Sport on Noetic Nought

Software development practices for sports teams

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 11:31:00 +0530

Motivation

A few weeks ago, I came across a talk on Mob programming — a technique for working on a software project as a team, that was accidentally discovered by a team trying to figure out how to work well together. The speaker lets us in on how they stumbled on it, and how they fine-tuned it to make it more effective while being relaxed and enjoyable.

A few days before that, I shared a post on “getting feedback (as a software developer)” with my Ultimate Frisbee team-mates and it seemed to resonate with them. I’m often looking at things happening in my sports team from a software guy’s perspective, since I spend a lot of time being the software guy. But, I rarely, if ever, directly share these thoughts and ideas with my team-mates.

But, the mob programming talk inspired me to make a conscious effort to look for software development patterns that could be adopted by our (sports) team.

Most players on our team have been playing Ultimate for a while now (2-5 years). So, we have more problems due to miscommunication and everyone not being on the same page, than we have due to lack of skills or knowledge. When someone on the team does not understand the plan, the whole plan goes for a toss.

How do we make sure that everyone understands what the team is trying to do and is able to contribute their bit to the team’s plans and success? How do we make playing with each other as enjoyable as it can be?

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” — Robert Henri

Some ideas for adoption

Here are some ideas that, I think, could be adopted by our team. Some of these are things that teams, including ours, do in some shape or form. But, identifying and naming would make it easier for people to talk about them and develop a common understanding of why and how to do them.

Ubiquitous Language

Eric Evans, in his book Domain Driven Design, talks about building a Ubiquitous language in the team. It grows as the team’s understanding of the problem grows, and helps the team communicate clearly throughout the development cycle.

Our team plays a lot of zone defense, and it usually works well for us But, it wasn’t working particularly well, during one of the tournaments last year. Luckily, we had Moby playing with us, and he asked us some probing questions around the objective of the play and the roles of each of the players. With just a short chat and a few small adjustments, the zone became way more effective. Essentially, we built a common understanding of the objective of the defense and brought everyone onto the same page.

Ultimate teams use a lot of lingo – a lot. New players just pick it up by osmosis, at practice, from the senior folks. This works most of the time, except when it doesn’t. Each person on the team has a slightly different understanding of what a term means, and the difference is sometimes big enough to cause a plan to fail due to miscommunication. Spending time building a common understanding would make the team communicate and operate more effectively. Practicing game scenarios is essentially a way of doing this, but it would be worth thinking about and discussing the terms and the language being used.

Off-field lingo should also be clarified using a similar process – for instance, what does “good sideline support” mean? What does giving or not giving “feedback on the field” mean?

Sprints

Agile development recommends continuous development of software. Often software teams use 2-4 week development cycles, called sprints. For each sprint, the team sets itself a goal, and the whole team prioritizes tasks and makes decisions in-line with this goal.

Sports teams would also benefit from sprints – short and focused practice cycles, where everyone on the team is aware of the team’s goal. This would make it much easier for players to help each other out. Also, players can align their individual goals with the team goal, making practices much more effective.

Retrospectives

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. — The Agile Manifesto

Most Ultimate teams do some kind of post-practice retrospectives, though, they don’t call it that. These retrospectives are a discussion of the good, bad and the ugly. Usually, no conscious decisions are made about what practices are working well for the team, and what should be taken forward to upcoming ones.

Slightly longer term retrospectives would be quite useful too. If a team adopts the idea of sprints, each new sprint should start with a retrospective of the last one and planning for the next.

A retrospective’s participants are expected to follow the prime directive.

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. — Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Internalising this would be really helpful especially during post-tournament retrospectives, where emotions can run high – it would keep the discussion positive and focused on identifying problems and finding solutions, rather than spiraling into blame games, defensive arguments, etc.

Daily Stand-ups

Agile teams gather each day at the start of the work-day, to let each know about the progress of the work-items. The team tries to help each other get rid of the impediments to progress.

Ultimate teams could also benefit operating in this style – everyone shares with each other what they are working on, and the problems in their learning. This would make it easier for others to look out for things to help with. Team-mates would limit themselves to giving feedback to the thing that a player is working on.

Players setting themselves a small number of clear focus points would also force them to consciously think about and work on their game more effectively.

Face-to-face communication

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. — The Agile Manifesto

As our team has grown larger over the years, more and more communication has moved to the WhatsApp group. Keeping everyone informed via face-to-face communication, at this team size needs a lot of co-ordination and planning, and the time at practice is considered to be too precious to be spent talking and not practicing.

But, clearly WhatsApp doesn’t seem like the best medium to have discussions. Discussions rarely, if ever, happen on our groups. It often just seems to be information dissemination. Using a better communication tool could mitigate a few of these problems, but face-to-face discussions have other benefits. They bring about a greater sense of belonging to the team and increase buy-in into the team’s plans.

Unit tests vs. Integration tests

Practice games are helpful to gauge if a team is playing well together and if its plans are working. This seems analogous to integration tests — checking that we have functional software, end-to-end.

But, in the early stages of development, it’s common to write unit-tests – tests to ensure that each of the individual components works well in isolation. An analogous thing would be to have individual evaluations to help players identify weak areas, and to measure progress in those areas. It would also prevent players from slipping on important “indicators”.

Other ideas to think about

Some ideas that I find interesting, but don’t yet know if and how they can be adopted by sports teams are below.

Mob programming

In a mob programming session, everyone on the team is working on the same computer, in the same room, at the same time. This seems tremendously ineffective at the face of it, but turns out to be a good way to produce high quality software, quickly.

Hammock driven development

Bugs are incredibly expensive to be found and fixed in production software. They are cheaper to fix in the development phase. But, the design phase is the best place to fix them.

Rich Hickey recommends feeding a lot of information about the problem you are trying to solve to your waking mind, so that your background mind can feed off of it while you are asleep, and make useful connections.

Conclusion

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. — The Agile manifesto

This sounds exactly like what players in our team need too. The captains and the mentors in the team should work towards providing the environment and the support everyone on the team needs, and trust them to do the job.

Thanks Meghana Iyer, Ravitheja Tetali, Shantanu Choudhary, Vandith PSR, Varun Rangarajan and Vivek Krishnaswamy for reading drafts of this post and giving helpful suggestions.

Where do the Children Play (in Bangalore)

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 13:11:00 +0530

A bunch of us have recently started playing Badminton regularly (on weekends), in Bangalore. We use Playo to book a court to play on. But, all of us live in different parts of the city, and it’s often difficult to find a convenient place to play. Often, we end up in bad courts because we don’t pay enough attention to the ratings, while focusing on trying to find a court in a convenient location.

To help make this search easier, I built a small web app that shows the venues from Playo on a map, and then allows you to specify the locations of players, and the radius (in km) that they are willing to travel. Hopefully, we end up finding a good court in the overlapping region. Clicking on the venue marker allows you to jump to the Playo booking page for that venue. The source is available here.

I usually go with leaflet when I want to do map related stuff. This is the first time I used Google APIs, and it was a pretty decent experience.
I also ended up using the Google URL shortener API to make it easier to share URLs. The entire state of the app is being saved in the URL fragment, so that URLs are shareable, but it makes them long and ugly. Short URLs seemed like a good workaround.
I got most of it working with vanilla javascript, until I started doing things where I felt it would be nice to have a light-weight two-way data and view binding library. I ended up trying knockoutjs for the first time, and enjoyed using it.
The data for Playo venues is updated everyday using a cron job that runs on Travis. So, the ratings of venues should be pretty up-to-date.
But, Playo allows players to rate venues overall, and not by sport. So, it may so happen that the venue is a decent one overall, and has good facilities for some other sport, but the badminton courts are still bad. But, some venues are badminton only, and in those cases the ratings are more useful.
It should be pretty easy to make the app fetch data for other things like restaurants/movie theaters, to make this app do more than just help find Playo venues.

To Moar Badminton!

Surat Ultimate Open

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0530

About 20 of us, gathered at Andheri Station, to leave for Surat. I was the only one playing in his/her first tournament, and it was exciting to be a part of a squad, going to a tournament. A first in my life. We had two teams, A and B, or better known as Storm and Chasers. I was playing for the Chasers team. The train journey was pretty uneventful for me, unfortunately so, because of a mixed up ticket booking and only 4 of us, sitting in the AC coach. I ended up reading or sleeping for most part of the journey. I didn’t realize, we could just walk into the other coach where most of the others were having a lot of fun!

Fountainhead School was the venue for the tournament, and they had arranged for transport, accommodation and food and drinks, all through the tournament. The organization for the tournament was pretty good, I must say! We had a bus pick us up at the railway station, and getting into the bus felt like we were some big team with our own team bus, and stuff (though, there was also the Silent Voice team on the bus ;). Ganesh and I had a little chat in the bus, and he was recollecting his experiences in his first tournament, and was asking me what I expected from the tournament, and I didn’t really have a good answer, because I was too excited. But, I really enjoyed the chat with him.

We all crashed at the school library for the night, for a hard day in the field on the next day. We rushed to the field, early next morning, about half a km of walk from the school, the playing field was in the middle of some fields and we warmed up to a lovely sun rise. Storm had their first game at 7, against Dream Catchers, and they started a little rusty in the first half, but came back strongly in the second one to beat them 11-7. This was going to be closest their opposition was going to come to winning! Chasers had their first game against Silent Voice, a team from Ahmedabad. We got together as a team for the first time, really, and having just one substitute player didn’t really help much. We got thrashed by Silent voice, 11-4 or 11-5. Chasers got the next game as a bye, since Lay Lapak failed to turn up for the tournament and this meant we slid up the table and got to play the Dream Catchers from Ahmedabad. Craig reached in time, from Mumbai, for this game, and we gave them a decent fight in this game, though the score line didn’t really suggest it. We were doing way too many mistakes (and repeating them!) near the end-zones and they were costing us a lot. The highlight of these games, though, was the spectacular layouts by Cheerag on D. Storm, meanwhile, thrashed the HAT team 11-0, and beat Surat Trailblazers convincingly.

A lot of the teams had school kids on them, who were playing astonishingly well. The pick out of those was Jumbish, which had 10 to 15 year olds, jumping all over the place and giving their opposition a run for their money. The moment of the tournament for me was a catch by a Jumbish player, who jumped ahead of him, to take a catch, flipped over in the air without placing his hands on to the ground, and landed on his feet and made a perfectly nice pass to his team-mate! Exciting stuff to watch! Pune also has a nice Ultimate program for kids, and their team Royal Spirits was playing some good Ultimate.

The last game of the day was Storm vs. Flying Spirits from Pune, who were second on the points table, after Storm. But Storm was clinical in their execution, and “Bagel-ed” [read as, thrashed 11-0] Flying Spirits.

At the end of the day, we had a good dinner and lots of ice-cream and discussed our favorite moments of the day. I felt proud to have featured in atleast one person’s favorite moments, in my first tournament! W00t! Some of us fooled around on the dance floor for a while, to some Gujarati and Bollywood music.

The next day started with us playing Royal Spirits (Pune). We started off strongly, but ended up giving away some easy scores towards the end of the game, and ended up drawing the game at 6 all. Our next game against Storm was another Bagel for Storm. They played zone on us, and though we were as patient as we could be, we simply didn’t have enough skill and team work to score against them. Our next game against Flying Spirits was a very good game, and I’d rate it the best amongst our games. We played a good stack and played hard on D, and were able to keep the scores at 5-5 until the last 5 minutes, when they scored and finished winners. The Flying Spirits admitted to us giving them a good competition and making them work hard for their goals. Our last game was against Zero Gravity, a team from the school itself, and our first victory! We started off pretty strongly, and were able to finish the game 10-5.

The final between Storm and Cats-Dogs (Delhi) was so much fun to watch. Storm stuck to their clinical performance and everyone seemed to be playing at their best! They came out winners 13-4 in a game that lasted close to an hour and a half. All the other games, btw, were games-to-11 and time capped to 55 minutes. Storm also managed to win the Spirit award for the tournament, and it is the first time in Indian Ultimate’s history that a team won both the tournament and the spirit award!

The tournament was a lot of fun and a lot of learning for me. I learnt a lot of things from everyone playing there, specially from the players in Storm. I know I’ll carry forward some wonderful memories from my first tournament, thanks to everyone from Storm Chasers and everybody else, who I played against. I really liked the idea of spirit circles after the games, where each team discussed the game and appreciated the other team about particular aspects of their team and play and suggested areas that they could work on, to improve themselves. I also hung out around some of the spirit circles of Storm and their opposition and I really loved listening to Apu speak to the opposition. On almost every occasion, it gave me goosebumps! Thanks Apu, for showing us, what the spirit of the game should mean to each of us. Ganesh mentioned, in the chat we had on the bus to the school, that I’d learn a lot more than just Ultimate, and it turned out to be true. I got to learn a lot about my team, and everybody on Storm chasers. I experienced what it feels like, to be a part of a squad or a team, for the first time and it feels great, in short! Thanks Ganesh for the chat, and all the inspiration on-and-off the field. In the middle of one of the games, Willis walked up to me and told me to be more confident on the field and move more crisply on the field. I’m not sure, that will change in one game, but that is something I’ll remember for a long time to come. Kayleigh reminded me of one of the good catches I took on day-1, by having it in her favorite moments of the day. As someone playing in his first tournament, that’s a pretty big deal! Thanks to Willis and Kayleigh for all the encouragement, guidance and training! Thanks to Parag for drilling it into our team, that we are going to keep the game’s tempo high, but our tempers low. The tournament was much more fun, that way. Thanks to Robo for giving me the cleats, and the encouragement during many a practice session. Thanks to Rose for being the wonderful captain that she was, thanks to Cheerag for showing us how much one can give on D, thanks to Craig, Diti, Rakesh, Sheryll and Vishal for being supportive and being patient with me and all my blunders. Thanks to Pixie for all the morning practice sessions, while we were waiting for everyone else to turn up. Thanks to Mak for help from the shouting helping me out from the side lines. Thanks to Jimmy, Megna, and Sarah, for making me feel a part of the squad, and for being a part of the wonderful Storm! Here are some pictures, thanks to Shantanu and Saurabh, who traveled all the way to Surat to watch, cheer and capture!

Even if, our team won just one out of the 6 games we played, it was an Ultimate tourney. Literally! Looking forward to future tournaments.