My Software Heroes

Everyone has a hero. Here are mine:

It is not possible to spend any significant time in the software profession and not have heroes. Here is the list of my software professional heroes:

1. Kent Beck

Picture it: I am a young(ish) software designer who is knee-deep in Interaction Design, as taught by Alan Cooper. I have read Cooper’s books and am convinced that software design must not commence unless we have first sorted out all possible end user interactions with the nascent system. I have just joined a very progressive startup staffed with cutting edge engineers. I organize an internal session to teach them the virtues of Interaction Design.

Much to my shock and to my chagrin, the engineers boo me off the stage! They start throwing out the name Kent Beck to my face, and mentioning some crazy new fad called Extreme Programming. What? Extreme what?

I was deeply hurt by such rude reception. Licking my wounds, I went back and summoned the strength to look up that newfangled kid on the block — Extreme Programming (XP). Of course, after skimming over XP narrative, I knee-jerk conclude, “This is the stupidest thing ever! This can never work!”

But little by little, I started getting pulled into the XP game by more serious engineers on my team. And wouldn’t you know it, one nice day the light bulb finally went on in my head and everything just cleared up for me!

From that day on, I devour everything and anything Kent Beck publishes. I follow him as he is meandering on the narrow trail leading to ever shorter feedback loops. I embrace Test Driven Development with gusto. I keep a close eye on Kent’s work aimed at increasing the frequency of feedback. Before I knew it, I am up to my eyeballs in TCR! I’ll spare you the gory details here, but I hope it is clear by now why Kent is my number one hero in software.

2. James Grenning

Picture it: I am helping organize the 100th sprint in the organization I was part of. Our 100th sprint coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. To help celebrate the portentous milestone, I reach out to James Grenning asking him to honour us with his talk, since he is one of the cosignatories of the Agile Manifesto.

James gracefully accommodated us, and delivered a fantastic talk rounding up the exciting road that led us to the Agile way of doing software. After exchanging a number of messages with James, I became very impressed by his approach, his kindness, and his expertise. Maybe the most impactful thing I’ve learned from James is his ZOMBIES formula that is very effective when doing TDD practice.

3. Woody Zuill

Picture it: After leading a number of teams in different organizations and witnessing the disconnect between working in secrecy and then trying to bring one’s work up to the light of day, only to experience endless frustration and agonizing rework, I stumble upon a seemingly weird concept called ‘mob programming’. I can’t recall exactly through which channel, or through which association, I became aware of mob programming, but I do remember being instantly intrigued by the very idea.

Could mob programming be the solution to the endless frustrations that happen almost any time some team member, who was working diligently in secrecy, attempts to integrate that work into the shared repository? I downloaded the free booklet that elegantly explained the concept and the process of mob programming. I promptly arranged for an inaugural mob programming session with the teams I was leading. All it took is one session for me to be completely convinced that mob programming is the way to go!

Connecting with the author of the concept was super easy and Woody was incredibly generous with his time and very kind to share his wisdom with us. I was very fortunate to cut two episodes with Woody:

Fast forward to April 2024. I am celebrating the second honeymoon with my wife in Paris, and I learn that Woody is also in Paris. I call him and we get together for a nice breakfast to chat about the future of software development. I cannot express how nice it is to sit next to Woody and listen to him talk and investigate and ponder. Such a humble, and at the same time brilliant man!

4. Andre Kaminski

Picture it: I am a disillusioned, somewhat tired door to door salesman of technical excellence. I am deeply in love with Extreme Programming, TDD, Agile, mob programming, DevOps, CI/CD, but anywhere I go I only find disinterest. No one seems to care about technical excellence. Everyone only seems to want to just ship features.

And to make things worse, even if every now and then I bump into an organization that claims to want technical excellence, when they hire me to bring it on, I realize soon enough that it was all mere lip service. No one wants to change anything, no one wants to upset the apple cart.

Then, when I least expected it, I received an afternoon call from a large government corporation, where I was just interviewing that morning. They said they would like to hire me to lead their Best Practices initiative. Next thing you know, I am in Andre’s office, trying to gauge whether the appetite for the Best Practices is real, or merely a lip service.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that, yes, this time, it’s for real! Andre had proven to be in the right position to instigate the correct approach. As a Director of DevOps department, he is blazing the trail in the organization. I quickly learned that the potential for growth under his guidance was literally unlimited.

To cut the long story short, here are some of the things Andre had enabled while leading nine DevOps teams:

• Kickstarted a very successful cluster of Communities of Practice

• Advised me to create TDD Dojo, which I led with great success and produced a number of graduates

• Ordered me to start publishing regular microlearning episodes (at least one episode per week)

• Led and presided over the Breaking the Silos practice on a regular cadence

• Led and presided over numerous and very successful Navigating the Future sessions (one of the guest speakers was James Grenning, as I described above)

• Co-organized large scale hackathons that involved all parts of the organization

• Encouraged me to create and publish a very active Technical Blog

And on and on. I have never seen a leader who is so energetic, so full of brilliant ideas and also so capable of bringing those ideas to full fruition.

5. Honourable Mention - Bryan Finster

I only relatively recently became fully aware of the powerhouse expertise that Bryan brings to the table. But now that I’m fully aware of Bryan’s incisive insights, I am following his musings like a hawk. Almost everything Bryan decides to share with the community is worth printing, laminating, framing, and hanging on my office wall.

I am deeply grateful to Bryan for his amazing contributions.