Tag Archives: life cycle

What foo is “contribution” to open source? Mik Kersten & Tasktop @ SXSW

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How do we really know who influences most in a software project?  We can easily track code commits, but there are more bits to the project than the commits.

I had the good fortune to attend Mik Kersten’s Code Graph presentation at SXSW last week. Mik started the Eclipse Mylyn project and went on to found Tasktop. Both are built on the very intriguing concepts that software development production (aka work) is organized around tasks.

His premise is that organizing around tasks provides a more manageable and actionable view of a project than a more traditional application life-cycle management (ALM) approaches.  I’m a sucker for any presentation about lean development process that includes references to both DevOps and industrial engineering (I have an MS in IE), but Mik surprised me by taking his code graph concept to a whole ‘nutha level.

The software value chain is much deeper than just the people who write code. Mik’s approach included managers, testers and operators in the interaction graphs for his projects.

By including all of the ALM artifacts in the analysis, you get a much richer picture of the influencers for a project.

For example, the development manager may never show up as a code committer; however, they are hugely influential in which work gets prioritized. If your graph includes who is touching the work assignments and stories then the manager’s influence jumps out immediately. That knowledge would completely change how and who you may interact with a team. It effectively brings a shadow contributor into the light.

The same is true for QA members who are running tests and opening defects and operators who are building deployment scripts. Ideally, it should include users who exercise different parts of the applications capabilities.

Mik’s graphs clearly showed the influence impact of managers because they touched all of the story cards for the project.  The people who own the story cards are the most potent influencers in a project, yet they are invisible in code repositories!

I would love to see an impact graph for a software project that equally reflected the wide range of contributions that people make to its life-cycle.  This type of information helps rebalance the power in a project.

Industrial engineering legend W.E. Demming‘s advice is to look at production as a system.  Finding ways to show everyone’s contributions is an important step towards bringing lean processes fully into software manufacturing.

Cloud Application Life Cycle

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Or “you learn by doing, and doing, and doing”

One of the most consistent comments I hear about cloud applications is that it fundamentally changes the way applications are written.  I’m not talking about the technologies, but the processes and infrastructure.

Since our underlying assumption of a cloud application is that node failure is expected then our development efforts need to build in that assumption before any code is written.  Consequently, cloud apps should be written directly on cloud infrastructure.

In old school development, I would have all the components for my application on my desktop.  That’s necessary for daily work, but does not give me a warm fuzzy for success in production.

Today’s scale production environments involve replicated data with synchronization lags, shared multi-writer memcache, load balancers, and mixed code versions.  There is no way that I can simulate that on my desktop!   There is no way I can fully anticipate how that will behave all together!

The traditional alternative is to wait.  Wait for QA to try and find bugs through trial and error.  Or (more likely) wait for users to discover the problem post deployment.

My alternative is to constantly deploy the application to a system that matches production.    As a bonus, I then attack the deployment with integration tests and simulators.

If you’re thinking that is too much effort then you are no thinking deeply enough.  This model forces developers to invest in install and deployment automation.  That means that you will be able to test earlier in the cycle.  It means you will be able to fix issues more quickly.  And that you’ll be able to ship more often.  It means that you can involve operations and networking specialists well before production.  You may even see more collaboration between your development, quality, and operations teams.   

Forget about that last one – if those teams actually worked together you might accidently ship product on time.  Gasp!