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On delivering software

Andrés — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:10:41 +0000

More than ten years ago, some visionaries got together in the mountains of Utah to relax, ski and discuss on the challenges of their profession. That was the very moment when the Agile movement cristallized. They wrote a manifest and 12 principles. The first gem goes like:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

And only now we all are understanding what they mean. Even them.

In Software G Forces: the effects of acceleration, Kent Beck discusses the technological and business challenges of making your releases shorter. And why that matters (see also a good summary of Beck ideas by Mary Poppendieck).

On the other hand, Jeff Humble and David Farley have published a (jolt-award wining) book called Continuous delivery, which goes (technological) deeper on the value proposal done by Beck. I highly recommend this talk by Jeff at DevOps Hamburg and the introductory article.

Seems that it takes 10 years for the new ideas to mature and emerge in other shapes and wrappings. Nice to see that we, (“software deliverers”) as a profesion, are continuously improving.

LibreOffice stats

Andrés — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:01:58 +0000

Have you seen the LibreOffice stats shown at FOSDEM? They have got a lot of momentum from its very beginning and seem doing well. I’d like to see the source of that, though, to compare how they build the report with ours.

History of science fiction

Andrés — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:52:15 +0000

A good map to navigate through the themes, authors and styles of the so-called scifi.

On meritocracy and self-promotion

Andrés — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:21:49 +0000

«Just as demagogues may subvert democracy, so self-promotion may subvert meritocracy.»

Open Source Projects and the meritocracy myth

Institucional memory

Andrés — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:25:22 +0000

«Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).»

Sign: an engineer. On institucional memory and reverse smuggling.

It takes time

Andrés — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:37:41 +0000

If you’re trying to make a successful tech product, 90% of the battle is that it works at all.

Havoc Pennington, on creating a successful product… and companies I would add.

Lovelace and Babagge VS The economy!

Andrés — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:24:12 +0000

Just found this online-ongoing comic by Sidney Padua created to the Ada Lovelace day in 2009. She depicts a steampunk alternative past where Charles Babagge and Ada Lovelace got to build the difference engine … to fight crime!! LOL. Here the chapters. Don’t miss this one: Lovelace and Babagge VS The economy, where they fight against the economic crisis of 1837, which has uncanny similarities to ours.

Google Wave and the mythical man-month

Andrés — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:04:16 +0000

«And this is the essential broader point–as a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria.»

Dhanji R. Prasanna (one of the engineers behind Google Wave), on how even the smartests fail to stick to the essential. Jointly with this other post, they both draw a good story for any startup to hear.

Analysis of free software communities (III): activity and manpower

Andrés — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:27:52 +0000

Images: on the left, the number of changes to the codebase (commits) agregated by year. On the right, the number of developers with at least 1 commit that year.
Data: trunk from project repositories during the period 1999-2010.

Is it something we could extrapolate from the data there?

Certainly, not the number of features developed or bug fixes. It is even barely possible to compare activity between projects, as there are a high variability in terms of changesets: some people could send several little changesets and others just 1 big change, some project could have a special policy which affect the results (i.e.: make a commit formatting the code accoring to the style rules and other with the changes), etc. Some people could even argue that the language they are written in affects the number of changes (GRASS is written in C, gvSIG in Java and QGIS in C++) due to the libraries available or the semantics of every language. So, is it possible to find out something? Well, in my opinion, we can trace at least the following:

the internal evolution of a project.
how a project is doing in terms of adding new blood.

So, let’s make again the exercise of finding out what’s happening here:

GRASS

It calls the atention the curve of activity in the project: growth by periods (2001-2004 and 2005-2007) with local maximums in 2004 and 2007. Our hypothesis was that it was due to the way the project works: the developers here make changes both in the trunk and in the branch of the product to release (be it 6.4 or 6.5) at the same time, with a lot of changesets moved between both the trunk and the branches (so doing heavy backporting). In a recently conversation with Markus Neteler, he has explained me better how they work and I guess the rhythm we see in the graphics is due to that.
In terms of number of developers, GRASS has showed a continuous growth until 2008; since then, the number of regular developers stabilizes.

gvSIG

gvSIG shows an incredible high period of activity during 2006-2008 (4500 changesets by year and most that 30 people involved!). To understand the Gauss bell of activity, is needed to know the background of the project: gvSIG development has been led by contract, which means that all activities (planning, development, testing, etc) were led by the client needs who pay for it. Only recently, these processes have been opened to a broader community (firms and volunteers collaborating in the project within the gvSIG association). So, it makes sense that the beginnings had seen less activity (high phases of planing) and afterwards they got to agregate so many people in such a short period of time.
But, in 2010 it suffered a sudden stop in development (only 233 changes to the codebase were made, while a pace of 4500 changes were made during previous years). This decreasing in activity is highly correlated to the number of developers involved. It’s hard to say why it happens: could it be due to the efforts were directed to gvSIG 2.0 development? could it be due to the reorganization in the project and the creation of gvSIG asociation? Well, few can we said at this respect with the data available, further research is required to determine that.

QGIS

Steady grow both in terms of contributions and contributors. 2004 and 2008 years determine two peaks of activity and people participating in the development. Our preliminar hypothesys was that it was due to the release of the first stable version and the release of 1.0, as well as become an oficial project of OSGEO. Gary Sherman has confirmed that in a recent post (history of QGIS commiters) and an interview (part1 and part2). Besides, he pointed out that in 2007 the project added python support for plugin development, which possibly was one of the reasons of the growth in 2008 and afterwards.
An interesting finding is that, every 4 years the project has doubled the amount of developers involved with a slower but steady growth in activity.

Well, hope these graphics have helped us to understand better how is the project activity and the manpower every project is able to aggregate around it. Next posts in the serie, will focus on the developers involved and the culture surrounding them. Looking forward to your feedback!

4 big ideas in sw development according to PragProg

Andrés — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:30:11 +0000

I found interesting this serie of posts titled “4 big ideas in software development” according to Tim Ottinger and Jeff Langr. The serie was published monthly in Pragmatic programmers magazine:

Code coupling, or Reducing dependency in your code.
Cohesive software design, or Cohesion makes code easier to understand, debug, and test.
Abstraction, or How to tell a cat from a dog.
Software volatility, or Do most changes to your code base occur in just a few files?