Raible Designs

Reviews for Grails: A Quick-Start Guide and Kanban and Scrum

A couple weeks ago, I had a business trip from Denver to Washington, DC. Since I didn't have any coding to do on the flight, I brought along a couple books and was surprisingly able to finish them both en route. Tech books that can be read in a single flight are my favorite. Another book I recall doing this with was First Steps in Flex back in December.

The books I read were Dave Klein's Grails: A Quick-Start Guide and Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin's Kanban and Scrum minibook. Below are short reviews of each book.

Grails: A Quick-Start Guide
I've developed a few Grails applications, so I didn't expect to learn a whole lot from this book, but I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did it introduce all the basic concepts in a clear and concise way, it actually made it fun to read. The first chapter does a good job of introducing Groovy; showing you how to use closures and the easy-to-use collections API. From there, you dive into learning about the project, which is actually a real-life web application called TekDays.com. Then the foundational Iteration Zero is planned and executed.

In Chapter 3, you dive right into creating domain classes and their relationships. All the different mapping types are covered: one-to-one, one-to-many and the good ol' many-to-many. Since this is often a difficult part of an application, it's always nice to see how much Grails simplifies it. I liked the Ajax section in Chapter 7 and especially the part where it showed how to do a TagLib to show threaded comments in a forum.

Chapter 7 (Security) was a little disappointing in that it showed how to hand-roll your own security rather than using the Spring Security plugin (formerly Acegi) or the Shiro plugin (formerly JSecurity). I'd especially have liked to see how to do Ajax authentication where a token is generated for the client and included as a header in each subsequent request.

Other than that, I really enjoyed Chapter 10 where I learned how to implement search using dynamic finders, Hibernate's Criteria API and the Searchable Plugin (which gets its awesomeness from Compass). Implementing Compass in Java requires many, many annotations. In Grails, it's as simple as adding the following to your domain class.

static searchable = true

I truly enjoyed this book, especially with its Agile Development patterns that used iterations to get things done. Grails: A Quick-Start Guide is a code-intensive journey that gets up you to speed on Grails quickly and efficiently. It's very much like the framework itself. It eliminates the yak shaving and allows you learn without distractions. Kudos to Dave Klein for creating such an enjoyable and easy-to-read book.

Kanban and Scrum
In my career, I've used Scrum on quite a few projects. Of course, it's not the processes that typically make a team successful. Rather, it's often the gelling of the team members, as well as respect for coding practices that are proven to create higher quality code - specifically TDD and pair programming. Before reading this book, I'd heard a bit about Kanban, most of it from Marty Haught's Lean Teams: Doing more with less presentation.

This book did a great job of showing the differences between the two approaches: how Scrum promotes iterations whereas Kanban promotes cycle time. The most interesting part of the book is the Case Study in the 2nd half. This section shows how a team used various techniques to develop a well-oiled development machine. I think the most important thing to note from this section is how the team was willing to change, learn and grow based on their experiences - in a very rapid fashion.

In my current gig, I'm helping a team of developers move from waterfall to agile processes. We're leveraging many aspects of Scrum and agile by using a coach, iterations, daily standups, TDD, continuous integration and creating "as built" documentation when we finish developing a feature. The "As Built" documentation is something I picked up from working at Chordiant and I've found it to be a great way of education developers (and outsiders) how things were done in an iteration.

One thing we've seen in our first few weeks is that iterations don't work for all teams or individuals. A Kanban model fits much better for them. Having a Kanban board allows them to visualize (and control) their workload in a much more efficient manner. We haven't started implementing actual boards on a wall, we're just using spreadsheets for now. However, we do have two Agile Coaches starting this week so I expect things to improve rapidly.

Back to the book. More than anything, I enjoyed reading this book because it made me excited about the changes I'm helping implement and I believe in many of the practices in both Scrum and Kanban. I enjoy iterations and structured expectations around development, but I can see how Kanban would work better for folks in operations and infrastructure. I look forward to implementing the best parts of both worlds and hopefully a similar Case Study of what worked and what didn't. With any luck, we'll be able to learn, evolve and produce at a much higher level than previous waterfall practices achieved.