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Agile, crowdsourcing headline SD West


By Alex Handy
March 11, 2009 — 
Agile methods and cloud computing are the hot topics at this year’s SD West Conference that began Monday in Santa Clara.

Earlier this week, keynotes at SD West focused on the evolution of extreme programming and the ongoing debate over whether or not SOA is dead. While the jury is still out on SOA's life expectancy, James Reinders, chief software evangelist and director of software products at Intel, made it clear that parallelism is still a key to successful software development in his keynote.

Today, Mike Cohn, consultant with agile consulting firm Mountain Goat Software, gave an extensive talk on self-organizing groups. Cohn contended that managers do not need to create command and control processes. Instead, he said, they should set goals for teams, then use subtle influences to push the teams and tweak their performance.

“A lot of people feel that agile is about leaving the team alone,” said Cohn. “That's not the case. There's a lot of things we can do to influence and help the team. I don't want to have a command and control process, but this is not to say that all control is evil. As long as the control is subtle and indirect, control is not evil.”

As an example, Cohn suggested that a team that is not communicating well might benefit from being moved into the same building, or even the same room. He likened self-organizing teams to ant colonies: There is a queen in charge, but she's mostly busy with her own work and leaves the drones to accomplish their tasks however they see fit.

Dave Messinger, chief architect of TopCoder, spoke today about the use of crowdsourcing in software development. TopCoder holds competitions between developers to accomplish set coding  tasks. It's part of a growing industry of crowdsourcing development companies, like Mob4Hire and uTest.

Those two companies are specifically focused on crowdsourced testing, but TopCoder remains concentrated on actual software generation. Messinger said that peer review is key to success in TopCoder, where leading developers are paid to review the software written by others on the site. Using those reviews and some behind-the-scenes algorithms, TopCoder is able to profile its developers and predict which projects they might be suited to based on their skills and past performance.

Tracking development
TechExcel was on hand to demonstrate the new features of its upcoming release of DevTrack 8.0. This issue tracking and management system will be updated at the end of April and will bring Unicode support to the platform for the first time.

Paul Unterberg, associate director at TechExcel, said that DevTrack 8.0 is designed to address the growing number of companies that have acquired overseas development houses. Unterberg said that many of TechExcel's customers have recently begun working with Eastern European developers who are not yet up to speed with modern agile methodologies. As such, DevTrack 8.0 adds in Web services support for reports and bug tracking, allowing developers to quickly see the statistics around their projects from desktop widgets.

Yesterday, Electric Cloud introduced a new version of its ElectricInsight build profiling tool. Version 3.0 of ElectricInsight adds two new reports that can show root conflicts in slow builds and track down bottlenecks from build time. ElectricInsight works with ElectricAccelerator to profile build issues and give developers a view into what is going on at compile time. This information can be used to eliminate bottlenecks and speed up build time overall.


Related Search Term(s): agile, crowdsourcing, Electric Cloud, TechExcel


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