Assembla Blog: Category Breakout Development

How to select good trial tasks

andy@assembla.com — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 11:53:00 +0000

We use trial projects to help find the best developers to work with. We hire candidates to do paid trial tasks from our live projects. In working with the candidates, we understand how good they are and how well the they work in our process. We try to sign the good ones for longer term contracts. Itâ€™s a lot of work, but it is well worth the effort.

Sometimes, clients want to do this themselves. Or, they want us to perform in a trial, which is a hassle for us, but a good idea for them. That brings us to the subject of how to select trial tasks. To make the process work, we need good trial tasks.

I find that a managerâ€™s first instinct is to create a â€œtestâ€? task. Itâ€™s a small task that can be assigned to lots of candidates. That way, they save time by doing one specification, and they get the advantage of being able to compare results from multiple candidates. Or, they select a task that they have already specified and completed. That way, they save even more time because they donâ€™t have to do a new specification, and they can compare the candidate result with the previous result.

I donâ€™t use either of these approaches (a test task, or an already completed task), because they make the task meaningless. This causes two problems.

Good developers (including us) are busy, and work very hard, and donâ€™t have time to do meaningless work.
These trials fail. As a busy manager, you will never bring yourself to pay enough attention to a meaningless task to get a good result.

So, I only assign trial tasks and features that I intend to deploy, or that are R&D / prototyping for something that I intend to deploy. I only assign meaningful tasks. I think to do otherwise shows disrespect to the hard-working candidates I hope to work with.

For trials, I take a real system that I am working on, and ask for a meaningful improvement. Essentially, I assign tickets out of our live projects.

I hear three objections to this approach

â€œI need the deliverable. I canâ€™t risk it with a new guy.â€? If that is true, then hire two guys to do it.

â€œItâ€™s too much work to specifyâ€?. Thatâ€™s true if you are working with mediocre developers. However, if you are working with people who require precise specifications, and they just do coding, they arenâ€™t saving you much time. They would save you a LOT more time if they could take the general idea and a do something with it. So, it makes sense to test for that.

â€œMy systems are too complex for a quick trial.â€? Thatâ€™s true if you are working with mediocre developers. If you are working with good developers, you should be able to throw them into a complex system and get some forward motion pretty quickly. From a qualification point of view, complexity can help you. If the build process is such that you canâ€™t get new people set up easily, then you will benefit from improving the build process. That in itself can be a trial task.

Upgrades and a long future for assembla.com hosting

andy@assembla.com — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:23:00 +0000

A questioner over at DZone asks “how do you guys make money at this? ... just want to know if you guys will be around awhile…”

The free version will always be available, and we will continue to invest in it. However, we will soon launch extensions that will provide the tools that corporate projects need to recruit and manage distributed developers, including a developer directory, time tracking, billing, and payment services.

So, we will need to support and expand our free online services in order to market the commercial package, and in order to attract good developers and give them experience with this tool set.

We make a profit doing full-service development (we deliver at amazing speed), and we use assembla.com for all of our own projects. We have dozens of developers using these tools on high-speed development projects, so that gives us another strong incentive to maintain reliability.

You have probably notices a series of upgrades to the site recently. I will send out an email with full release notes once the upgrades are complete. However, here are some highlights:

New front-end design. The Space styles will be upgraded later this month.
Trac 10.1, upgraded from 9.4
Team members find it easier to follow the action. We upgraded the alert system, which notifies users by email about new flows, wiki page edits, etc., and shows them on the “New” tab, which is like the Basecamp project page. We provide a single-click setup for sending Trac notifications to flows, where team members can manage them as alerts. Email alerts can be set from the “New” page sidebar.
Checkbox on the project create sets up a development space with Trac, Subversion, notifications.
Users can now customize the appearance of a space by entering new style tags on the admin page. Coming soon – a pulldown style library.
Chat. Cool. Also, you can set any tab as the landing page for your space, so that users can drop right into Chat if that is where the action is.
Many other fixes and smaller improvements.

Jon Udell Podcast: - A conversation with Andy Singleton about building global teams

andy@assembla.com — Sat, 20 May 2006 22:53:00 +0000

Jon Udell included me in his Friday podcast series this week with a conversation with Andy Singleton about building global teams . Jon has been putting up with me since 1993, when he edited some freelance articles that I wrote for Byte magazine. In 2003 he coined the term “dynamic development” to describe the work I was doing. He has recently been commenting on user innovation and the power of human networks to do work beyond open source sofware. In this conversation, he turns me on to Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and he cautions against a “walled garden”. Maybe we’ll be able to work together on a universally portable user profile.

Introducing Assembla.com and Breakout

andy@assembla.com — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 10:21:00 +0000

Over the past few months, we have done a lot of work on Assembla.com, our online service for building and running distributed software teams, and Breakout, the underlying platform for professional networks. Now, we are ready to share. If you have suggestions for user groups that can benefit from this resource, or bloggers that might be interested in it, let me know at andy@assembla.com Read on for the story->

Assembla – for dynamic, distributed software teams

Assembla.com provides workspaces and services for distributed software teams. Techcrunch readers can think of it as a sort of construction kit for Web 2.0 development teams. These teams are usually distributed, and often composed on the fly for a particular project. We call this approach inspired by open source.

I have been working on this approach for years, doing rapid development with great developers and low fixed cost. Now, we are bottling the magic and making it available on a larger scale.

If you are managing software projects, you can create a project workspace on Assembla.com to manage your code, documentation, and team permissions. This creates a secure IP asset that you build a team around as needed, with no fixed costs and unlimited team scalability. You can also advertise opportunities publicly or selectively. If you work on these projects, you can create a personal space, post a profile, join teams, and engage in public and private discussion with potential employers.

The online service is a work-in-progress with many rough edges, but it is feature rich in comparison with other collaboration services. Each workspace offers a wiki, discussion, issue management, feed aggregation, email alerts to the team, team invitation and permissioning, file store, Typo blog. Those are generic features for any professional network. For software teams, we have integrated Trac and Subversion, with instant activation and single-sign-on permissions. There is currently no restriction on the number of spaces, files or pages allocated to a particular user.

The service is free. We make our living supplying premium applications, and full-service distributed team recruiting, management, and development.

A Platform for Professional Networks

We describe the underlying Breakout platform as Social Software to Get Things Done. Our approach is loosely like cramming MySpaces together with real enterprise software. Over the past few years we have learned that certain kinds of software – social software for exhibiting profiles and starting discussions – is very easy to adopt. We get people engaged with easy-to adopt profiling and collaboration features, and then we let them progressively crank down on permissions and ramp up application capabilities to make real working teams.

We describe the result as a “professional network” – a population of people who work together in a variety of permission groups, ranging from global (eg an open source project), to enterprise, to small project teams. We provide mechanisms to engage these professionals, help them organize themselves into groups and projects, and support them with on-demand applications, which can be added to the workspace with integrated permissions in the same way that Trac and Subversion are integrated with assembla.com.

Our first customer for this platform is working on a network to manage the response to biological threats such as an avian flu epidemic. So, we believe social software can help get very important things done.

The software is available for enhancement and customization under an open source license.

Team

Assembla’s experienced management team came together in order to bring “inspired by open source” practices to enterprise software. Andy Singleton was the founder and CEO of Cambridge Interactive and PowerSteering Software, now the leading application for corporate six sigma deployments. Sesha Pratap was a founder of Centerline Software, which he grew to $20M as CE. Jon Stillman has 15 years of experience leading technology projects at GE, topped of with a stint doing strategy for Divine Interventures and a venture partner position at High Peaks Ventures.

Geek dinner Pitch for the Software Developers Network

andy@assembla.com — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 22:57:00 +0000

Pito Salas invited me to a “Geek Dinner”, which I attended tonight. It was organized by Pito and blogger Adam Green, and populated by RSS and blogging geeks. I pitched the Software Professional network and came away with some positives:

Two different guys came up to me and said, essentially, that they manage multiple groups of unruly open source developers, and they will try our system. Mental note – a couple of guys asked about time tracking and billing. I got the same question at the Ruby Users Group meeting.

I learned more from Dan Bricklin about the wiki/spreadsheet he has been working on. Once I started thinking about how it lives out in data space, and can pull data and catch data from other servers, I started thinking it will be big. Definitely worth adding as a tool. It will be useful for management reporting and for securities research.

Adam Green said â€œmy last company (Andover.net at the height of the craziness in 99) was sold to Sourceforge. How does this competeâ€?. I explained what we were doing and why I thought we would roll right over VA Software, and he agreed.

I ended up giving an impassioned speech about what a great business software suddenly is, with costs down, demand up, and innovation flourishing. Maybe that one beer wasnâ€™t such a great idea on four hours of sleep. More on that later.