A few months ago at a conference I heard something like "The only thing true measure of a software project is working code." While I cannot recall the exact quote, this was the basic gist and is very inline with "Agilist" thinking.
Principle 5 of the Agile Manifesto [ Note: I don't think they are in any specific order ] is:
"Working software is the primary measure of progress."
I heard it again at a conference this week: "We measure working software."
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Subversion ( SVN ), the popular source-code control system, has a command to see the changes to a file by user. It shows a file annotated line-by-line with the user responsible for authoring it. This command has two names: blame and praise. Whenever I jokingly suggest using "blame", developers will often respond, "you mean praise?"
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On Saturday, we delivered an update to the 6SA application. Although the release does have many visible new features, there are many usability and user-driven updates in the release. Here's a quick list of what you can expect:
We'll be highlighting some of the new features in future posts, so stay tuned. As always we welcome your feedback. Please direct comments to support@6sa.com.
Last Friday we posted a 3 new reports for your enjoyment: Status Report, Churn Trends, and Flow time audit.
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Real developers write code — not status reports.
There are typically 2 reasons for needing status reports: 1) collaboration and 2) monitoring.
Agile shops recommend status reports for the first reason. Software development is a team sport. Rarely do individuals work in a vacuum, so regular status is important to address dependencies, remove blocks, and ensure folks don’t step on each other’s toes. The manager may collect reports for logistical reasons, but the reports aren’t for managers — they are for the team.
Monitoring is more common in consulting arrangements. Work is being done on someone else’s behalf and that person wants to monitor the activities. Very simply they want to ensure they getting what they are paying for. Every once in a while you read about dysfunctional uses of status reports. This “use case” is commonly the scenario where that’s found. The reason is that people often don’t care until there is a problem. Then the reports are reviewed to help understand where things went wrong.
Users of our service should now notice that something is different. With the latest release, we've dropped Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as our default format for charts for PNG. The marks the end of an era of our unwavering support for this bleeding edge technology. Some times we take chances using certain technologies and those chances work out -- it saddens me that this chance didn't have the envisioned return.
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I'm pleased to announce that we've released an update to our 6th Sense Analytics service which features a completely re-worked user experience. It's the culmination of work beginning last Summer and finally coming to fruition last weekend. Words cannot adequately express the changes, so we're going to start releasing short movies highlighting areas of the release:
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I had the pleasure to attend the 2nd Barcamp here in Raleigh-Durham at Red Hat's campus. After a great experience last year that provided me with new relationships and great inspiration, I'm pleased that the sequel lived up to the original.
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It's remarkable how much our customers inform our product direction. A perfect example of this was a call we got from a customer who was trying to gain visibility into a classic blind spot in software development: The playpen (or sandbox) environment. The interesting thing about this request wasn't the uniqueness of the requirement�of course, this is a challenge that most development organizations face. It was the fact that they were ready to do something about it and they knew 6th Sense could help.
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Thanks to all who attended my presentation last Thursday in Austin, TX at the SEI's 2007 SEPG conference. I was pleased with the attendance and audience participation at the end of the talk. As promised I've uploaded my presentation as a QuickTime movie. If you need this in a different format, please email me at todd at 6sa.com.
My presentation (.mov): From CMMi to Agility: Metrics that Cross the Chasm
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