David Faure Breaks The Law!?

Talk given at Akademy 2014, Brno.

Transcript

1. Another Questionable Presentation By Dr. Paul J. Adams David Faure Breaks The Law‽
2. A Man Of Great Dignity
3. A Man To Be Taken Seriously
4. A Sober Man
5. Does Not Play The Trombone
6. The Legend Is Born… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <log> <logentry revision="5958"> <author>dfaure</author> <date>1998-03-10T00:41:11.000000Z</date> <msg>Added missing Makefile.am Think of changing them whenever adding a .po file </msg> </logentry> </log>
7. What Does David Faure Look Like?
8. A Bit Like This… dfaure • Yes, a circle
 • Other KDE hackers look similar
 • In fact all Free Software hackers are circles
 • And we link them when they “work” together
10. He Is The Law?
11. Brooks’ Law • Posited in 1975 by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month: • “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” • Two issues to consider: ramp-up time, communication overhead
12. Conway’s Law • Posited in 1968 by Melvin Conway in Datamation: • “organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
13. Measuring Stuff
14. Contributors Contribute… Stuff • Documentation • Artwork • Sound • Code • Bug Reports • Intangible “Things” ! ! ! And (almost) all of these things have associated (measurable) metadata.
16. Why Evaluate Commits? Factor LoC Churn Velocity Commits Artefact X X Automation X X X Process X X X
17. Project: Reassessing The Role Of Brooks’ Law Figure 5.1: Community Graph for KDE Marble There He Is!
18. In Case You Don't Believe Me (Plone) Chapter 5. Joining A Project: Reassessing The Role Of Brooks’ Law 76 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 Cohesion Developer Count Weekly Data
19. In Case You Don't Believe Me (Evince) Chapter 5. Joining A Project: Reassessing The Role Of Brooks’ Law 77 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Cohesion Developer Count Weekly Data Figure 5.4: Coordination Cohesion in Evince
20. In Case You Don't Believe Me (KDE) Chapter 5. Joining A Project: Reassessing The Role Of Brooks’ Law 75 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 Cohesion Developer Count Weekly Data
21. Who Is This Dude? That’s me! With Donald Knuth. Wearing a “Knuth is my homeboy t-shirt.” What do I do? • Community management (I’m not a master manipulator of social media) • Study, expose, react. • 10+ years of Free Software (business) management experience
22. We’re Off The Path… KDE project that has acted as the catalyst for this improved coordination cohesion. In order to test this, the same weekly coordination cohesion data can be plotted in chronological order to see if growth in coordination cohesion starts at a particular point in time, rather than when a particular size in the contributor community is reached. This new plot is shown in Figure 5.5. 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 01/01/1997 01/01/1998 01/01/1999 01/01/2000 01/01/2001 01/01/2002 01/01/2003 01/01/2004 01/01/2005 01/01/2006 01/01/2007 01/01/2008 01/01/2009 01/01/2010 Cohesion Date Weekly Data
23. A Thought Experiment Income to KDE eV somewhat correlates with cohesion over time (about 1 year lag). ! Potential for causality?
24. Say What, Now?
25. • In short: we lost focus. • “After” KDE 4 we lost: • One repo, kdesvn (and not an increasing number or ever-smaller repos where we do not collaborate). • Shared technical vision (and not an increasing level of independence between components). • Shared tone (and not increasing confusion about what KDE “is”). Say What, Now?
26. How To Be Like dfaure • Do: Have fun
 • Do: Work hard (at being better)
 • Do Not: Forget we have a mission and users who need us to deliver This has been another questionable presentation by Dr. Paul J. Adams:
 • paul@baggerspion.net • www.baggerspion.net • @therealpadams