Crouching tiger, coding monkey

It all started with Pac-Man. It all ended with yoga. This deserves an explanation.

My daughter will turn four years old this September and quite by accident I’ve discovered that she enjoys Pac-Mac World 2 for the original Xbox. We “played” for the first time when I de-cluttering the house and found the old Xbox stashed away in a box. She was curious what it was, Pac-Man was really the only non-sports game that was even remotely appropriate for her age, and I needed a break.

What a mistake.

It turns out she loved “playing” it with me. I keep using quotation marks because “playing” means me using the live controller while she holds the other controller that does nothing, and makes excited statements of “Daddy get that coin!” or “Oooh. A cherry!” that only a preschooler can make. The real kick in the head is that she found out about the unlockable bonus games, including the original Ms. Pac-Man. So lately when she’s been good all day we’ve broken out the game to go searching for all 180 stupid coins we need to unlock a game from 1981.

Luckily for me a surprising bright spot has suddenly appeared. It’s a metaphoric parting of the clouds, a star on the horizon, or perhaps a comp’d breakfast at the casino. It’s my wife mentioning, “Do you know anything about Wii Fit?”

Score. Grant just stumbled onto a power pellet.

Thanks to clever yoga based marketing, the kid friendliness of Nintendo, and a slant toward casual gaming that my wife would be on board with I suddenly found myself looking for a Nintendo Wii. Unfortunately, so is everyone else.

Now at this point I could have gone one of five ways.

Way #1: Drive all around creation to brick and mortar stores looking for a Wii.

Way #2: Call all around creation to brick and mortar stores asking if they had a Wii.

Way #3: Park a browser window on Amazon’s Wii page and keep hitting refresh until they came in stock.

Way #4: Play the game of market price “Is it actually going to get shipped to me/Hopefully it is a real Wii in the box and not a broken NES” roulette that is eBay.

Way #5: Put the Internet to work for me through the novel service that has sprung up to deal with Wii shortages: wiialerts.com

It was Jonathan that tipped me off to wiialerts and considering that nothing bad had happened to him when he used it I gave it a whirl. The short story is that it worked EXACTLY LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO. I’m not entirely sure how they are set up to work with the monitoring of different retailers but I suspect it is some manner of web service consumption along with screen scraping where necessary. The site itself seems to be written in PHP, but then again what isn’t these days.

Regardless, I just signed up, entered my contact info (email and cell number) set up some alerts on the exact items I wanted, and the next day got a text message telling me Toys R US had it in. Two minutes later my transaction was complete. Three minutes after that they were sold out.

I write about software quality a lot. Actually I write about it all the time. Thus I’m always thrilled when I stumble across a product or service that gets it right and does what it claims. The Wii just arrived yesterday and I haven’t shown it to my daughter yet although I suspect the prospect of waggling a stick at the TV will be a big hit.

So if you are in the market for a Wii definitely check these guys out, it absolutely works. If you are writing some kind of web application also check these guys out. Simple, clean, and works, those are very good traits to copy. Now if only Ms. Pac-Man was on the Wii Virtual Console life would be complete…

One of the questions on the Quality Ready Assessment (QRA) asks about the interaction between development and testing teams. One of the possible answers is:

The teams do not interact. “New builds are thrown over the wall” when they are completed.

So I decided to ask the question, what percentage of those companies ship on time and on budget? I even gave them some wiggle room since sometimes even the best-laid plans don’t work out. All I was looking for shipping on-time greater than 75% of the time. What did I find?

11.76% could ship on schedule and not over cost.

Ouch.

Wait, I’m sure that this is only like one or two companies that have taken the QRA. Let’s go see how many do this throw over the wall business…

15.86% (!)

Aye carmaba! To put that in perspective that is one out of every six companies.

I spend an obnoxious amount of time in the application lifecycle and quality worlds. I also have been very lucky in that every company I’ve ever worked for has had mixed teams of developers and testers. To me the concept of throwing a build over a wall is as foreign as the game of cricket.

(Have you ever tried to follow cricket? I was working in London once and I desperately tried to figure it out. I even had one of the British guys walk me through it as slowly as humanly possible. I think I lost all higher brain processing ability when he explained that some cricket games can last up to five days.)

Judging by those shipping numbers I’m glad the experience is foreign to me and I really feel for those poor souls that are stuck in that situation. I suppose if anyhing the QRA provides some pretty tangable data that that is not the optimal way of doing things.

Kind of like if you are the batsman trying to French cut a googly into the square leg.

(I mean, if that’s not good. I have no idea what I just said there.)

So yesterday Surround SCM 2008.1 finally hit the street. Well, the internet actually. Let’s call it the internet street. What’s this really means is that I can finally write about the two features I really love but haven’t been able to publicly talk about.

Neither one of these things are huge changes but they made a big difference in my daily life.

*insert joke about my lack of a life here*

Feature Numero Uno: The New Branch Dropdown

For years and years my Surround SCM setup looked something like this:

So I had the branch pane on the left, the repository pane in the middle, and the file list pane on the right. Some people I’ve seen have the file details pane shoved in there somewhere too but I never got into that. It’s just how I roll.

The problem is that if you use lots of branches (which you should) the branch dropdown would have so many items in it that it would be unusable:

In this new version that dropdown isn’t linear anymore, it has a new progressive disclosure tree hierarchy hotness control. That means the branch pane has essentially been shrunk down into snack size dropdown form:

So now I can turn off the branch pane, still have no file details pane, the repositories are get upgraded to the left side instead of the center seat and the file list still gets the window. It’s all much cleaner but with all the same functionality:

Feature Numéro Deux: Reveal in Finder

Anyone who frequents this blog, or for that matter has ever read it, knows that I have serious Apple leanings. That being said it has always bugged the beejerbers out of me that the file list didn’t have a contextual “Reveal in Finder” item. Many a time have I done a get of something, usually some kind of document that is outside of the main source tree, and then had to have a click-fest through Finder to get to it.

For a while I used Quicksilver and I thought I would be all cool and do some ninja moves to avoid the click-fest. In the end I just managed to accidentally email the iTunes executable to someone.

I don’t use Quicksilver anymore. I need to wait until the safety scissors version of it comes out since the real version is too dangerous for me.

All sharp instrument jokes aside “Reveal in Finder” is now available in the context menu:

When you click on it, well, it reveals the file in the Finder:

This also works on platforms other than Mac OS X but it has a different name to fit better with those operating systems. I’d look up what the names were but this is a blog with the word “Monkey” in its title not CNN. Read: If you are looking for hard hitting reporting you’ve probably come to the wrong place.

One final thing to note on this is that for new installations of Surround SCM this item will be in the context menu. For existing installations that are upgraded you’ll need to go into the User Options menu and add it yourself. We argued about this a great deal and finally decided that customers have their context menus set up how they want them already so just jamming a new item in there wouldn’t be proper:

Think of it as our nod to Emily Post.

There are other new features besides these guys too. Those are just the most awesome ones the ones that I like the best.

(And so should you.)

Yeah. Words, having trouble coming up with them. I mean, hmm.

Kudos to you if you make it to the end.

A few months back we released the Quality Ready Assessment (QRA), a fancy web based tool to help people measure their overall software quality level. We knew we wanted to create something that could provide quantifiable measurements about a subject that oftentimes is looked at as the eating right and exercise of software development.

“Yes I know that I should focus more on software quality but have you ever tasted bacon? It’s freaking awesome.”

Anyhow, did you know that 80% of the people that have taken the assessment so far use some kind of SCM tool? Of course you didn’t I just told you that, but that’s like 4 out of every 5 respondant. Wait, that’s exactly 4 out of every 5. What do you know, 5th grade math did come in useful.

Note to self: Send thank you/apology card to fifth grade teacher.

Anyway, lots of interesting patterns can be found by looking at the data. For example:

“It looks like most shops use an SCM tool now, but a large percentage of the time it is a stand alone system.”

“Companies in the financial services industry sure like integrated toolsets.”

“Companies in the greasy spoon breakfast diner industry don’t seem to care much at all.”

Going back to the first stat though, that means that 20% do NOT use an SCM system. This got me curious about the overall quality practice level of shops that use SCM vs. those that do not. Since I happen to know people who know people I was able to get that comparison report created. The numbers are enlightening:

In the Track metric SCM users scored 62% higher than non-SCM users.

In the Test metric SCM users scored 47% higher than non-SCM users.

In the Automated metric SCM users scored 70% higher than non-SCM users.

In the Change metric SCM users score a whopping 120% higher than non-SCM users.

I don’t need my 5th grade math to tell me that is a huge difference. It also highlights just how fundamental a SCM system is to software development and how its usage indicates a higher level of overall skill. I have to admit though, I never expected the numbers to be so big. Moral of the story, use SCM. It will absolutely help you ship a quality product. Oh and try to cut back on the bacon, it’s all about moderation people.

The funny thing about writing a blog but not administering the blog is that sometimes you login and notice that WordPress is all different. It’s kind of like coming home finding that someone has redecorated your house. You leave and everything is arranged in a nice 16th century Japanese Imperial decor and you come back to find wall to wall IKEA. Now, I’m not saying that one is better than other. Who knows, if IKEA existed in 16th century Japan the emperor might have taken a fancy to it. It’s just jarring to go from one to the other, that’s all.

So anyhow, the real reason why I am here is to give another example of the usefulness of Twitter. On April Fool’s Day, Andy Ihnatko wrote a hugely funny gag story using only Twitter. Through the first few tweet’s I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on but by the time he picked up his traveling companion I was already laughing. By the time the airbags were deployed I was laughing out loud. Once I got to the end I had forgotten all about IKEA.

The real problem though is that Twitter is so darn transient that there is no good way to provide a link to the full story. Luckily someone else out there did the work for him to archive it all up. Seriously, go read it, it’s ha ha funny.