SourceKibitzer Blog

Hi,

Wanted to share with you a presentation of XWiki platofrom that our friend Vincent Massol has done some time ago at Valtech Days in Paris.

What makes this presentation so special? Sure, the XWiki product is one reason for that. I can tell it from our own experience with our commercial website, www.sourcekibitzer.com which runs on XWiki. But here, I wanted to point out the fact that Vincent’s presentation is using SourceKibitzer metrics to promote their product. Take a look at slide #22. Simple and interesting marketing tactic from XWiki guys. According to metrics you can see that development activity has increased over the last year. Also interesting enough is that density of comment has gone up together with that. Looks like guys are working more and despite that are writing more commented code.

Do you plan a public talk about your great open source product? Turn to us if you would like to show your audience the development of your codebase and developers using SourceKibitzer metrics.

Mark

Popularity: 13% [?]

Posted in Open Source | 2 Comments

First of all, on the behalf of SourceKibitzer, I would like to wish you all a happy and frutiful new year!

About a month ago we gave a talk at a local (Tartu, Estonia) symposium which was basically timed to the start of the Software Engineering professorship at Computer Science Institute of Tartu University. The idea was to create an event to introduce academia (including new SE professor - Marlon Dumas) and local software companies companies to each other.

We, at SourceKibitzer, decided to give a visionary talk illustrating how do we see the future of software development and how does it align with our existing and planned tools. You may check out the complete talk (”Infrastructure for Software Engineering 2.0″ - both slides and audio stream) from the symposium’s page.

The backbone idea of our vision is about purchasing the particularly needed expertise instead of a “headcount” as in traditional outsourcing/offshoring. For instance, consider professional soccer (hockey, basketball or any other) club. If a club plans to purchase additional players then it doesn’t purchase 100 players from Russia, India or China. Instead it thoroughly searches for players that fit the best onto required position (forward, defender, goalie) and into the team. We think, that compilation of software development team is heading in the same direction: in the near future specialist would be hired one by one (or small teams at a time) based on the expertise and know-how possessed by individuals, where expertise and know-how is objectively proved through SourceKibitzer tools ;). Such hiring or selection would lead to development teams distributed even more than a typical outsourced/offshored team. This rises several organizational issues and among them - socializing for team members. At a typical job we go to office every day and there we not only perform our work duties, but also socialize with our colleagues. Now, if a team is geographically distributed and everybody works from home, then there is not much space left for the physical socializing. So, we thought that this problem will be addressed by special types of offices (we called them virtual offices) where anybody can rent a desk or a room. Many specialists in the same neighborhood would perform their duties at such offices. Whereas many of them would not work for the same employer, they still would have possibilities for physical communication (instead of sitting alone at home).

Today I was very surprised to learn that several such offices already exist and this concept is called coworking.

Guys, what do you think? How many of you would prefer coworking to traveling around the country/globe when your employer (or contractor) changes?

Popularity: 14% [?]

Posted in Opinion | 5 Comments

Interestingly, people mostly talk about how evil software metrics are and at the same time looks like a lot of us (software developers, team leads, managers) actually use metrics and rely on them in everyday job. For instance, the recent study conducted by Forrester Research Inc. [1] examines the usage of software metrics and indicators in several application development shops. Even after reading couple of pages one may see that people actually do use metrics and use them for variety of reasons: product portfolio management, process improvement and most notably for communication with the business.

It is also quite interesting that the 2 biggest obstacles of metrics collection are requirement of manual effort and unnaturalness (wow, what a word) of this activity (”gathering metrics is not a natural part of the process”). One of the participants of the study stated that “between 20% and 40% of my time is spent gathering metrics”. Rhetoric question: how much this is in a monetary equivalent?

So, it looks like both of these major problems could be solved by applying some sort of automation. But, authors warn reader that “most accessible metrics aren’t necessarily the best metrics” and one should “improve accessibility of the metrics one cares most about”

Guys, do you use metrics? Or even better why don’t you use metrics?

[1] Forrester Research Inc. - Changing the cost/benefit equation for application development metrics

Popularity: 15% [?]

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Hi there!

At the moment we are trying to monetize our knowledge of software metrics and indicators and for that we have offered a special report to several software development houses. This report contains various information about the team working on the project. For instance, one is able to compare team activity to the one in the previous months, benchmark developers against each other using indicators and track staff personal development throughout the project. The reaction so far was pretty optimistic - many managers felt very enthusiastic and several of them wanted to participate in the pilot. (If you want know more just drop us a line and we will be glad to share all the details with you).

So, we started to feel that we going to need a customer support in the near future. Fortunately, there is a wonderful service called Satisfaction, which is kind of a open-source customer service - anyone can ask a question and anyone can try to help (I think, crowd-sourcing is the correct name for such services). Be sure to check out the SourceKibitzer’s satisfaction page: http://getsatisfaction.com/sourcekibitzer as we have started there a thread concerning the ethics behind measuring software developers and we would really like to know your thoughts on this topic.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Posted in Community, News | No Comments

Matt Loney has just written an interesting opinion blog post after chating with Steve Raby from Nuxeo (btw, check Nuxeo metrics). I wanted to comment on those, as on my opinion it is a bit oversimplified view on Open Source developers

1) It is much easier to hire the right developers in the open source workd than in the proprietary world, because in the open source world everybody knows who has done what - they have their name on the code or will be otherwise associated with it. That is a much more intimate association than the proprietary software world.

I agree that you can learn more about specific developer who has contributed to Open Source. One trivial way to do so is look at developers SourceKibitzer Bio. But, this information will not give you a better chance to hire him or her. I think, it is even harder to hire the Open Source guy. Why? here are few points:

a) We - OS developers, typicaly are emotionally so involved wih products we do. Getting us to work on your OSS product is very difficult. Try to convince me to work on Nuxeo instead of SourceKibitzer
b) OSS development is done in virtual environments. The team is spread around the globe. Will you be able to reproduce it? yeah, not easy!

2) Many open source developers do their work as an adjunct to their day jobs. When it gets to the point where the company can say there’s enough momentum to hire the developer, they are incredibly motivitated - much more so than someone ‘going for a job’.

This seems logical, but unfortunately I don’t see this supported by numbers. In the Open Source companies I know, almost 100% of product know-how is owned by paid developers. Take Mindquarry as an example. So stating that you have dozens of developers waiting to be hired is accurate only for hand-full of projects. I would be glad to see examples on this statement from Nuxeo project. Interesting, how many developers in Nuxeo with considerable know-how are not paid today.

Mark

Popularity: 26% [?]

Posted in Open Source, Opinion | 1 Comment

Interesting announcement about MySpace to become open source in coming month or so - Murdoch hopes to fend off Facebook with open-source MySpace

Unfortunately, inside the announcement it was clear enough what exactly do they plan to open. If title is true, it means, that MySpace will be next social network following User-Programmed Service model. Will see! Hope MySpace will not limit itself only by opening up the APIs as Facebook did.

Glad to learn that huge social network site is thinking alike with us at SourceKibitzer.

Mark

Popularity: 23% [?]

Posted in News, Open Source, Opinion, User-Programmed Service | No Comments

Yesterday we got reviewed at the site KillerStartups. What I liked most is that review is done by humans. Would be glad to see more Open Source start-ups reviews there.

Mark

Popularity: 20% [?]

Posted in SourceKibitzer in Press | No Comments

We are looking for next participants in our Interview proccess? Take a chance, and be published on our index page. Only condition to become a next inteview hero is that you have to be Open Source developers.

Give me a note if you think you have interesting thoughts to share with others.

cheers,

Mark

Popularity: 18% [?]

Posted in Interviews | No Comments

I just read the article by 451 CAOS analyst Jay Lyman, Choices grow for finding and understanding open source.

I’ll be honest, first I was jelous SourceKibitzer was not listed there but after emotions went down I tried to think why is that. One though that crossed my mind is that analyst are interested in Open Source products. And SourceKibitzer is not about the products anymore. We also did this mistake in the beggining. Yes, I think it was a mistake. Contributors, are the key to success of the Open Source. For example, if Anton with his today almost monopolistic know-how in SourceKibitzer would decide to stop doing SourceKibitzer it would die. So if you are ever talking to analyst or journalist, don’t forget to tell about yourself and your team.

Probably I am still too emotional

Mark

Popularity: 19% [?]

Posted in Open Source, Opinion | No Comments

Few days ago, when we talked to Anton we realised that it’s exactly one year after SourceKibitzer has went online. It has been the fastest and the most exciting year for us. I took WaybackMachine to track the progress of SourceKibitzer during the last year. Quite a funny stuff I have found out:

1) September 2006, Lauhch of SourceKibitzer. It’s just hand-full of Open Source projects analyzed. Complex metrics with difficult to understand reports. But it is alive.

2) October 2006, - First mentioning of SourceKibitzer in internet history :). It listed reports of some 20 projects including Apache Jakarta projects.

3) February 2006, - We call ourselves “Online Metrics for Open Source Java Projects”. We started the interviews with developers, we have about 500 projects in our database.

4) Aprill 2007. Unfortunately WaybackMachine doesn’t have history of this important moment for us. We have launched SourceKibitzer Bio, which has totally changed our way. We have concentrated on the contributors instead of Open Source projects.

5) August 2007, - We have launched the User-Programmed Service model and now each SourceKibitzer user can contribute.

6) September 2007, - Here is how we look now

Hope, next year will be even more interesting for SourceKibitzer. Stay tuned!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Posted in News | No Comments