2017-11-05

Adaptive development

Recently I helped some colleagues to automate mail deliveries. When they first asked for help they did not really know what they wanted. They asked if I could help them create a schedule when to send mails to recipients. All they had was an Excel sheet with mail addresses of people who should be migrated from one Active Directory to another with date of migration and location.
Based on this Excel sheet I created a small database and a prototype of a  simple mail generator. When I showed my prototype it took a while before they understood the prototype was more than a schedule, their first impression was an overly complex schedule. But when they realised the prototype was actually emitting mails according to the schedule they were more than happy “we didn’t know how we should be able to deliver those 50,000 emails”.
When I asked for the contents of the mails they told me it was five emails in eight languages. That should not be a problem I only had to replace personalised items in the mails  with my symbolics. The mail templates was in MS outlook msg form. That was a problem, my mail-generator was in Linux and I did not have any tools to work with outlook msg files. After some experiments I concluded  best I could do was to convert the templates to htm in UTF16le encoding and transfer them binary to Linux. In Linux I first converted the templates to UTF-8 encoding and then manually edited the HTM files added images removed some distorting HTML code.
When I started to test I realized the dates were in local time and my server was on CET time.
I asked if it mattered if the  mails arrived one day early, “yes it does, the mails should arrive 05:00 in the morning local time”. Not only had I to calculate the day  to deliver the mails I also had send it the right time of the day. Back to the drawing board and after some tinkering I had modified the generator submitting mails at the right time. Now we were ready for production and a lot of mails were fired of each day at the right time.
Now my colleagues came back and told me “We have a problem, the ‘welcome emails’ sent after the migration should not be sent following the schedule as we said. We like these mails be sent when the migration is confirmed by the local IT support. They send us a report each morning at 09:00”. Tomorrow I will get this report, tweak the system yet a bit and fire off emails to successfully migrated users.

In total we have spent less than two hours discussing functionality of this rather complex mail automation. Not one line of specification is written, no project plans, no process descriptions, no sprints. Nothing is planned and nothing is written but a fully operational system. I consider this adaptive development style superior to any other development model I have seen. It is the dev part of the extreme devops style I always used which I modestly call ‘never on a Friday’. Extreme in extreme devops comes from the fact not only do the same person do development, put it into production and run the operations, I also design and build the hardware and install software from opsys to application code.

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