Similarly, when we began work on Hackystat six years ago, I thought in fairly conventional terms about this system: it was basically a way to make it simpler to gather more accurate measures that could be used for traditional software engineering measurement activities: baselines, prediction, control, quality assessment.
One interesting and unintended side effect of the Hackystat 8 architecture, in which the system becomes a seamless component of the overall internet information ecosystem via a set of RESTful web services, is a re-examination of my fundamental conceptions of what the system could and should be. In particular, two Web 2.0 concepts: "mashup", and "social network", provide interesting metaphors.
Measurement as Mashup
Hackystat has always embraced the idea of "mashup". From the earliest days, we have pursued the hypothesis that there is a "network effect" in software process and product metrics; that the more orthogonal measures you could gather about a system, the more potential you would gain for insight as you obtained the ability to compare and contrast them. Thus, we created a system that was easily extensible with sensors for different tools that could gather data of different types.
Software Project Telemetry is an early result of our search for ways to obtain meaning within this network effect. In Software Project Telemetry, we created a language that enables users to easily create "measurement mashups" consisting of metrics and their trends over time. The following screen image shows an example mashup, in which we opportunistically discovered a covariance between build failures and code churn over time for a specific project :
Hackystat 8 creates new opportunities for mashups, because we can now integrate this kind of data with other data collection and visualization systems. As one example, we are exploring the use of Twitter as a data collection and communication mechanism. Several members of the Hackystat 8 development group "follow" each other with Twitter and post information about their software development activities (among other things) as a way to increase awareness of project state. Here's a recent screen image show some of our posts:
There are at least two interesting directions for Twitter/Hackystat mashups. Assuming that members of a project team are twitter-enabled, we can provide a Hackystat service that monitors the data being collected from sensors and sends periodic "tweets" that answer the question "What are you doing now?" for individual developers and/or the project as a whole. Going the other direction, we can gather "tweets" as data that we can display on a Simile/Timeline with our metrics values, which provides an interesting approach to integrating qualitative and quantitative data.
A second form of mashup is the use of internet-enabled ambient devices such as Ambient Orbs or Nabaztag. The idea here is to get away from the use of the browser (or even the monitor) as the sole interface to Hackystat information and analyses. Instead, we could move toward Mark Weiser's vision of calm technology, or ""that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention".
The net of all this is that Hackystat is evolving from a kind of "local" capability for mashups represented by software project telemetry to a new "global" capability for mashups in which Hackystat can act as a first class citizen of the internet information infrastructure.
Software development as social network
Google is releasing an API for social networking called OpenSocial. This API essentially enables you to (a) create profiles of users; (b) publish and subscribe to events, and (c) maintain persistent data. You can use Google Gears to maintain data on client computers, and thus create more scalable systems. Google intends this as a way for developers to create third party applications that can run within multiple social networks (MySpace, Orkut), as well as enable users to maintain, transfer, and/or integrate data across these networks.
So. What would Hackystat look like, and what would it do, if it was implemented using OpenSocial?
First, I think that in contrast to the current analysis focus of Hackystat, in which the concept of a "project" as an organizing principle is very important, in an OpenSocial world you might not be so interested in a project-based orientation for analyses. Instead, I think the emphasis would be much more on the individual and their behaviors across, and independent of, projects.
For example, your Hackystat OpenSocial "profile" might include analysis results like: "I worked for three hours hacking Java code yesterday", or "I have a lot of experience with the Java 2D API", or "I use test driven design practices 80% of the time". All of these might be interesting to others in your social network as a representation of what you are doing currently and/or are capable of doing in future. The process/product characteristics of the projects that you work on might be less important in an OpenSocial profile for, I think, two reasons: (a) it is harder to understand the individual's contributions in the context of project-level analyses; and (b) project data might "give away" information that the employer of the developer does not want published.
Which brings me to a second conjecture: issues of data privacy or "sanitization" will become much more important for social network software engineering using a system like OpenSocial. To make the example analyses I listed above, it must be possible to collect detailed data about your activities as a developer (sufficient, for example, to infer TDD behaviors), yet publish them at an abstract enough level that no proprietary information is being revealed. That is a fascinating trade-off that will require a great deal of study and research. The implications are both technical and social.
2 comments:
A couple weeks ago, Aaron and I had a conversation about "Myspace for Hackers." We thought it would be great to have Joshua Bloch, Robert Glass, Insert your Software Guru Here in your "Top 8". We also talked about how integrating developer level metrics might allow other hackers to socialize with others that appear to have the same hacking "style".
Another thing that was brought up was the ability to improve other developers that are your "friends". Maybe you would be able to see their code from open-source project and give them some constructive code reviews. They would be in your trusted circle so you would (hopefully) consider their suggestions.
I think that there can be a lot gained from having a hacking social network. I'm excited to see Hackystat enter that realm.
sounds cool to me.
one thing that i notice about the social networking scene is that people are in involved for very selfish reasons. but, the beauty of that selfishness is that it makes social networking tick. for example, people want to show off who they are, what to find other people, etc. i want that instant gratification from a social hackystat. The key thing about social networks is that you have provides instant value. However, on that scale the value often tends to be superficial. Making a connection and carrying that connection in another medium is deeper value. So, I think we should be shooting above and beyond social networking. Its definitely cool tho.
One thing that I’ve been recently interested in is Collective Intelligence. In my opinion, this is how you harness the resources of a social network.
Like is said on my blog, I want a system that will deliver 10 second vignettes of knowledge that actually help me grown and learn and that can be applied to what I’m doing right now. Hacking on software is always an external investigative activity. Often you have no idea if you are clueless. Collective intelligence and eLearning in web 2.0 word could solve that.
here is a comment that i made:
my software development has improved by debating with, communicating, learning from, teaching, pair programming with, yelling at, getting yelled at, blogging for, reading blogs of, emailing, and just working with great hackers. if you can package that up and bottle that, then you've got it! thats how you get 10x productivity and hit the high notes. if you can harness that relationships; improve the ability to share information along with metrics pointing you in the right direction, then you've hit gold. i've realized that context is always the number one thing. the context of the problem and the context of the solution.
If Hackystat could help me harness my relationships better then I definitely will get better. That means going beyond social networking to include collective intelligence, elearning, awareness, etc to create vignettes of knowledge that I can use to attack the essence of software development. Anyway, in addition to know what you are doing, I want to know what you learned from what you are doing, so I can be better.
This is cool stuff. to me social networking and hackystat is the first step. but there are many steps after that. and that is what is really cool. the possibility to break out of the "old software engineering" way of working.
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