basic move. They repeat the kata, over and over, with the weight of their conscious mostly on thinking, “I move my arm up to block”.

The Ha person, no longer follows the rote kata, “detaching” from the original conscious thought, now focused on its application. They spend their time thinking, “An arm is coming my way, I better block”.

The Ri person is certainly spectacular to witness with energy flowing from move to move, something the dojo sensei demonstrated during a yearly open house. During this event, lasting a good twenty minutes, five black belt students attacked the sensei from all sides. They attacked with their hands and a small assortment of weapons. The sensei defended by turning, locking and throwing each student back in return. What I still remember vividly was comparing the black belts, completely drenched to the skin in sweat, to the sensei, who barely showed any signs of sweat.

I see this same flow of energy and focus of effort when watching people learn development skills. At one end of the spectrum, the Shu developer spends an enormous effort thinking about how to execute a particular practice. At the other end of the spectrum, the right practices occur and great quality code (and tests) appear.

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Thanks to all the people that came along to the BSC London presentation I gave last Wednesday. Despite the threat of weather potentially cancelling our, previously snow-canned, presentation, it went ahead much to my delight. I hope that you all got something out of it. I’ve uploaded the slides here if you’d like it.

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As I gather more experience (i.e. get older) I’ve discovered every model has a breaking point. What does that mean and why should you care? Accepting that models break is the first step to understanding and identifying their limitations. More importantly, because models have a breaking point, you should be actively discovering other models that help you better communicate and grasp new concepts.

Sounds easy right? Unfortunately my experience in life proves the opposite with most people wanting to only hold a single “valid” model that manages to explain and justify everything. I see this as a consequence of western education guided by Socratic thought and a Platonic ideal but that is a post for another time. In real life, this desire to hold onto “one valid model” translates to arguments over the merits of a particular model and often the basis for justifying a position. Note that I have no problems arguing for the sake of testing and discovering the boundaries of a particular model.

What do you do about it?

Accept that models are simplifications of sometimes complicated, sometimes complex systems. Be open to exploring the boundaries of a particular model, uncovering where one model excels at explaining certain characteristics of a system. Seek out and invent new models that provide a different point of view, or that emphasise and highlight different aspects for that system.

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One of the biggest differentiators between the users who prefer IntelliJ over Eclipse is often their dedication to learning keyboard shortcuts. The user-conscious designers of IntelliJ make as much as they can consistent, something much more difficult for Eclipse, who is dependent on a community for plugin development without any process for reviewing how well they all fit together.

On my very first ThoughtWorks project, I remember my pair commenting about how I should learn all the keyboard shortcuts for IntelliJ. Learning keyboard shortcuts is less about churning out great amounts of code, and much more about avoiding interrupting your flow. Simple actions, such as reaching for mouse have potential to break your flow. Jetbrains make it easy to learn the keyboard shortcuts, even providing a printable cheat sheet so you can put them around your workspace as you learn them.

Having said all of this, here are some of the keyboard shortcuts I find myself using all the time for iPhone development:

• Switch to Header/Source File- ALT + CMD + UpArrow
• Open quickly – Shift + CMD + D. This is as close to Jump to Class/Method/Symbol that I could find so far. I haven’t worked out how to search using regular expressions yet.
• Go back/forward – ALT + CMD + LeftArrow/RightArrow. Moves back between files that you opened. Useful for cycling through a call stack
• Go(Run) – CMD + Enter. I’m currently using this to quickly see results as a spike my way through learning about Objective C and the APIs
• Open Console – SHIFT + CMD + R. Useful when debugging using log statements and looking at what’s going on.

I’ve also found application-wide standard keyboard shortcuts really helpful as well

• Cycle through different applications (XCode, Interface Builder) – CMD + TAB
• Cycle through different windows in the same application – CMD + ` or CMD + ~. These are all really useful because Apple applications have a tendency to open many many windows, not really ideal for keyboard use.
• Open help – SHIFT + CMD + ?. This is really useful when no keyboard shortcut is mapped, or you want to access a menu and can’t remember what it was. Once you have the Help dialogue open, start typing the name of the menu item. I’ve used this quite a lot to access the Refactor menu item which pops open another window.

Of course there are many more keyboard shortcuts. These are simply the ones that I’ve found I’m getting the most productivity. I wouldn’t say all of development can driven through the keyboard alone, but it’s a pretty good start for now. What are your favourite ones?

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I’m a huge believer in accepting multiple models as different ways of looking at the same set of data. It’s just simply different glasses to see different things through. One of the glasses I’ve been putting on more consciously is that of David Kolb and his model on experience learning. Read more about it here.

It follows a simple cycle: Experiencing -> Reflecting -> Generalising -> Applying -> (Back to Beginning)

Here’s how I go about applying it. I follow one of the wonderful tutorials from Apple on their iPhone development, focused on simply trying to step through the cycle and get some visible success (Experiencing). I then spend some time thinking about what new tidbit of information I’ve learned (Reflecting) and trying to come up with some way of fitting it my general mental model of how it works (Generalising). I then try it out on my prototype application to see if I truly understood it (Applying).

Having read about the model a while ago, I think there are a few key things to focus on when using this model:

• Keep it small – I could choose to run through all of the different Apple iPhone tutorials one after the other. This doesn’t give me any chance of reflecting, generalising or applying the material. Given my very forgetful nature, working with one tutorial at a time through this cycle is important. I try to keep this cycle in terms of a couple of hours, not a couple of days. Attempt to pick up knowledge incrementally.
• Rinse and repeat – Going through this cycle one doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually learn everything, or even anything. I’ve found I got to the end of doing something and didn’t have any general model. Iterating lets you mine and discover new lessons. I repeat the same exercise, and as I do, I notice I pick up different things.

Interesting it is these two aspects, incrementing and iterating that is at the heart of working in an agile manner. Notice how it’s all about learning then?

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I’m a big fan of XP’s practice of spiking solutions. Although I’m not currently doing TDD because I barely know enough about iPhone development to make myself dangerous, I haven’t quite dropped all practices. I still use source control (just a local SVN repository) against the root of my spikes directory.

Here’s how I’ve been structuring myself:

The benefits of this let’s me quickly create new projects to learn a single lesson given the numerous tutorials out there, and then put that under source control for reference code at a later stage. I then spend some time integrating it into the MyPrototypeProject, making small incremental commits as I make progress. The best part is that if I make a mistake along the way, all I have to do is a svn revert -R . to get back to a working state if I get too frustrated or lost.

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Late last week, Andy Yates got me onto the whole Hello World application for the iPhone. Since then, I’ve been dabbling around a bit more trying to get my head around it. After having studied how people learn things using models such as Shu Ha Ri, the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition, and Kolb’s learning cycle, it’s fascinating to try to understand how best to pick it up.

Here are some observations that I’ve made so far:

• There are many different dimensions to learning how to write an iPhone application. First, there is the fact that it’s written in Objective C, so you’re learning about the syntax and intricacies of a new language. Secondly, you are learning new development tools including XCode and Interface Builder. Thirdly you are learning about the libraries, documentation, and understanding how things fit together.
• I intentionally recognise myself as being at Shu level (in Shu Ha Ri) or a Novice (on the Dreyfus Model). This means that I want to have some quick wins, get stuff working and worry about how it all fits together in the next stage. I’ve found that repeating the same exercise (almost like a kata) has helped me understand how things relate to each other just that little bit more.
• Writing a journal helps. I intend on blogging about some things that I’m discovering. It might help one person out but it will sure help me articulate clearly my understanding (or lack of understanding) about the topics that I’m finding. When I don’t blog, I’ve got a little text file with snippets on what things I’ve discovered and what things still puzzle me. It’s helping me organise the random things that I’ve got.
• Interestingly, I’m less interested in following some of the practices I would if writing a production application. This means I’m not worrying too much about refactoring or testing until I get the basics down. I don’t want to confuse the concerns of exploration and learning with verifying the system works (which I can barely get going right now). When I am more confident in my knowledge, I’ll definitely spend more time thinking about these things.

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Definitely agree with this from the 10 Things I Wish Lean Practitioners Wouldn’t Say in 2010 (via the Lean Blog):

7. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

I don’t believe that statement. I think this phrase should be avoided and it certainly shouldn’t be attributed to Dr. W. Edwards Deming, as it often is mistakenly. Dr. Deming never said this and he, in fact, meant quite the opposite. Some of the most important factors in a system are very difficult, even impossible, to measure. That doesn’t mean you can’t try to manage them. John Hunter, friend and fellow blogger, has the definitive take definitive blog take on this here…

Don’t get me wrong. Metrics are important but they aren’t always most important.

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Assuming that people make it to the Covent Garden venue tonight given all the snow conditions, then I’ll be running the Top Ten Secret Weapons for Agile Performance Testing presentation Alistair and I ran at Agile 2009 for the North London British Computer Society branch. Here’s the email detailing it all.

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