Software Accountability Made Real?

An Anonymous Reader writes "In a recent presentation and post, Kent Beck (eXtreme Programming, Embrace Change) highlights Open Quality Dashboards as a means to make software development accountable. Many different approaches attempt to reduce the number of issues creeping in all along the development process. Whether a shop abides by the rules of up-front UML design or test-driven development, or a methodology somewhere in between, the ongoing burst of popularity for tools enabling continuous integration and frequent releases shows the need for unit testing to appear earlier in the development process. In this context, quality dashboards could well establish a credible benchmark for software accountability."

Comments

We do this internally already.

[Dr. Bent]

At my company, most of our products are built daily (at a minimum) and the metrics are published to an internal website. Things like ugly code, unit test failures, bad JavaDoc, poor test coverage, and findbugs problems are visible to everyone in the company.

This makes it a lot easier for developers to do the right thing (and fix these problems). Nothing like a big red bar to motivate you!

Re:Wha?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

His scenario reflects 2/3 of the places that I've worked.

However, his solution might work well in many places where feature-creep happens, even when there isn't as much animosity between developers and management.

Re:Wha?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Yeah, you can't force all development into a 3-week cycle, but it can work pretty well for some projects where pieces of the project can be postponed until the next development cycle.

A 3 week cycle could work pretty well in a web-environment (which is what I work in).