Thursday, December 20, 2007

Programmer's theater group

I belong to a amateur theater group. Every year we put on two large shows. These shows take month of preparation. Not only do the actors need to learn their lines and go on stage but there's a huge amount of behind the scenes work to do as well.

There's things like:
- Choosing the script
- Directing
- Renting the hall for the play
- Renting the space for the rehearsals
- Ticket selling
- Costumes
- Designing and building the set
- Props
- The staff running front-of-house during the productions
- Advertising
- Ticket selling

All in all even with a cast of about 15 people, we end up using more than 30. All of this is done on a volunteer basis. All done in people's spare time.

It takes allot of time. As an actor, I spend 5 hours a week for the first two months at group rehearsals then 9 hours for the last month culminating in about 20 hours during the week of the production. Generally, people also tend to spend hours on their own learning their lines as well.

The more I think about it the more I'm amazed at how all this works. I'm curious if anyone is trying to do this sort of thing with software project.

The idea would be to get about 5 or so programmers who are interested doing a project and aren't particularly picky about what the project is. Then brainstorming on ideas until there's one that stands out then coding it, setting people up as project leads, designers, etc... As well as grabbing others for things like building the website and doing all the work with registering the finished projects with websites and sending out press releases.

With 5 people spending about 5 hours a week or more on the project I don't see why we can't have something interesting in 6 months or so.

The idea would be to set it up as an agile style process. Meet once a week for a SCRUM type status. Have a "director" or lead to decide the high level direction and focus of the project. .. and guarantee some hours of availability for code paring.

The goal would be to set some fixed time span (this is important) and a goal and try to ship a workable solution to the goal, preferably as an OS project. The timespan would probably be about 5 to 6 months in total with about 4 months of coding/design time.. the other 2 months would be just deciding which problem to tackle by way of looking at problems/possible programs/possible new features that can be written in such a short time. The idea here being that if you're going to spend the next few months tackling a problem you might as well think hard about which problem to tackle.

Given what I've seen with the theater group, some hours of inter-team interaction together would be needed for social reasons and as a good motivator. This is why I would say that it's important for team members to set aside some time at which all team members would be working on the codebase at the same time. If everyone has a laptop it could all be at the same location too. It's always great coding in an environment where you can bounce ideas off each other... nt to mention things like peer review too.

The project would proceed (Look Phil! Two "e"s!) in phases:

- Meet once a week for a while and each week present a possible project as a problem or need to fulfill and a goal for the project. After some time recap all the projects and vote on which one it the best. The project must have a team lead/"director" and must have enough programmers who want to work on it. New features to existing projects are allowed.

- Build a high level design and mock up for how the program should be built. This is mostly up to the director to organize. They should pick someone to help design the project. During this phase, any part of the project that may not be feasible should be investigated up until the point where everyone is convinced it will work. Brain storming sessions should be held twice a week on invitation of the project lead.

- Director choose who should work on which section of the problem and works with those people on explaining what the behavior should be. Teams are made. High level design of these module is done and code is started. Two sessions per week ~ 2.5 hours a week.

- After two months or so we start to attempt to going all the pieces together and run the project looking for bugs and behaviors that are not desirable. Schedule adds a 4 hour session to the existing 2.5 hour sessions.

- During the last week, the schedule accelerates to bug fixing every day of the week and work is wrapped up. Over the week-end the program is compile and uploaded or if the project is a website it goes live and links submitted to search engines etc..


So currently I'm curious to try this out. I've currently got two potential prospects. We've been brain storming potential ideas. I'm curious to know if we can get something out of it.

Anyhow.. food for thought. You want to audition for the next project? You know how to reach me. :-)

1 comment:

Philippe said...

Hey Starscream !

Indeed, the programmer's theater group seems very interesting...

The only thing left is to find good practical problems to solve ... That shouldn't be too hard.

In the mean time, take care and Happy Holidays !

Phil
PS: Say hi to the old Koreans for me :)