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?

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.

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

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

Once again we are happy to announce new exciting feature on SourceKibitzer! Today, we have launched Simple Recruiting for Open Source Software teams. It means that each project listed in our database can put up a banner indicating that it is looking for new developers to join the team.

Any project contributor can turn it ON on the project page. To see it in action, check out SourceKibitzer project page

Mark

Hi,

There is another interview in the series of talks with Open Source developers. This time Olesja interviewed us, SourceKibitzer founders. Yeah, I know, it is not very modest from us ;). We agreed, because we believe contributors should not be shy. Every success story can attract new developers into Open Source movement and we all benefit from that.

So please, don’t blame us and give yourself 10 minutes to read our opinions and ideas - “Open Source Contributors, Brand Yourself”

Mark

We have just released the know-how cloud feature for all Open Source Software projects listed. It is a kind of tag cloud or weighted list of project contributors. In our cloud contributors are weighted according to their know-how in the project, measured by SourceKibitzer.

We don’t publish the indicators of developers willing to be anonymous! But if you are proud of your contribution and believe your name and face should be there, don’t be shy! Create your Bio to be positioned in know-how tag.

You can check some OSS projects with interesting know-how clouds:
- Mindquarry
- Apache Struts 2
- Aranea Framework

Mark

We have got quite a few questions on what is the “User-Programmed Service” is about. I will try to explain basic ideas behind that in this blog post.

First of all, User-Programmed Service(U-PS) is a development model. It is aimed at creating online services. Sometimes those also called SaaS (Software as a Service). The key point of the U-PS model is that source code is open as in open source software. That is why you can also call this SaaS + Open-Source model.

But, why would anybody like to give the source code? Virtually, all Open Source Software licenses allow you to use any piece of software inside your on line service without any restrictions. So, the reason to open the source code of the service is to allow users to steer the development. It is similar to the Wikipedia model, where any user is allowed to contribute to articles, it is similar to the Digg - allowing users to add news and voting on them. But, U-PS is one step forward - users really get the tools to direct the growth of the service they use.

Just like with the Open Source model the biggest issue of the User-Programmed Service comes from its advantages: as soon as the number of contributors surpasses a particular point the orchestration and synchronization of the work becomes a problem. In SourceKibitzer, we try to overcome this by having community leads to regularly sync all tasks and sketch the global direction. We are almost sure that there could be better ways to deal with that. Please let us know, if you have some ideas on improving our approach.

We didn’t invent this model. On the other hand, we believe that this is a natural way of online service evolution. We just took the name that in our opinion characterizes the idea in the best way and decided to pioneer this style of development. There is someone, who makes us feel very enthusiastic about our undertaking. This someone is you! Because the greatest thing about SourceKibitzer is its community - almost 100% of it are Java developers. So, any of our user is able to contribute and drive SourceKibitzer to the success!

If you have further questions on U-PS model please post them either here or on our “Questions and Answers” page.

Mark
http://sourcekibitzer.org/Bio.ext?sp=l8