Book Review: Clean Code

Clean Code by Robert C. Martin, ISBN 0132350882

Here’s a rhetorical question: Should you work hard to ensure your software code is readable, well-structured, uncluttered with useless or flat-out wrong information, and is well designed? Rhetorical question #2: Should you spend time polishing code when you modify or maintain it to ensure you’re improving the code you wrote earlier?

“Uncle Bob” Martin’s Clean Code is a book full of sage advice on being able to deal with both those questions. The book’s broken into three separate sections: Good craftsmanship principles, case studies of refactoring code, and smells/heuristics in existing code. There’s also an appendix on dealing with concurrency.

Martin starts out with a frank example of how poorly written and maintained code can torpedo an entire company. A product that Martin and many others used in the late ‘80s began to lag with its release cycles, and bugs weren’t being fixed in subsequent releases. The situation worsened, sales vanished, and the company eventually closed its doors. Martin recounts meeting one of the company’s employees years later – and finding out that an unmaintainable codebase was the cause of all the woes.

Clean Code is intended to help you avoid such a mess.

The initial section covers such fundamental principles as naming conventions, function/method design and layout, use of comments, and a passle of chapters on design principles. There’s a great wealth of things to get your mind rolling in this section, and you get a number of different voices/viewpoints as Martin brings in colleagues from ObjectMentor to write various chapters.

The second section is made up of three refactoring walkthroughs. Martin shows the initial condition of each example (all real-world software), then goes into great detail of the small changes he makes to apply the principles from the first section. These three chapters are outstanding examples of putting the principles from the first section to work. Additionally, Martin’s writing style makes it seem that you’re sitting down with him for a pairing session as you read. Normally I hate these over-the-shoulder discussions because authors usually fail and end up with a sappy, overly chatty example. Martin’s succeeded at this before as well with his example of a pairing session in Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#, another book you should run out and buy.

The final section is one chapter with a large number of smells and heuristics you can apply as you’re writing and refactoring your code. Each item is concise and to the point, some with terse but beautiful example code.

The term software craftsmanship is generating a tremendous amount of discussion on blogs, articles, and podcasts. If you care at all about improving your skills and being a true craftsman, then you need to read this book.

Also, if you don’t follow “Uncle Bob” Martin on Twitter, you should. You’ll get a passle of insightful bits on software craftsmanship, find useful tools like Uladoo, and get some passionate views on politics and life mixed in with all that.

Why You Should Always Validate Your Input

Malicious folks are out there. They want to hurt your software. You’d better do everything you can to keep those little b*#!&@rds away from your stuff.

Look at this shot of a user at Udaloo, a nifty Twitter companion services that graphs stuff for you.

This user was obviously trying to send garbage to Udaloo in the hopes of making it do Something Bad. If you’re not up on SQL injection attacks then you need to stop reading this post and go brush up on them. I mean it. Stop now, go hit the books.

In case it isn’t clear, this user sent a Tweet to @uladoo with some malicious content in it in hopes of having the Uladoo drop the table ‘users’ from their database. I’m guessing Uladoo has their act together, or at least they don’t have a table named ‘users.’

Maybe the guy is associated with Udaloo, maybe not. Don’t know, don’t care, because this is a great demonstration of the critical need to make sure you have your act together when dealing with user input.

There are jackasses out there. Protect your stuff.

Selenium Test Suite Not Starting in TestRunner

Problem: You’re invoking a Selenium test suite via the command line and the Java jar file, using something like

java -jar selenium-server-1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar 
	-htmlSuite 
	$browser 
	http://localhost/csfunctionaltests/ 
	$testSuitePath 
	$testReportPath

Where all those $ thingies are input parameters. You’re finding that a suite you’re running loads into the Selenium TestRunner fine, but then just sits there and never executes.

Solution: Double check that you’re loading a suite and not a test case. Test cases will load fine into the TestRunner, but won’t ever actually launch off. You get no error message, just a hung test.

Not that I’ve done this myself, mind you. I just know someone who might have done this. Just sayin’.

Selenium Trick: Warm Up Site First

I’ve been having some issues where the first Selenium test suite in a series of suites was failing because of timeouts. Our Selenium test runs happen right after we completely repave our build box with new bits and a new database, so there’s some compile delays when Selenium first hits.

Solution? Make the very first test suite one that has only one test case in it: hit the site, and do a ClickAndWait on the site’s homepage.:

WarmUpSite.html

open /csfunctionaltests 
clickAndWait link=Home 

Yes, ClickAndWait in a regular test case should be fine, but it wasn’t working. I’ve had a lot better luck using this approach and my irritation at chasing non-issue issues is slowly  lowering.

VMWare Issue: “This Virtual Machine Appears to be in Use”

I had a power outage which caused a power loss to the external drive my VMWare virtual system’s running on – this is the wrong way to find out that the battery for my UPS is dead.

As a result, VMWare died a nasty death and hung up. I had to terminate its process in Task Manager to get it to restart, always a semi-risky thing.

When I tried opening up my VM again, I was greeted with the error message “This virtual machine appears to be in use” followed by some instructions to try and take ownership of the system. Those steps didn’t work.

What did work was going in to the VM’s folder and deleting the various lock folders and files, those with an extension of “.lck”.  Everything came up just fine after that.

Now I need to go get a replacement battery for my UPS!

Leadership 101: Wrapping Up

I’m a firm believer that while a few great leaders (Eisenhower, Welch, Reagan) are born to the role, the vast majority of successful leaders have grown and/or been tutored into their roles. Leadership is indeed something that can be nurtured and learned, but only if the right environment is created to help current and future leaders develop their skills.

So what should you take away from the series?

If you’re currently running organizations, companies, or teams of any size, take away a commitment to better yourself as a leader. Take a long, hard, honest look at yourself and figure out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Don’t forget to work on those things that are wrong! Also, take a look at how your organization’s supporting your growth as a leader. Reach out to your own leaders and ask for help with your leadership development.

If you’re not in a leadership position yet, then take away a commitment to think about how you can work to develop your leadership skills. You’ll be called up at some point, so be ready to step in to a leadership gig when it arrives. How are your communication skills, particularly when you’re trying to convince others of your position? Are you treating others with respect? Are you asking for more responsibility, and executing on that?

Regardless of where you’re at in your career, I’d challenge you to help raise awareness of the many problems our organizations face in developing future leaders. Encourage your organization to create mentoring programs that are more than just a free lunch once a month. Encourage your management and leadership to get serious about coming up with plans to groom future leaders, because more likely than not they’re dropping the ball in a bad way on that right now.

This series has been very rewarding to me personally as I’ve written it, because it’s forced me to do a self-retrospective on a wide range of my own habits. I’ve come up with a number of things to work on, and that exercise is always a good one to go through.

I’d also like to thank folks who’ve shared their thoughts on the series here on this blog, mail, or via Twitter. Your feedback and kind words have been greatly appreciated.

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A complete listing of all articles in this series can be found here.

Getting Selenium HTML Test Suites Running Automatically

We’ve been working on using Selenium to write tests around our major functional slices in Community Server. Selenium enables you to write a test script that opens up an instance of Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer and drives it around your website. You can navigate, check functionality, and test for text on the screen. It’s an amazing tool, and it is leaps and bounds ahead of the web testing functionality in Visual Studio, IMO.

Selenium has a number of different parts to it: a server component to run the tests on a server, a remote control piece which lets you push tests through different browsers, and a grid piece to scale out execution for load testing/faster execution.

The Selenium server test runners support a number of different languages, so you can write tests in C#, Java, Ruby, or a number of others. Tests are written those languages, then compiled into an assembly, and executed in one fell swoop by the server which consolidates all the output from the tests into one individual results file.

We’re using program managers like myself to handle writing these tests, so we’re all over using Selenium IDE to record and maintain the tests. Selenium IDE records tests and stores them in an HTML file, so it’s easy for PMs to crack open and understand what’s going on.

Support for running HTML test “suites” in Selenium is pretty spotty, unfortunately. The Selenium team’s focus has really been on supporting real languages instead of HTML. (No, HTML is not a programming language! You aren’t writing code if you’re writing HTML!)  As a result, gaps in tools and a bug in the server code leave users with no way to automate a series of HTML test suites. You have to individually execute your test suites through Selenium IDE. While this is still tremendously useful, it’s painful if you want to run a large number of tests, or if you want to automate execution for dropping into a CI process like CruiseControl.NET.

Moving to the pure language environment isn’t what we want to do at Telligent for our feature testing. We want to keep the HTML test suites because our PMs all understand HTML and it’s easy for us to write and maintain tests – we don’t have to divert devs from focusing on their work. There’s an option in Selenium IDE to convert the HTML to C#/Rub/Java/etc., but that’s a one-way tool and can’t be automated. Too brittle, too labor intensive. Again, everything points our environment to HTML. Your environment may and likely does differ.

Dave Donaldson and I have been spending some time over the last couple weeks plinking away at getting this HTML suite issue solved, and we’ve finally gotten things up and working!  There are three steps involved:

0) Patch the Selenium server code to support HTML suites.

1) Build a script to execute your HTML test suites.

2) Build a script to read the suites’ output reports and consolidate the information for inclusion into your CC.NET report.

First off, you’ll need Selenium up and running on your server. I’m not going in to that in this post. The Selenium site’s instructions on setup can get you going.

You’ll also need a full version of the Java SDK on the server you’re running Selenium from, not just the JRE.

Next, you’ll need HTML Tidy. We use that to clean up some HTML goo from the Selenium test reports so that we can treat those reports as XML in PowerShell.

Lastly, you’ll need PowerShell.

Step 0: Patch Selenium

There’s a bug in Selenium RC that prevents the Selenium HTML test runner from correctly loading HTML test suite files. We need to fix that, so grab the Selenium RC source from the Subversion repository at http://svn.openqa.org/svn/selenium-rc.  You’ll need to apply the patch discussed here and then use Maven to rebuild the jar file. Maven will drop the updated file into the folder selenium-rc\trunk\selenium-server\target. The jar you’ll use is ‘selenium-server-1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar’.  You absolutely should rename that jarfile so it’s clear you’re running a patched version, not the stock one. Being a highly creative chap, I chose ‘selenium-server-1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone-TelligentPatched.jar.’ Brings a tear to your eye, I’m sure.

 Step 1: Execute Your HTML Test Suites

(Note: Step 2: Deal With Reports is mixed in here…)

Launching an HTML test suite in Selenium is done by invoking Java to fire off the Selenium server (Dox on SeleniumHQ site). The snippet below shows some PowerShell parameters, i.e. “$browser”.

java -jar selenium-server-1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone-TelligentPatched.jar 
        -htmlSuite 
	$browser 
	http://localhost/csfunctionaltests/ 
	$testSuitePath 
	$testReportPath

The “-htmlSuite” param says you’re running the test in an HTML suite as opposed to a C# assembly, Java jar, etc.  “$browser” lets you specify what browser to use. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer are among those currently supported. “http://localhost/csfunctionaltests/” is the root of the site your Selenium scripts will execute against. “$testSuitePath” is the test suite’s file location. “$testReportPath” is where the report for the specified test suite will get stored.

To start off with, we use a number of parameters when invoking this PowerShell script. This lets us keep the script the same but tweak its execution in different environments for our build server or local dev boxes. The parameter statement looks akin to

# Get params, most likely passed from a .bat file.
param($browser, $testScriptsRootDir, $reportDir, $tidyDir)

There are a number of ways to figure out what test suite files you need to run. We append “TestSuite” to all our suite filenames, i.e. “ForumCRUDP0TestSuite.html.” Using this convention, you could search a directory structure for all those test suites and iterate over them, launching the server jar as needed. Note that the test suite’s output report won’t get merged with other suite reports. You’ll need to have a separate name for each report and merge those after the run’s complete. Fear not, more details on that later.

For now, we’ve hardwired in our test suite locations in a predefined array:

# Setup pairs of test suites with their report names. 
#  Ex: ("myTestSuite.html", "myTestReport.html").
$suites = 
	("CommunityServer\Forums\P0\ForumCRUD\ForumCRUDP0TestSuite.html", 
	  "ForumCRUDP0.html"),
	("CommunityServer\Forums\P0\PostCRUD\PostCRUDP0TestSuite.html", 
	  "PostCRUDP0.html"),
	("CommunityServer\Wikis\P0\WikiCRUD\WikiCRUDP0TestSuite.html", 
	  "WikiCRUDP0.html")

Note that these aren’t full paths, they’re partial paths under a common root. We’ll use an input parameter to control where that common root is, enabling us to easily support different environments on our build box and local dev machines.

Next we set up some global variables for accumulating stats on each test suite:

$accumulatedTestCount = 0
$accumulatedTestPasses = 0
$accumulatedTestFails = 0

Now we can iterate through our list of test suites with a simple foreach. The loop sets up paths for the suite and reports, runs the suite, then does some processing on the output file to gather up statistics. We use HTML Tidy to clean up the report so we’re able to use PowerShell’s XML data type to easily pull important bits from the report.

This loop can use some serious refactoring, but hey, we’re just at the “Green” stage of things right now. Note that I’ve done some line breaking for readability here.

foreach ($testSuiteAndReport in $suites)
{
	$testSuite = $testSuiteAndReport[0]
	$testReport = $testSuiteAndReport[1]

        $testSuitePath = join-path $testScriptsRootDir $testSuite
	$testReportPath = join-path $reportDir $testReport
	
        "Running $testSuitePath..."
	$buildScriptDir = join-path $testScriptsRootDir "BuildScripts"
      
        set-location $buildScriptDir
	java -jar selenium-server-1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone-TelligentPatched.jar 
		-htmlSuite 
		$browser 
		http://localhost/csfunctionaltests/ 
		$testSuitePath 
		$testReportPath
	
	"Cleaning up HTML..."
	set-location $tidyDir
	./tidy.exe -m -i 
		   --doctype omit 
		   --output-xml true 
		   --numeric-entities true 
		   $testReportPath
	
	$report = [xml] (get-content $testReportPath)

	#
	#Hardwired positions based on current Selenium HTML report
	#
	$currentSuite = 
		$report.SelectSingleNode("//table[@id='suiteTable']/tbody/tr[1]/td/b")
	
	$currentTestCount = $report.html.body.table[0].tr[2].td[1]
	$accumulatedTestCount += $currentTestCount

	$currentPasses = $report.html.body.table[0].tr[3].td[1]
	$accumulatedTestPasses += $currentPasses

	$currentFails = $report.html.body.table[0].tr[4].td[1]
	$accumulatedTestFails += $currentFails
	
	if ($currentFails -gt 0) 
	{
		"`nFailures present: " + $currentSuite.get_InnerText()
		$suitesWithFailures += $currentSuite.get_InnerText()
	}	
}

OK, so we’ve looped through our array of test suites to run each individual suite and save its report, we’ve cleaned up those reports, and extracted out various statistics from them.

Now we can directly work with PowerShell’s XML type to create the summary results we’ll hand off to CruiseControl for its reporting. (You do remember that’s what we started off with as our goal at the top of this post, right?)

First we’ll create our XML structure, then we’ll list our accumulated totals, following on with looping through test suites with failures, then finally closing out the XML structure and writing it to our output file.

"Building Selenium report..."

$xmlOut = "`n"
$xmlOut += "" + $accumulatedTestCount + "`n"
$xmlOut += "" + $accumulatedTestPasses+ "`n"
$xmlOut += "" + $accumulatedTestFails+ "`n"
$xmlOut += "`n"

"Suites with failures:"
foreach ($failure in $suitesWithFailures)
{
	$xmlOut += "" + $failure + "`n"
	"* " + $failure
}

$xmlOut += "`n"
$xmlOut += "`n"

$finalReport = join-path $reportDir "selenium-results.xml"

$xmlOut | out-file $finalReport

We’re finally through the entire script!

We run this script by invoking it from a batch file shown below. I’ve broken lines for readability, although the path to the PowerShell script will likely look like complete poo on my blog. Deal with it.

powershell.exe
	D:\Builds\CommunityServerFunctionalTests\Working\Trunk\Tests\FunctionalTests\BuildScripts\RunSeleniumTestSuites.ps1'" 
	-browser 
	"*firefox" 
	-testScriptsRootDir 
		"D:\Builds\CommunityServerFunctionalTests\Working\Trunk\Tests\FunctionalTests" 
	-reportDir 
		"D:\Builds\CommunityServerFunctionalTests\Artifacts" 
	-tidyDir 
		"D:\Downloads\HtmlTidy"

The entire PowerShell script can be found on my site here.

We use a simple XSL to merge the “selenium-results.xml” file into CruiseControl as well as a mail notice that goes out.  That XSL’s fairly simple:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">

    <xsl:output method="html"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:if test="//seleniumReport">
            <br />

            <table border="0" width="100%">
                <tr>
                    <td>
                        <!-- Header table -->
                        <table width="100%">
                            <tr>
                                <td style="background-color: #000066; padding: 5px;">
                                    <span style="color: #ffffff; font-weight: bold; font-size: 12pt;">Selenium Summary</span>
                                </td>
                            </tr>
                        </table>

                        <!-- Stats table -->
                        <table>
                            <tr>
                                <td style="padding-left: 5px;">
                                    <span style="font-weight: bold;">Total Tests:</span>
                                </td>
                                <td style="padding-left: 5px;">
                                    <xsl:value-of select="//seleniumReport/totalTests" />
                                </td>
                            </tr>
                            <tr>
                                <td style="padding-left: 5px;">
                                    <span style="font-weight: bold;">Total Passed:</span>
                                </td>
                                <td style="padding-left: 5px;">
                                    <xsl:value-of select="//seleniumReport/totalPass" />
                                </td>
                            </tr>
                            <tr>
                                <td style="padding-left: 5px;">
                                    <span style="font-weight: bold;">Total Failed:</span>
                                </td>
                                <td style="padding-left: 5px;">
                                    <xsl:value-of select="//seleniumReport/totalFail" />
                                </td>
                            </tr>
                        </table>

                        <!-- Table to display failed test suites -->
                        <xsl:if test="//seleniumReport/failedSuites/failedSuite">
                            <xsl:variable name="failedSuite" select="//seleniumReport/failedSuites/failedSuite" />
                            <br/>
                            <table cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0">
                                <tr>
                                    <td style="border: 1px solid #649cc0; background-color: #a9d9f7;">
                                        <span style="font-weight: bold;">Failed Test Suite</span>
                                    </td>
                                </tr>

                                <xsl:for-each select="$failedSuite">
                                    <tr>
                                        <td style="border-left: 1px solid #649cc0; border-right: 1px solid #649cc0; border-bottom: 1px solid #649cc0;">
                                            <xsl:value-of select="." />
                                        </td>
                                    </tr>
                                </xsl:for-each>
                            </table>
                            <br />
                        </xsl:if>
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </table>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

OK, that’s plenty to digest, and there’s lots of room for improvement in the process. As I said, we got past the Red stage and are at Green. Refactor comes as we figure out any hitches in this.

Feedback is welcome, and I’d especially love to hear from any Selenium folks who’ve also solved this problem!

Leadership 101: Odds and Ends Grab Bag

My second-to-last post in this series is really a grab bag of several topics which I thought important but was too lazy to come up with enough material on to write longer individual posts on. Frankly, I was also getting concerned I’d started spending too much time telling Jim-as-an-old-fart war stories or was drifting into Dilbert land complaining about bad bosses…

With that in mind, here are a few smaller items about leadership fundamentals which you need to keep in mind as well.

You’re Part of the Team, but You’re Not IN the Team

A leader needs to be close to and part of his team, but he needs to remember that he’s not IN the team. That sounds strange, so let me try to clear it up a bit. While you lead the team, you need to keep in mind that your teammates aren’t your peers. You’re responsible for leading them, you’re responsible for their success as individuals, but you’re also responsible for the team’s success and contribution to the larger organization. At some point you’ll have to make some difficult decisions, and sometimes an overly intimate relationship with your team can get in the way.

Don’t get me wrong: build camaraderie with your team. Build strong bonds with your team. Build incredibly strong trust and communication with your team. But you’ve got to maintain a bit of distance between you and your team to ensure you’re able to have a clear head when it’s time to make tough calls.

Part of this is also taking care to avoid blowing off steam around your team. Don’t vent your frustrations to your team, instead find a peer at your same level and form a Mutual Rant League. When you start venting to your team you’re injecting them with the same level of frustration you’ve got. Worse, actually, since it’s a one-to-many relationship and whatever you feel frustrated about will get vastly magnified and distorted when you vent to your team. Finally, they’re seeing that you’re not living up to the Calm in a Storm tenet I wrote about earlier.

As Capt. John Miller said in Saving Private Ryan, “Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officer, so on, so on, and so on. I don't gripe to you. I don't gripe in front of you.”

Unfair? Maybe. Deal with it. You’re a leader. Act like one.

Value Your Elites, but Keep Membership to That Group Open

Hopefully you’ve got a team built up of top-notch performers. They’re elites who work hard, work well, and work to continually improve themselves. The 10X productivity factor of your elites isn’t a myth, it’s a reality, and it’s a reality that brings your organization incredible success.

Recognize those folks as elites, because they are. They’ve invested a tremendous amount of time, passion, and sweat equity in improving themselves. There’s a vast ocean of individuals in the world who care not a whit for self-improvement, and your elites are small islands in that sea of dross. Recognize your elites for what they’ve done to reach their level, and heed their input. If you’re lucky you’ve got a team working for you that’s a whole lot smarter than you, so listen to them! (And it’s a Good Thing to have folks smarter than you on your team.)

At the same time, keep the entrance door open to that group and encourage people from other teams to aspire to get into your team. Don’t you dare drop the bar for entrance to your elite team, but make it clear to others that they can join the Kool Kidz if they have the right mindset and put in the level of work required to lift themselves over that bar.

Furthermore, open up that door even wider: actively encourage members from other teams to join your brown bag lunch presentations. Set up developer exchanges where outsiders can join your group and get fired up about how neat it is to learn new things and succeed at them.

Your elites are the drivers of success in your organization. Recognize them as such.

Praise in Public, Criticize in Private

Do I really have to write about this one? Yes, unfortunately, I do.

Criticism to one of your team members should never be given in front of others. Do it in private where there’s no sense of confrontation and egos can stay a bit less inflated. Furthermore, you’re bettering your odds of success for ensuring the criticism is taken as guidance for the receiver to improve on something. Criticism in public is nothing more than a slapdown, and it’s always going to leave hard feelings.

Even worse, your team’s going to take a significant morale hit as they see you grinding someone down in front of them. They’ll lose the confidence you’ve worked to build up in them for fear of being castigated in public for errors, right or wrong.

Conversely, offer up your praises in public. Recognize the person in front of their peers. You’re lifting up the recipient, and you’re building good morale with the peers, too.

Successful Team? It's the Team's Success, Not Yours.

Just because you’re a leader doesn’t mean you get to take credit for your team’s accomplishments. Sure, you’ve worked hard to build up that team, but the victories and accomplishments the team achieves are the team’s! Yes, you certainly had a part in it, but guess what? Who did the real work? You guided, you had some vision, hopefully you inspired and supported – but you didn’t figure out that Excel Services issue, you didn’t handle all the blocking at the net, and you alone didn’t pull off making 550 folks outrageously happy over a three day conference. (SharePoint development, volleyball, and CodeMash, respectively. J )

Sports teams are great for this: the coaches generally make sure the players get the limelight. Apple’s nearly the complete opposite: Steve Jobs seems to take credit for every accomplishment and gets his name on many of the patents awarded to Apple when I doubt he’s the driving force behind many of them.

Ensure the spotlight’s on those who actually do the work. You lead, but your team wins the victories.

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A complete listing of all articles in this series can be found here.

PowerShell Snippet for Combining Directory Paths

System.IO.Path.Combine rocks for safely combining directory paths, but it’s got a silly inflexibility built in which means you’ve got to clean up paths you first pass in to it.

For example:

Path.Combine(“C:\Foo\”,  “\bar”) results in “\bar” because you’ve given Combine “\bar” which is a root-level folder. Unfortunately, there’s no flexible way in the API to deal with this, so you’ve got to do some pre-processing first.

My particular use case right now is that I don’t want any trailing slashes dealt with on the root (left) param, and I don’t care about starting slashes on the subdir (right), so I’m just going to get rid of both those. Ergo:

[char[]]$trimChars = '\\'
function FixTerminatingSlash ($root) {
    return $root.TrimEnd($trimChars)   
}

function FixStartingSlash($suffix) {
    return $suffix.TrimStart($trimChars)
}

function CombinePaths ([string]$root, [string]$subdir) {
    $left = FixTerminatingSlash($root)
    $right = FixStartingSlash($subdir)
    $fullPath = [System.IO.Path]::Combine($left, $right)
    return $fullPath
}

 

Invoke this via “CombinePaths <rootDir> <subDir>” with a space, not a comma, between the two. It’s not rocket science, and I’m sure some PowerShell guru will tell me all this can be done some other way in three characters – which is fine, so show me!

Leadership 101: Stop Talking and Listen

This one might be subtitled “Miscommunication? It's Your Fault, Not Theirs.” That or “Make Your Default Answer ‘Yes’, not ‘No’.”

Let’s take as a given that your team is comprised of average or better folks. If not, then you’ve got other issues you need to address that are outside the scope of this series. With that ground rule in mind, if you’ve hired good people, then pay attention to what they’re saying. If someone on your team brings up a point, they’re raising it for a reason, and furthermore, since you’ve invested in getting solid folks, they’re likely bringing up for a reason that will benefit the team.

If one of your team members is talking to you, take the time to listen to what they’re trying to tell you. If you’re not understanding what they’re saying, then you need to work harder – as a leader, it’s your fault if your team can’t get something across to you.

Read that again, because it’s important. Communication problems between you and your team are your fault. There are two aspects of this, both on your shoulders: First, you haven’t invested enough time with your team to learn their communication style, or to educate them on how to better communicate. Secondly, you’re not working hard enough to hear what they’re trying to tell you.

As an example, a friend of mine repeatedly ran into roadblocks when trying to pitch crucial upgrades and changes to his company’s infrastructure. The changes were utterly necessary to remove roadblocks hindering a large group of really talented folks who were constantly delivering value to the organization. My friend didn’t have the best communication talents and sometimes delivered his requests in a blunt, unclear fashion, but what he was trying to say was critical to the success of the organization. The organization’s head, instead of making the effort to clear up the communication issues, repeatedly fell back to a default answer of “No.” The boss’s failures to expend the effort to work through the communication blockages resulted in all the requests getting turned down. This ended up causing more blockages and slowdowns with his group – something you really don’t want when you’ve spent time and money to hire top-notch talent. Furthermore, my friend got extremely frustrated and took a pretty good morale hit since he couldn’t get any traction in trying to solve problems.

Your team needs to believe that you’re an advocate of theirs. Your team needs to believe that if they raise issues to you, you’ll invest the time to understand their problems, and that includes spending time to break through communication barriers with them.

Your team shouldn’t expect that they’ll get their every wish, but this falls back on your shoulders too. If you’ve worked to clearly understand the team’s requests, then you’ll be able to clearly communicate back to them the reasons why you may not be able to move forward with their request. Your team will have seen that you’ve take the time to hear them out and have put some conscious thought into your decision.

You have good people. Invest the time to make sure you understand what they’re trying to tell you.

Updated: Complete listing of articles in this series here.

Excellent CodeMash Video Posted

John Kellar posted up a great video he made at CodeMash on his Edge of Dev series for Telerik TV.

There’s a bunch of video of an interview John did with me, but most of the video’s great stuff John took around the conference itself. John did a tremendous job capturing all the cool stuff that goes on at CodeMash.

Go check it out!

Leadership 101: Integrity is a Coin You Can’t Afford to Spend

Two of the worst leadership failures I’ve seen both involved me as the recipient of dishonest, duplicitous actions by leaders while I was in the Air Force. (Bear with me: there are some military positions, ranks, and terms in this post…)

Six months into my first stint in the Air Force I got in some trouble because I didn’t take responsibility in the first leadership role I’d been entrusted with. Buy me a beer sometime and I’ll tell you the whole story.

My First Sergeant [1] repeatedly ensured me he was supporting a verbal reprimand for me, not something more serious. After the dust had settled I looked over the paperwork for the mess and found, in extremely light, tiny handwriting, the First Sergeant’s recommendations to my Commanding Officer (CO): a much more severe punishment which would have resulted in a loss of rank and fines.

18 years old, six months into my first stint in the service, and this two-faced, lying SOB is what I’m being shown as an example of a leader? I still have a copy of that paperwork around somewhere. It’s been 26 years, and I still get pissed every time I run across that.

Years later I had an extremely tense situation involving one of my subordinates. Our Chief Enlisted Advisor (CEA [2]) gave me verbal orders which I vehemently disagreed with because they put me in a completely untenable position. I repeated the CEA’s orders to ensure I understood things correctly, then respectfully let him know my objections. “Carry on” or something similar was the response. I left that man’s office, went and got my superior officer, explained the situation, then returned to the CEA’s office with my Major in tow.

“I never said anything like that” was the CEA’s response when confronted with the situation. An outright lie to my face, and he knew it because I remember him being unable to look me in the eye. I served with that CEA in that unit for several more years, then again in another unit later on in my career. I also ran in to him several times after I left the service. Not once after that initial incident did I ever give him anything more than the bare minimum of courtesy required by regulation. He didn’t deserve it, and he never even remotely attempted to earn back my trust. Fail Whale, to use the vernacular.

Integrity is absolutely critical to who you are as a person. Not a developer, not a professional, not a leader, but as a person. Small transgressions with your friends, peers, customers, or team members will dig you into a big hole. Moderate transgressions leave you at the bottom of a huge crater. Large transgressions are the equivalent of the Grand Canyon, and you’ll likely never, ever recover.

In the past I’ve dug some holes through sheer stupidity or lack of courage, and it took me a lot of hard work to recover. That time and pain of that recovery effort is something I can look back on now and say “Jackass! You could have avoided all that if you’d had the stones to do the right thing.” Thankfully Darwinism gave me a pass and I’ve survived after learning some hard lessons.

I can’t emphasize this enough: Integrity is the foundation of nearly everything I’ve written about so far: communication, respect, responsibility. All my examples were negative ones because I wanted to show the impact of getting it wrong. Take the magnitude of those examples’ failures, flip them over, and hopefully you’ll understand the upside of being adamant about protecting your integrity.

You earn your integrity very slowly over a long period of time by demonstrating your honesty and trustworthiness. You spend it quickly with white lies, hypocrisy, and uneven handedness in how you treat those around you. Big lies drain your entire account in an instant.

Integrity’s a coin you need to hold near and dear to your heart. You can’t ever, EVER afford to spend it.

[1] First Sergeant: a senior enlisted person responsible for conduct and performance of all enlisted personnel in a unit.

[2] Chief Enlisted Advisor: somewhat like a First Sergeant, but generally responsible for a smaller group of enlisted personnel in a unit.

Update: Find links to this series of posts here.

Central Ohio Day of .NET Call For Speakers

The Central Ohio Day of .NET will be Saturday, 18 April, and will once again be held at the Roberts Centre in Wilmington, Ohio.

We’re now accepting submissions for sessions, so go submit your talks at the speaker submission page!

Updated: Fixed the bad URL for the speaker submission page. Thanks to commenter Kevin Upchurch for pointing it out, and massive boos to Live Writer for its less-than-helpful handling of pasting in URLs.

Leadership 101: Open That Door!

While at Quick Solutions, I had mentorship responsibilities for a number of folks. I was very fortunate that all my mentorees were in Quick’s Solutions group. QSI Solutions folks are, in my honest opinion, the region’s best and brightest conglomeration of bleeding edge devs. (Second, of course, to my homies at Telligent!) As a result, the scope and number of problems I had with them were miniscule in comparison to other situations I’ve been in at previous jobs.

(For example, while in the Air Force I had to manage a subordinate who “accidentally” shot his friend who was having an affair with said subordinate’s wife. Long story. Buy me a beer some time and I’ll tell you more. But I digress.)

Almost all of the personnel issues at QSI are handled through Larry Schleeter, the Vice President for Professional Services. Larry oversees nearly all consultants at QSI, and all the recruiters report up to him, so he’s an extremely busy guy. Twice I had situations where I needed to bounce my ideas off someone in a leadership position. Both times I walked into Larry’s office and was able to get a significant chunk of his time to discuss my approach to the problems. Larry was freely giving of his time and experience, helping me to refine a couple aspects of how I was going to fix the problem.

Larry was always adamant about making time for any conversation his folks needed to have with him. Sometimes I’d need to hold off while he finished up a meeting, but I knew I’d get his time at some point fairly quickly. What’s more impressive is that I wasn’t even a direct report to Larry.

As a leader you absolutely must keep your door open to your team. They need to have a clear belief that you’re going to make time to help them out with their problems. If you’re closing your door, either metaphorically or physically, then you’re crushing free and productive communication with your team. A closed door means you’re blocking the ability to quickly hear about problems that are hindering your team’s ability to function smoothly. More importantly, you’re giving the impression your team’s is somewhere far down your priority list. You’ll not be getting crucial feedback to situations, and you’ll be missing the chance to let your team bring up pressing issues – something that’s crucial for keeping a happy, productive team.

Of course you have situations where you can’t drop everything immediately for your team, and you do need to respect your own time and productivity. Set up a Do Not Disturb signal with your team and lay out some clear expectations for them, but ensure that you’re tipping the balance to “Open Door” rather than “Closed in Most Cases Door.”

Keeping your door open reaps you a wealth of goodness with your team. Ensure you’re giving your team priority for their communication needs.

Open up that door!

Update: Find links to this series of posts here.

Leadership 101: Don't Sweat The Small Stuff (And It's NOT All Small Stuff)

My first Air Force assignment after basic training was technical training school at Keesler AFB in Biloxi/Gulfport, Mississippi. There I joined the Blue Knights Drum and Bugle Corps where I played a bad second horn. (No, I don't mean bad as in wicked good, I mean they were hard up for horns and took me despite my tremendous suckage.) Because we performed for the public, we Blue Knights spent a lot of time keeping our uniforms top-notch. I, as did the other Blue Knights, took immense pride in having a set of boots and shoes that were incredibly well-polished. I kept up this habit through months of other training until I was posted to my first "real" job with the 963rd Airborne Warning and Control Squadron at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma.

Just a couple weeks after I arrived in Oklahoma, the Soviet Union's air force shot down a Korean Air 747 over the seas north of Japan. Things in the world were pretty tense at that point, and we deployed a number of extra aircraft to Okinawa to fly overwatch for the salvage operations. I was on one of those deploying flight crews and was scrambling around to get everything ready. For some reason, instead of focusing on getting my training material and deployment gear gathered up I was fixated more on getting my two pairs of flight boots polished up to my usual high standards.

Master Sergeant George Bishop, one of the most utterly smart, highly experienced, and very respected radar technicians we had, said in a very calm, quiet voice "Don't sweat the small stuff." Nothing more, nothing less. His calm voice snapped me out of my tizzy and reminded me that polishing my boots wasn't going to get me on the plane.

You as a leader need that same view: what's the really important stuff for getting your team's goal accomplished? What are the important things that will help not only your team, but your broader group succeed? Focus on those crucial things, and keep your team from getting lost in minutia which contributes only churn and hinders progress.

Is your team getting constantly interrupted for administrivia tasks? Jump in as the gatekeeper to block those disturbances. Do you find members of your team getting overly focused on small tasks tangential to delivery on your project? Take time during the day to help guide them back on track.

You've also got to have a good filter for deciding what's small stuff and what's not. Everything isn't small stuff. Sorry, but those time cards, while a complete pain in the keester, ensure your team members get paid. Furthermore, those same sucky timecards ensure your company is properly recording your billable hours so you're pulling in your appropriate revenue.

Don't sweat the small things, but keep in mind that it's not just small stuff because it irritates you.

Update: Find links to this series of posts here.

Leadership 101: Build Broad Shoulders

Note: This post really dovetails with the prior one “Foster Success with Small Victories”, and might even be the same concept but spun differently. Regardless, I wanted to call it out separately…

I never thought twice about it at the time, but at the age of 20 I was a single point of failure for a radar system responsible for protecting a lot of human lives and critical targets in the Persian Gulf. I ran and maintained the radar and transponder systems in flight on E-3 radar surveillance planes, and during the 1980s I was part of aircrews monitoring the Iran/Iraq war. Occasionally planes or boats from one side or the other would go try to blow up things like oil tankers, ships, or ground targets in countries other than Iran or Iraq. Our radar planes monitored those bad guys and vectored in good guys to keep people and things from getting blown up.

If I didn't do my job right, the radar wouldn't be available to find the bad guys, things might explode, and good guys could die.

On a less dramatic but more cheerful note, during my non-flying times I was also responsible planning annual budgets for a fairly large set of computers, radios, and other equipment. I was responsible for several thousand dollars worth of equipment, and had to plan an annual budget between $50K and $100K. I needed to understand budgetary cycles, equipment phase out schedules, future requirements, and a lot of other fairly complex concepts.

Both of these things were part of my regular work day all right around the time I was first able to legally drink alcohol.

I had a lot of responsibility heaped on my shoulders at an early time in my career, and I never thought twice of it. There wasn't a big deal made of it, and I got solid guidance and help along the way. That said, at the end of the day, it was my name on the dotted line for equipment, and my hands on the equipment keeping the radar alive to keep the bad guys at bay.

Dealing with responsibilities is just like exercise: you need to build up your muscle to handle it and do it well. Help your team grow by giving them ownership of and responsibility for tasks. Furthermore, don’t shy away from putting large amounts of responsibility on them. Do it in an escalating manner, and monitor things as you go to ensure you’re putting the right level of responsibility on the right shoulders.

Finally, do this as early as possible in your subordinates' careers, because it dovetails right in with the concept of fostering success with small victories.

Learning to take on responsibilities for significant things is an important part of your team members’ career growth. Help them build up the strength to shoulder those responsibilities.

Update: Find links to this series of posts here.

Foster Success with Small Victories

Confidence is a nebulous, sometimes fragile thing. (Confidence ain't arrogance or ego.) As a leader you need to build the confidence of your team with a regular parade of victories and successes, even if it's a parade of small victories. This is critically important in two different lines of leadership: team confidence and building the confidence of your future leaders.

Team confidence can often hinge on the perception of the team's progress. If your team isn't seeing progress on the project, then frustration builds and morale suffers. One of the reasons I'm such a fan of Big Visible Charts in project workplaces is that the entire team can easily see how you've been doing in delivering velocity. You might feel beat down by a problem you're working on today, but a quick glance at the velocity chart and you can see that you've made some progress on the project this week. Sure, you may be behind projected velocity, but you're still knocking things off and you've still got some success to lay claim to.

Building the confidence of your future leaders is something that too often gets completely ignored. While there are many, many aspects to building your organization's future leaders, one of the simplest, most critical things you can do is start building the confidence of those people at an early point in their careers. Give them small tasks at which they can succeed, then be sure to note their successes. Don't ignore failures, and don't make the tasks or recognition patronizing, but do get them creating a pattern of wins. Increase the complexity and responsibility of those tasks, and continue to give appropriate praise where earned.

Success is habit-forming, and you’re priming the pump for those future leaders by getting them a cadence of seeing success. Your future leaders will gain the confidence that they're able to make correct decisions and will be better positioned to accept more important tasks.

Small victories lead to big wins.

Update: Find links to this series of posts here.

Leadership 101: Communicate Bad News And Big Changes In Person

Twice I've worked for people who surprised me with personnel changes via PowerPoint slides shown on the wall at staff meetings. The first time I learned three people who worked for me now worked for our new practice manager. The second time I learned a former peer had been promoted to a position managing me and two other peers.

The first example was one of the final straws causing me to leave a badly led company that was sinking. The second example, while it happened to be a case of promoting the right guy to the right job, came as a slap in the face because the CEO of the company who decided on the change didn't have enough respect for me and my peers to let us know in private we'd be getting a new boss. The second example was even more galling because a peer and good friend had a demotion from "Manager" to "Lead" and found out about it on the same slide.

This year several friends of mine got notice a week before Christmas that their benefits were being substantially cut -- a week after a company meeting had the CEO announcing the company's outlook was rosy. Said notice came over e-mail.

The same company laid off another friend via a phone call instead of face-to-face. My friend had been recognized as "Consultant of the Year" two years before and had been highly regarded at clients.

Bad news in companies happens. Big changes happen. Every reasonable employee understands that there are economic cycles, and sometimes hard choices have to be made. Every reasonable employee understands that reorganizations are a necessary part of making sure you've got the right people in the right slots to ensure the company's success.

If you even pretend to want to be a leader, then you're going to have to make hard decisions at some point. You owe your team the respect of sharing those changes in person, not via e-mail or over the phone. Sometimes this can't scale: incredibly poor leadership at the auto companies and UAW is forcing nasty changes down the entire supply chain. CEOs from all the auto companies and the UAW union president can't hit up each and every worker in person.

Still, there are ways to ensure that big impact news is handed out in as respectful manner as possible. Such communications absolutely must be in person, regardless of the effort it costs you as a leader. Shy away from these tough conversations and you're in Fail Whale mode. Not only will you be losing respect (remember the thing about getting respect by giving respect?), you'll do immense damage to morale across the organization.

I can't stress that morale issue enough. Rumors fly rampant and quickly spiral out of control when bad news comes from a phone call or an e-mail. There's no face to the message, there's no context to it, there's no chance to ask questions. Get in front of the message, get in front of the audience, get in front of the recipient. Share the changes or bad news, and at least make an effort to answer a few questions.

Bitter pills are never easy to swallow, but giving that news in person is the only way to lead.

Update: Find links to this series of posts here.

Leadership 101: Calm in a Storm

Great leaders project calmness, even during crises. Your team doesn’t benefit from you losing your cool when times are tough. They need the feeling that things are being handled, even in tough situations.

One day while working at Quick Solutions we got news that a client had funding for our project yanked by their venture capital board. As a result, a large team of 28 needed to get down to 14 in a matter of three days. The entire team on the client site knew the bad news, and they were understandably flustered.

Tim James, our sales manager, calmly and quietly told me and the other studio leads “It’s 4:30 now. By 5:30 we’ll have a plan for each of the folks, and by 6:30 you’ll have called all of them to let them know what they’re doing tomorrow and where they’re going next week.”

Tim’s quiet, calm demeanor helped us quickly accomplish what we needed to: get coverage for all our folks, and get them quickly informed of the action plan. We met the deadlines, and we got our folks reassured that they’d still be valued members of our group.

Contrast that demeanor with your stereotypical Dilbert-style boss. Exploding in a fit, or getting wound up and emotional rarely solves problems. Furthermore, your team quickly picks up on the emotional explosion. Productivity plummets, rumors begin to fly, and your team’s morale falls through the basement.

Take a hard look at how you react to crises. If you’re an exploder, or someone who gets tightly wound, then you need to change that. If nothing else, force yourself to separate yourself away from your team for a few moments so you can settle down and get your head on straight. I’ve literally gone and sat in a stairwell for a couple minutes so I could collect my thoughts.

I can’t emphasize this enough: You need to have the presence of mind to get your act together. Even telling your team “Hey, this sucks. Give me a couple minutes to think. I’ll be with you shortly.” is a completely acceptable response. You’re showing your team that you’re actually in control of yourself instead of just exploding.

There’s another critical aspect of Calm in a Storm: The ability to figure out what a real crisis is. My military background comes in to play here, combined with my time as a system administrator for a global computer reseller. Some of my career experience is working on sensor systems used to keep bad guys from killing good guys, and from maintaining systems for a company where downtime meant, literally, tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue every minute the system was down.

If people aren’t dying, if something’s not on fire, or if your company is still able to do its job, then the problem you’re experiencing is likely not a crisis. There may be a massive inconvenience, and the problem may be epic in scope, but you need to keep and force some perspective on the issue. Yes, you likely need to address the problem in a quick and focused fashion, but is it bad enough that you need to keep your team in overnight on a Friday evening?

Likely not.

Don’t get me wrong: There are times when you do need that level of escalation to fix a problem, but as a leader you need to protect your team by calmly triaging issues and allocating resources in a sane fashion to fix them.

Calm reactions on your part as a leader are crucial to keeping your team from spiraling into a panic attack. Keep your head on straight, stay cool, fix the problem.

Calm in a storm. It’s critical.

Update: Find links to this series of posts here.

Switching Website Root With PowerShell

Gasp! Jim is actually writing a technical blog post!

I'm using Selenium to write UI/feature tests for Community Server and Evolution. I use these tests both as feature acceptance and as regression tests to make sure we didn't bust something while working on other parts of the system. In order for me to regression test, I need to easily switch my website between the release and latest trunk.

For example, I’ve got two virtual directories in IIS, one for release, one for functional tests against trunk:

IIS

   Default Web   (http://localhost)

           Community Server Release  (http://localhost/CS)

                  Filesystem: C:\Program Files\Telligent\Community Server 2008.5\Web

           CS from Subversion’s trunk (http://localhost/csfunctionaltests)

                  Filesystem: D:\TelligentSvn\CommunityServer\Core\Trunk\CommunityServer.Web

I can change this manually in IIS Manager via the virtual directory's property sheet, but that's slow and a lot of mouse clicks. I hate the mouse. Keyboard, FTW!

PowerShell, to the rescue! I'm only just (finally!) getting back to PowerShell after a couple years' hiatus, so the following script likely isn't as cool as it could be. Still, it does the job and I'll refactor later if needed.

param ([switch]$showCurrent, [switch]$trunk, [switch]$release)
if ($trunk -and $release) 
{
"Only one of -trunk or -release can be used."
exit
}
$iis=[ADSI]"IIS://localhost/W3SVC/1/Root"
$cstests = $iis.psbase.children | where {$_.AppRoot -eq '/LM/W3SVC/1/Root/csfunctionaltests'}
if ($showCurrent) 
{ 
     "`nCurrent path: " + $cstests.Path + "`n"
     exit
}
if ($trunk)
{ 
     # Path for trunk
     $path = "D:\TelligentSvn\CommunityServer\Core\Trunk\CommunityServer.Web" 
}
if ($release) 
{ 
     # Path for release
     $path = "C:\Program Files\Telligent\Community Server 2008.5\Web" 
}
$cstests.Put("Path",$path)
$cstests.SetInfo()
iisreset /noforce
$cstests = $iis.psbase.children | where {$_.AppRoot -eq '/LM/W3SVC/1/Root/csfunctionaltests'}
"`nNew path for csfunctionaltests: " + $cstests.Path + "`n"

Save this as ChangeRoot.ps1, edit the trunk and release paths for your environment and invoke it with "ChangeRoot.ps1 -trunk" or "ChangeRoot.ps1 -release" to change appropriately. Use the "-showCurrent" to tell you which path you're currently using.