I’ve been thinking about agile/LEAN feedback loops lately, primarily how I could introduce fun ways to kick start them and hopefully keep them maintained. With this in mind my thoughts turned to the “commit” process. It’s something all developers do (hopefully else your coding without revision control) and provides a nice point in time to inject some automated feedback.

The idea is to have each commit analysed for some simple “agile” metrics, nothing too complex or tricky, examples:

• Did the commit touch unit tests
• Was the commit “small”

I imagine you could also run a few simple code quality algorithms also (ones that are regarded as being sensible) and maybe a copy and paste checker. Overall the main aim is to find around three or four simple metrics that the team can agree on that signify good practice.

Then the fun starts, you normalise the values and plug them into a simple fighting game, where they impact the fighters abilities (and looks?), clearly weighted towards the better the metrics, the better the fighter. This new fighter then battles the current one (winner of the last commit war) to see who remains king of the hill.

The whole fight can be e-mailed back as a small movie, statistics can also be kept – If you commit small, unit tested code often you have a high chance of ranking highly.

Think I will code this up. Also wondered about wiring the commit to net hack or an adventure game, I.e. your commit log would contain a string for your next move, on commit you are e-mailed a response. E.g.

# open door

<commit>

"You see a wolf"

Fun, possibly, but not where I was heading.

Current search engines replicate L-Mode thinking – Linear and logical. I type in “pie” and I get things directly associated with the search term. Practical, but dull!

Tangential is R-mode thinking (albeit in a simplified form). Taken to its extreme an R-mode search engine would take the word “pie”, “think” on it and return numerous interesting connections and patterns many appearing unrelated, yet on deeper inspection they are seen to weave in and around the search focus.

I feel the need to expand on Tangential. Unfortunately I don’t have enough skills or knowledge of the human language.

Routinely purchase prices total to an important/note-worthy historical date, e.g. £10.66. I would therefore like till receipts, or tills themselves (to save paper) to recount an interesting historical fact based on the sum total to pay. “Oh, did you know on this date X happened”…

I liked the way this presentation style really forces you to be precise and deliver the real message, it took ages to produce for such a small presentation time, this I guess is the point, i.e. deliver maximum value in the shortest time period.

The content blends my recent ramblings based on the “trousers of reality” book as well as a few other insights.

The exercise has given me an insight into how I would like to structure a book on this subject, pictures one side and words on the other, all forming a Koan – Practical “how to’s” at the end – Need to work more on this.

You can find the raw material here (note in terms of the slides, the first slide was triggered on a mouse click, the remainder on a twenty second timer – The last slide filled a question and answer section – I stuck to the “rules”).

I can supply a power-point version (on request), also I have higher resolution images available.

SoftwareCosmos_Presentation_Notes and SoftwareCosmos_Presentation_Slides

By adding the scientific method I’m trying to demonstrate that simply inspecting and adapting isn’t enough, you need to know where you intend to go and have the ability to assess the true impact of any proposed changes.

Personally I’m finding the creation of these diagrams a useful tool for reflection and understanding, I’m approaching the point where a single canonical diagram could be made.

One key point related to software engineering – That I missed until recently, was the fact that process, material artefacts etc. are all just aspects of the software product, they represent the current paradigm, it isn’t possible to point at any of them and see the whole product, in fact nobody can, again you are staring into the globe of knowledge!

Enjoy the reflection. I distilled some of this further by producing a Pecha-Kucha presentation on Plan Do Check Act

Deep Structure & The Scientific Method

I will be starting to look at feedback next – The core (in my mind) principle within software engineering and one which is cunningly (or not so) disguised and dressed up all over the place. My intent is to describe the model of feedback and how changes alter it, then to look at all that LEAN, Agile etc. have built around it – For the most part a change in words and the addition of context (a word which crops up quite a bit).

Having no experience of Java Applet writing (or Java for that matter) I have decided to not learn another very similar language and go a lazier route, namely via processing. Ok, it is basically Java, but it removes the irritation of needing to read up all about swing etc. just to draw a line and have a simple update loop.

Tonight I played with traer physics and animation libraries and reckon with some minor tweaks and a bit of networking magic I can get the random arboretum demo to fit my needs.

How the world waits in anticipation…

Place them in social areas e.g. the kitchen and beam useful and interesting stuff to them! I like the “API” i.e. just images. Can imagine all sorts of fun data and feeds – Burndown’s, build stats, mash-ups of company stock performance and random interesting data and pictures.

OK – It opens a channel for more spam, bad-ware and major content leaks, but ignoring reality…

Instead of humans entering text, services would broadcast information (say XML encoding simple types only) along with a “theme” tag. Other services would decide to listen to broadcast events based on theme and data and even go on to produce their on data feeds – ad infinitum. Essentially automated mash-up’s of all sorts of data.

This would be akin to listening to RSS feeds and generating endless new ones based on who was listening, this would repeat to whatever depth the system could handle.

The system would be very dynamic and if services dwindled in attention flocking of mashed up data would also occur.

Possibly Twitter could be subverted to handle this – through sending XML

No, I have to take all the packaged content from them and then if I forget to bring a bag pay for one – Which quite frankly has a minimal impact environmentally compared to all the packaging its containing. More pressure should be put on the sources of waste rather than the consumer?