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“Evidence-based” software scheduling a la FogBugz

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Yesterday afternoon I hopped over to Emeryville to hear Joel Spolsky talk. He’s on the road promoting the new, 6.0 version of Fog Creek Software’s bug-tracking product. I’d paid little attention to the evolution of this product — Salon’s team long ago chose the open-source Trac, OSAF used Bugzilla, and when I first looked over FogBugz ages ago it looked like a perfectly serviceable Windows-based bug-tracking tool, no more.

Well, in the intervening time, the thing has gone totally Web-based and AJAX-ified, and it’s pretty cool just on those terms. It’s also grown a wiki and become more of a full-product-lifecycle project management tool, with integration for stuff like customer service ticket management.

Still, what’s most interesting about the new FogBugz is what Spolsky and his team are calling “Evidence Based Scheduling” (or — because everything must have an acronym — EBS). Now, anyone who’s read Dreaming in Code knows that I devote considerable verbiage to the perennial problem software teams face in trying to estimate their schedules. This is in many ways the nub of the software problem, the gnarly irreducible core of the difficulty of making software.

With EBS, FogBugz keeps track of each individual developer’s estimates (i.e., guesses) for how long particular tasks are going to take, then compares those estimates with the actual time the task took to complete. Over time it develops a sense of how reliable a particular developer is, and how to compensate for that developer’s biases (i.e., “Ramona consistently guesses accurately except that things always take her 20 percent longer than she guesses”).

With this information in place — and yes, that’s right, to use this system the developers have to keep track of how much time they spend on each task — the software can turn around and provide managers with a graph of ship-date likelihoods. You can’t say for sure, “The product will ship by March 31,” but you could say, “We have a 70 percent likelihood of shipping y March 31,” and then you can fiddle with variables (like “Let’s only fix priority one bugs”) and test out different outcomes.

Spolsky explained how FogBugz uses a Monte Carlo simulation algorithm to calculate these charts. (He provided a cogent explanation that my brain has now partially scrambled, but I think it’s like running a large number of random test cases on the data to generate a probability curve.) In any case, while I’m sure many managers will be interested in the prospect of a reliable software-project estimation tool, what I find intriguing is the chance that any reasonably wide deployment of FogBugz might yield some really valuable field data on software schedules.

The sad truth is that there’s very little good data out there. As far as I understand it, the CHAOS report is all self-reported (i.e., CTOs filling out surveys). To the extent that users of FogBugz are working from the hosted service rather than on their own installations of the software, the product will gradually produce a fascinating data set on programmer productivity. If that’s the case, I hope Spolsky and his company will make the data available to researchers. Of course, you’d want all the individual info to be anonymized and so on.

As I said, all of this depends on developers actually inputting how they spend their time. They’ll resist, of course — time sheets are for lawyers! Spolsky said Fog Creek has tried to reduce the pain in several ways: The software makes it easy to enter the info, you don’t worry about short interruptions and “bio-breaks,” i.e., bathroom runs (hadn’t heard that term before!), you just try to track tasks at the hourly or daily level, and you chunk all big tasks down to two-day or smaller size pieces. Still, I imagine that if evidence-based scheduling doesn’t catch on, this will be its point of failure. Otherwise, it sounds pretty useful.

UPDATE: Rafe Colburn is starting to use FogBugz 6.0 and has more comments…
[tags]software development, project management, joel spolsky, fogbugz[/tags]

Terror of tinyurl

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From the earliest days of the Web to the present, there’s been a fundamental split between people who get the value of “human-readable URLs” and people who don’t. A human-readable URL is a Web address that tells you a lot of useful information about the page it represents. For instance, Salon URLs always tell you the date an article was posted, the section of the site the article appeared in, and a few words describing the subject matter of the article. By comparison, the typical URL at, say, CNET, looks like this: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10895_7-6782817-1.html. It is, essentially, human-unreadable.

In the old days, writers and editors who actually knew and used HTML always appreciated a good human-readable URL; and typically, for the ugly gibberish URLs, we had to thank (some) software architects and (some) publication managers who’d never hand-coded a link themselves. At Salon, we editors knew we’d be typing (and proofing) a zillion of those URLs ourselves; we insisted on something we could work with. (Our developers “got it” too.)

The cause of human-readable URLs got a great shot in the arm when sites began trying to optimize themselves for Google, because Google gives a little extra weight to text hints in URLs. So a lot of sites (like the New York Times) that had a history of human-unfriendly page addresses began to do better.

Today, though, we’re taking a step backwards, or at least sideways, in the cause of human readability, thanks to the growing popularity of the “tinyurl.”

When the tinyurl first crossed my radar I understood it to be a convenient way to tame unmanageably long Web addresses. (The Tinyurl site focuses in particular on how long Web addresses break in email messages.)

That’s all fine. But the tinyurl giveth and the tinyurl taketh away. When you encode a Web address as a tinyurl you’re hiding its target. Normally, when I read an article on the Web that has a link, I’ll hover my cursor over the link to see where it points. Even on a site with human-unfriendly URLs like CNETs, at least I can see that the link points to CNET.

With a tinyurl, I know nothing about the link except what the author chose to say about it. I can’t tell if it’s a reference to an article I’ve already read. If I want to find out, I have no choice but to click.

My sense is that tinyurls have grown in popularity with the rise of Twitter (where the strict character limit of messages means you don’t want to fill up a whole message with an URL), as well as the growing use of mobile devices for Web-posting activities. These are perfectly understandable reasons. But still, each time I see a tinyurl I think, there goes another tiny piece of the Web’s transparency.
[tags]tinyurl, urls, human-readable urls, web usability[/tags]

Good music: Mekons, TMBG, Black Francis

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Some new music I’ve been enjoying from three artists/bands whose work I’ve been following since the mid or late ’80s:

The Mekons, “Natural”: Their last collection of new material, “OOOH,” was an exploration of religion and ritual; this new batch takes a turn to the pastoral. Rough-hewn even in this laid-back mode; mysteriously allusive as always; and worth heavy rotation as ever.

They Might Be Giants, “The Else”: I never fully warmed to their previous outing, “The Spine,” but “The Else” strikes me as a return to form. I’m enjoying it and — even though this is ostensibly a “grownup” album and not one of the band’s “children’s music” works — so are my seven-year-olds. Standout tracks: the patter-song “Bee of the Bird of the Moth” (is it an ode about genetic engineering? I don’t know, but I’ll remember the “Sleep of Reason Corporation”!) and “Contre Coup” (a song about phrenology, concussions and love), which introduced me to the obscure word “limerent.”

Black Francis, “Bluefinger”: Frank Black reverts to his old Pixies moniker for this new album, inspired (as the folks in the FrankBlack.net forum figured out and the official site confirms) by the life saga of Dutch glam rocker Herman Brood. Hard for me to see how all 11 tracks fit that template. But it’s easy for me to love the entire album, which marks a return to energetic form after Black’s previous duo of interesting but somewhat enervated discs recorded in Nashville. Standout songs: Beastie-Boys-style rave up “Threshold Apprehension,” in which Black shrieks and yowls like he hasn’t since Pixie days; “Lolita,” which sounds like one of the great numbers from the days of Frank Black and the Catholics (reminiscent of the Jonathan Richman tribute “The Man Who Was Too Loud”); the singalong “She Took All of the Money”; and “Angels Come to Comfort You,” which rises to the catchiest, sunniest chorus of death you can imagine.

I missed TMBG on their current tour — they swung through the Bay Area while I was out of town last week — but it seems that both the Mekons and Frank Black/Black Francis are performing over the next week at the Cafe du Nord. I expect to be there.

Greetings from Elk land

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Elk in Estes Park
We arrived today in Estes Park, Colorado. We’re here at the YMCA of the Rockies because my wife’s company puts on a big yoga conference here every year. This is the first time we’ve all gone, including the kids. We walked out from dinner and were greeted by a trio of elk, just hanging out by the side of the road. The two big guys were locking horns and obviously engaged in some sort of vying-for-the-female ritual. They were all oblivious to the gathering crowd of human gawkers. They behaved as if they owned the place. Which in a way, of course, they do.

Travels, and the next Code Reads

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Blogging will be lighter over the next week as I’ll be on the road — family vacation (at least for me and the kids) in Colorado near Rocky Mountain National Park, then on to Dallas for a talk, hosted by the Society of Information Management.

In the meantime, I’m going to queue up the next Code Reads — one that I have not yet read, so it’ll be new to me as perhaps to some of you: Daniel Berry’s The Inevitable Pain of Software Development, Including of Extreme Programming, Caused by Requirements Volatility. Thanks to Will Sargent for the suggestion.

It’s now about a year that we’ve been doing this series and I’ve completed 12 installments, so the appropriate thing to do is to stop fighting the inevitable and accept that this is a monthly schedule! What I will try to do is keep that monthliness honest. So this paper will be the October edition. That should give me plenty of time…

Commerce or communication: the Net’s double-chambered heart

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Nick Carr on 8/31/07, writing about the effort to change how the Internet domain system’s “WHOIS” records work:

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net’s heart — the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved — or not resolved — will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.

Carr’s succinct (and I think accurate) anatomy of the couer d’Net caught my eye and echoed something just beyond my memory’s grasp. Then I realized, right, this is very much the same dichotomy that I wrote about a long time ago in one of the annual “state of the Web” pieces (from October 1996) that I used to write for Salon:

Two very different groups are emerging with different ideas of how to drive the Web forward: call them the information peddlers and the community builders. The former see the Web as a conduit to distribute information and sell products on a few-to-many pattern; the latter see it as a place to exchange information, many-to-many — to yak.

Not only does this tension between what Carr calls “a platform for commerce” vs. “a forum for personal communication,” or what I called “the information peddlers” vs. “the community builders,” remain prevalent; it is a fissure cutting right through the center of what we’ve come to call Web 2.0.

Here’s a link to the full piece, headlined “After the Gold Rush.” Yes, we were saying that the Web gold rush was behind us. In 1996.

New blogs of note

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  • Kevin Kelly appears to be blogging, and, unsurprisingly, in just a few posts he’s providing considerable food for thought. In this post, he describes his (successful) effort at creating a sort of desktop memento mori:

    I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

  • David Edelstein, my favorite film critic (I’m biased, as we’re old friends and former colleagues), has begun a blog called The Projectionist for New York magazine’s Web site:

    Cyberspace being infinite, at Slate I had license to write between 250 and 2,500 words on a movie, and no digression was too digressive. Now, there’s the horror, the horror of eliminating whole paragraphs to fit the page — in addition to changing, for example, “did not” to “didn’t” to pick up a line and removing anything in parentheses. I do not always want to use contractions, and I like parentheses. You never know where they might lead.

    And who knows where this might lead? Movies connect with us on an unconscious level, and blogging is a pipeline to the id.

  • Finally, Bill Wyman, who I worked with for many years at Salon, has a fine new blog on the entertainment industry — with a heavy emphasis on music — at Hitsville.

Moore’s Law, once more with feeling

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Jeff Jarvis reminds us that Moore’s Law is not: “Chips double in speed every 18 months.” Gordon Moore first predicted that the power of microprocessors (as measured by the number of transistors you could cram into a particular space on a chip) would double once every year; later he revised it to once every two years. Somehow — most likely, thanks to careless popular journalism — in the popular imagination this has become set in stone as an every-18-month prediction about chip speed.

Jeff asks:

So I raise again the question of how we can better map content and corrections. How does Moore assure there is a definitive statement of his law? How do we know it comes from him? Once it’s acknowledged as correct, how do we notify those who got it wrong so the can correct it and start spreading the right meme? Truth is a game of wack-a-mole.

I’ve been playing that game for a decade. Here’s a Salon column from October 1997 that addresses it. Here’s a post from just this past spring.
Here’s two pointers for good reference information on Moore’s Law: one from Greg Papadopoulos at Sun and the other from ExtremeTech.

If we all keep repeatedly linking to the good information maybe we can demonstrate that Gresham’s Law does not apply to information, and that good info can drive out bad.

But, you know, I won’t hold my breath.
[tags]jeff jarvis, moore’s law, gordon moore[/tags]

NY Post: Go online, end your career?

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From the “Did they actually write that?” dept., in Keith Kelly’s NY Post media gossip column (via Romenesko):

Not everyone who was spared in the Business 2.0 meltdown is going to Fortune.

Erick Schonfeld, who was an editor-at-large based in New York, has decided to end his 14-year career and jump to Michael Arrington’s influential blog, TechCrunch.

“It’s true,” said Schonfeld, “I’ve accepted a position to be co-editor at TechCrunch.”

“There was a ‘Schindler’s List’ [of Business 2.0 staffers who would be spared] at one point, but I took my name off it so I’d be eligible for a severance package,” he said

Mr. Schonfeld, as someone who left the comforting rituals of the print world for the wilds of the Web many years ago, I can assure you that career continuation remains a possibility. But even at this late date, I guess, there remains the possibility that colleagues and peers will consider you to have fallen off the edge of the earth…

(Here’s Schonfeld’s post about his move.)
[tags]media, journalism, errors[/tags]

Doc Searls: don’t count on ads

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Because I am always behind reading my feeds (aren’t you?) I only just read this post by Doc Searls from a week ago. Coming from a slightly different angle, using his increasingly valuable VRM argument, Doc’s “Toward a New Ecology of Journalism” arrives at a similar place to where I ended up earlier this week in the Times Select discussion:

…The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it.

This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

Google has radically improved the advertising process, first by making advertising accountable (you pay only for click-throughs) and second by shifting advertising waste from ink and air time to pixels and server cycles. Yet even this success does not diminish the fact that advertising itself remains inefficient, wasteful and speculative. Even with advanced targeting and pay-per-click accountability, the ratio of ‘impressions’ to click-throughs still runs at lottery-odds levels.

…The result will be a combination of two things: 1) a new business model for much of journalism; or 2) no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects — building reputations and making money because of one’s work, rather than with one’s work. Some bloggers, for example, have already experienced this….

Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.

I think this is right, though the long-term-ness of the vision will have most hard-hearded business people smirking their disbelief as they point to corporate-media revenue numbers with long strings of zeroes dangling from them.

I also think that, frightening as it can look, this is ultimately a great opportunity for journalists. We have the chance to invent new ways to support our work — ways that don’t depend on the essential bait-and-switching of old-fashioned advertising.

We can also give up the contortions and distortions of the old-school “Chinese walls,” the barrier erected between the journalists who create the news reports that have value and the people who sell…other stuff that ends up paying the salaries of the journalists. In any case, I’ve long thought that this beloved wall — for all its ethical value, when it worked — had an insidious side-effect of allowing journalists to pretend that they weren’t working for businesses at all. This innocence (or naivete) has left many of them ill-equipped to do more than rend their garments as their industry undergoes slow-motion collapse.
[tags]vrm, doc searls, advertising, times select, future of journalism[/tags]