Kategorie: Coding

As written before, I really like the regular updates provided by Thoughtworks in their Technology Radar. My focus is on the applicability of techniques, tools, platforms and languages for automotive software, with a further focus on embedded in-car software. Hence, I am ignoring pure web-development and machine learning/data analytics stuff which usually makes a huge portion of the whole report. Recently, its volume 27 has been published. Let’s have a look!

As usual, lets start with a dive in the „Technologies“ sector and its „Adopt“ perimeter. The first entry we can find is about „path-to-production mapping„. Its as familiar as it sounds – many of my readers will have heard about the Value Stream Mapping or similar process mapping approaches. Thoughtworks state by themselves that this one is so obvious, still they didnt cover it in their reports yet. Sometimes, the simple ideas are the powerful ones. I can confirm from my own experience that a value stream map laying out all the process steps and inefficiencies in an easy to digest manner is a good eye opener and can help to focus on the real problems instead of beating around the bush.

Something very interesting for all the operating systems and platform plans in Automotive is the notion of an „incremental developer platform„. The underlying observation that „teams shooting for too much of that platform vision too fast“ is something I can confirm from own experience. Engineers love to develop sustainable platforms, but underestimate all the efforts required for it, and management with its impatience is further undermining platform plans. Following the book Team Topologies‘ concept of a „thinnest viable platform“ makes sense here. Not shooting too far in the first step, but also treating a platform product as an incremental endeavour.

Another one which strikes me is „observability in CI/CD pipelines„. With the increasing amount and complexity of CI/CD pipelines in one project, let alone a whole organization, many operational questions arise. And operations always benefit from clear data and overview. Recently, a then-student and now colleague and me designed and realized a tool which enables CI/CD monitoring for more than one repo, but for a graph of repos. I hope we can publish/open this project anytime soon.

In the platforms sector, Backstage entered the „adopt“ perimeter. The project is actively developing forward, and indeed could be an interesting tool for building an internal sw engineering community.

Looking at the tools sector, I liked Hadolint for finding common issues in Dockerfiles.

As written before, I really like the regular updates provided by Thoughtworks in their Technology Radar. Since the new version #26 was released a few weeks back, I found now the time to put down my notes. My focus is on the applicability of techniques, tools, platforms and languages for automotive software, with a further focus on embedded in-car software. Hence, I am ignoring pure web-development and machine learning/data analytics stuff which usually makes a huge portion of the whole report. Let’s go!

In the techniques section in the „adopt“ circle we initially have „single team remote wall“. In a nutshell I think they mean having a dashboard showing the essential data, kpis and tasks for a remote development team. I think the trick here is the „single“ as I assume that most remote teams have dashboards, however usually multiple ones loosely coupled. In my current team, our Scrum Master has created a great Jira dashboard showing some essential data which could give hints at the team’s performance.

The second noteworthy technique is „documentation quadrants“. Referring to documentation.divio.com/ this provides a nice taxonomy of different documentation types. This is very relatable, as I very often experience a fuzzy mixture of all those types scattered in many places. Certainly this is something I will bring to my work network’s attention.

Third, we have „rethinking remote standups“. This follows a general observation that conducting remote daily standups in the same duration and content like the were recommended in former times (e.g. the typical 15 min Scrum daily) does not provide the same amount of alignment within a development team. This is not necessarily because of the the meeting itself, but because other casual sync occasions during the day are happening less in remote setups. In the radar, its recommended to try an extension to one hour, and of course the goal is to decrease the overall meeting load by this. I am thorn on this one, as I was always a fan of crisp daily meetings, avoiding random rambling on topics concerning only parts of the team. Blocking 1 hour for everyone every day sounds like an overshoot approach.

Next there is again the „software bill of materials“ topic. This is currently a huge topic in the software industry, there have been very concrete examples recently (e.g. the Log4Shell or NPM package events you probably read about). Tool support to transparently and consistently managing the used software in a bigger project is really needed. While in the web and cloud business there is a growing number of tools, in the embedded world there are only some puzzle pieces. I can currently think of some Yocto support for this, however this covers only Linux parts in usually more complex multi-os automotive ECUs.

„Transitional Architecture“ sounds like a promising thing, even though the radar’s description stays a bit vague. Luckily there is an extensive article by Thoughtworks‘ Martin Fowler on this approach. In my opinion, managing legacy software in complex setups is one of the key challenges in the whole software industry, even more so in automotive embedded software, which is characterized by the co-existence of decades old technologies with state of the art approaches. Formalizing the transition from on older architecture to a newer makes sense, as usually this transition is often not architecturally covered as extensively as a the target architecture. This leads to misunderstandings, hacky workarounds and other unwanted side effects to a sustainable development.

Going one circle to the outside, in the „assess“ perimeter, we first find CUPID. Aimed at replacing the SOLID rules with instead a set of properties of „joyful code“, it has some interesting observations and paradigms. Currently I only skipped over it, I think this deserves more time and maybe a dedicated article. However, I can recommend to check out the well written original blogpost by Dan North.

In the „hold“ perimeter we see „miscellaneous platform teams“. In contrast to „platform engineering product teams“ described earlier in the radar, this is kind of a degradation form. If a platform team fails to define a clear product goal and identify its customers, usually the scope becomes (or is) very fuzzy, leading to a unclear platform system. Hence, its strongly recommended to avoid this by achieving clarity of what actually is the scope of the team.

In the platforms sector, I could only identify one relevant blip „GitLab CI/CD“. Recently I see a lot of discouragement of using Jenkins, and of course if you use already Gitlab for its other elements (code hosting, code review, issue tracking) you may as well use it for CI/CD pipelines. For sure its better integrated in the overall Gitlab experience. However its just another vendor-specific DSL, so I wonder if there will be practical standardization on the pipeline definition soon.

Looking at the „Tools“ sector, I found the reference to the two code search tools Comby and Sourcegraph. Besides offering code search and browsing using abstract syntax tree analysis, they are also offering semi-semantical batch changes, enabling „large scale changes“. Comby is an open source tool, while sourcegraph is commercial. I think I will try at least one of them soon.

I am following the Thoughtworks Technology Radar since approximately five years. Since I first became aware about it (IIRC a colleague forwarded a version to me), I enjoyed its volumes as a condensed summary of current trends in the software industry. There is some bias towards cloud technology and machine learning which is out of my current professional interest, however there are enough other concepts/tools/aspects every time which make me investigate and followup to my best possibilities either at work or in my private projects. In this blog post I will try to list those parts which are roughly new and relevent from an automotive software perspective.

As usual, there are some selected topics on the top level they are presenting. Already the first one – Platform Teams Drive Speed To Market – is highly relevant. Its no secret that the automotive industry is widely moving towards in-house platforms, recent example from the news are vw.os (Volkswagen) and MBOS (Mercedes-Benz). The particular recommendation is to handle such platform activities explicitly as products, with all the implications. Only a platform with its own set of features, product vision, dedicated team and lifecycle can actually serve its purpose. A platform handled as a side-gig of an enduser product will neither serve the platform users well nor will it provide sustainable value, plus there would be a high chance of not surviving the first generation.

The second highlighted aspect – Consolidated Convenience over Best in Class – is also very relevant in the automotive SW sector. All of us love the regular discussion which code review tool is the best, and which CI tool is the newest hot shot we must adopt. Integrated workflow tools which integrate requirements/tickets to code, integration, tools and deployment such as gitlab and github (with github actions) promise so much more convenience in inter-tool integration and generally less setup hassle compared to having multiple tools each with its own authentication foo. However, there is also much higher risk of vendor lock-in. This can result in financial dead-ends and of course sooner or later lead to loss of flexibility on adopting new technology in the workflow area.

Jumping over the third highlighted topic and going straight ahead to the fourth – Discerning the Context for Architectural Coupling – this covers the architectural state of the union address. Baseline of the message here is „it depends“. Discussions with buzzwords like „monoliths“ and „microservices“ are seldom helpful, the real discussion needs to happen on the detailled requirements, constraints and principles.

Going deeper into the four sectors of the radar – Techniques, Tools, Platforms, Languages&Frameworks – lets start with Techniques. The new entry API expand and contract is directly an „adopt“ recommendation. It means rather than breaking changes with new API versions too often its more about adding new interfaces while keeping but deprecating old ones, giving consumers a chance to adopt without breaking their usage. I can see immediate benefit of such patterns especially on highly used interfaces such as the vehicle communication interfaces. If „deprecation would be a thing (at scale)“ it could relief many breaking integration challenges in the automotive domain.

In the trial circle we find Hypothesis-driven legacy renovation:

Rather than working toward a standard backlog, the team takes ownership of a measurable technical outcome and collectively establishes a set of hypotheses about the problem. They then conduct iterative, time-boxed experiments to verify or disprove each hypothesis in order of priority. The resulting workflow is optimized for reducing uncertainty rather than following a plan toward a predictable outcome.

https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/hypothesis-driven-legacy-renovation

Sounds quite interesting. I am, too, used to handling technical stories like user stories. The given approach may indeed yield more efficient and effective collaboration on technical improvements.

Another very relatable technique is Lightweight approach to RFCs. Its something which my personal workstyle already incorporated since long time. I strive to create very fast first drafts for any task and then seeking review comments from my peers. Hence, I can absolutely understand the point of this topic and clearly recommend this. Any organization in need of collaboration and frequent alignment on concepts can benefit from a very lean set of templates encouraging early feedback rather than a culture which expects „perfect first shots“.

Team cognitive load and its linked Inverse Conway Maneuver give also very interesting food for thought. I am well aware about some teams in my environment who struggle a lot with the complexity at hand, and the organzational environment adds to that complexity significantly. The Inverse Conway Maneuver – organizing the team organization around how the proper architecture of a system looks like rather than structuring the architecture around the semi-random existing organizational structure – makes a lot of sense. It chimes well with the notion of Feature Teams and team ownership.

Remote mob programming as an extension of local mob programming, which is by itself the advancement of pair programming is certainly a recommended practice in many situations. Recently I have tried to bring teams together in „remote debug sessions“ for hard inter-team nuts (=bugs) with not so great success. There is a lot of hesitance of teams to just spend some focus time together, and time difference in international setups is only one external factor. While (local) pair programming is something I think every team manager should at least try with his team a few times to see if it works out, mob programming depends an order of magnitude more mature team dynamics.

Under „hold“ we can find Peer review equals pull request. The baseline here is that pull requests are only one way to conduct peer review, and as such its a very valid claim and call for further action. Looking only at fragmented changes (which 99% of PRs usually are) and reviewing that alone doesnt give context how a codebase looks overall. Full code reviews or audits certainly give great insights for potential refactoring efforts and even re-designs, besides other learnings.

The scaled agile framework SAFe is a hold and a look in the history shows it was since the beginning. Thats interesting. I am no expert in SAFe, and only know it in theory.

Separate code and pipeline ownership is really triggering me while I write this. Thats because I recently gave a presentation about the exact same thing and why both shouldnt be separated. I am wondering if that thought appeared to me myself or if I read about it the radar earlier. Nevertheless, I think anything else than keeping both together cannot really be justified from a professional sw development context (neglecting some extreme theoretical circumstances). Having that said, its not yet an established truths, and organizational structures and other opinions enforce a separation more often than I would wish for.

The tools sector doesnt offer really relevant insights this time, its all about backend intra, web dev, ML and that kindof stuff.

In the platforms sector the first thing which appears intersting is Backstage. Its a platform developed by Spotify which in essence is a simple overview on projects going on within an organization (company). It can be used to advertise cool efforts in the developer community. Something which could be worth a try. However, as a separate tool it may lack synchronizity with the actual developer activities. Integrating such a frontend into gitlab could yield some interesting dynamics, because that could leverage existing information about activitiy of projects and use data directly from the individiual projects/repos in there.

In the languages & frameworks sector again nothing relatable.

In total the new tech radar volume give me some very valuable insights and food for more thought.