Collaborative Software Development in a Social World at the Utah JUG

Modern software development is an endeavor that requires creativity, science, math, artistry, communication, strategy, and collaboration with colleagues across the globe. The sheer combinatorics of those requirements can seem overwhelming at times. The solution, just as we've done with design patterns for the code and architecture, is the establishment and use of patterns for human and machine communication. In this talk, we'll briefly explore the methods, modes and challenges of collaboration over the last several millennia before turning our focus towards solutions successfully employed in the last several years, including open source, social coding on GitHub, automated testing, CI, and CD.

Transcript

1. Collaborative Software DevelopmenT in a social world @matthewmccull
2. @matthewmccull
3. T
5. 1MB data != 1MB knowledge
6. if (data) then (knowledge)
7. Enhance your software development
 with this one easy trick
8. if (data) then (knowledge) collaboration
9. Human Email Auto Responders Mailing Lists Spreadsheets Calendar Events Meeting Notes Proposal Documents Pitch Decks Customer Transactions Analytics Results Survey Results Tweets Performance Monitors Bug Reports Work Tickets Build Logs Change Logs Server Logs Audit Logs
10. ⏰
11. 1900 B.C. "
12. 750 A.D. #
13. 1568 A.D. $
14. 1837 A.D. %
15. 1876 AD &
16. 1956 AD '
17. 1959 AD (
18. 1971 AD )
19. 2012 AD *
20. +,-.
21. data++ != knowledge++
22. data
23. data
24. data
25. data
27. create Business Value
28. Problem !
29. Solution?
30. 2. Broadcast 1. Act 3. Condense 4. Decide
31. Tools "
32. easy
33. easy…
34. easy…right?
35. Humans #
36. What’s the problem?
37. I wanted to help make it easier sustainable software development is Hard
40. What are the hardest things about software development, today?
41. Projects frequently get stuck in the planning phase 10. $
42. Stakeholders want regular progress reports 9. $
43. Our devs want self-organizing, startup culture teams 8. $
44. I don’t know who to assign to architectural projects 7. $
45. We can’t easily find out who’s 
 a domain expert 6. $
46. We don’t know how to optimize 
 for continual learning 5. $
47. No one wants to do the repetitive data-processing tasks 4. $
48. We have a difficult time 
 attracting top talent 3. $
49. We struggle to to accurately estimate projects 2. $
50. The stream of project info is overwhelming us all 1. $
51. “Our job is to find a
 few intelligent things to do,
 not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.” –Charlie Munger, Partner at Bershire Hathaway
52. let’s walk through the 4 Steps
53. 2. 1. Act 3. 4.
54. “It is not enough to just have a good idea.
 Only when you act, when you implement,
 do you truly innovate. –Tom Kelley, Jonathan Littman: The Ten Faces of Innovation
55. act Early %
56. Post &
59. “Inspiration Is for Amateurs The Rest of Us Just Show Up and Get to Work” –painter Chuck Close
60. Commit &
61. topic branches master branch
64. “Many accounts… note a "missing hyphen" when a weak radio-guidance signal triggered the rare use of error-recovery software which
 lacked a hyphen in an equation, causing miscalculation or truncation of the remainder of the equation,
 which then pointed the rocket downward.” –Postmortem of Mariner I mission
65. “Fail often to succeed sooner” –Tom Kelley, Ideo
67. automate liberally %
68. Automate!
72. I’ve acted. Now what?
73. 2. Broadcast 1. 3. 4.
74. “…when the amount of information available to people increases much faster than our techniques for processing it, then we can get ourselves in a lot of trouble.” –Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise
75. open everything %
76. Help!
77. “most of your computer science career will be single data source, single CPU, single threaded processing. Don’t worry about chapter 7.” –my most incorrect university professor, ever
78. target broadcasts %
80. “Running a fundamentally different approach to decision-making, being much more transparent in the way a company communicates, and… having a CEO that is absolutely focused on innovation is something that any company can do.” –JONATHAN ROSENBERG, Former SVP of Products at Google
81. broadcast secrets %
84. “We… take the presentations that were given to the board of directors, and we show them to every employee in the company in order to promote communication. And we have a huge disclaimer about, it’s private information… We’ve never had a leak.” –Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google
85. work asynchronously %
88. How do I make sense of it all?
89. 2. 1. 3. Condense 4.
90. 3.5 bi!ion docs '
91. Performance Monitors Bug Reports Work Tickets Build Logs Change Logs Server Logs Audit Logs github CI Build Results Deploy Results Release Notes
92. “Humans are by nature, single-threaded processors. much of what I do every day is to evaluate which threads are noise and which are signal. unmanaged, my world moves towards 100% noise. ” –Jesse Newland, Ops at Github
93. Human Email Auto Responders Mailing Lists Spreadsheets Calendar Events Meeting Notes Proposal Documents Pitch Decks Customer Transactions Analytics Results Survey Results Tweets Performance Monitors Bug Reports Work Tickets Build Logs Change Logs Server Logs Audit Logs
95. leverage computation %
96. Dashboard (
99. context matters %
102. where’s the Value?
103. 2. 1. 3. 4. Decide
108. decide iteratively %
110. do we Have to Change?
111. “Innovation is now recognized as
 the single most important ingredient
 in any modern economy.” –The Economist, Thanksgiving for innovation
112. no
113. “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” –W. Edwards Deming
115. Collaborative Software DevelopmenT in a social world @matthewmccull