Monday, May 29, 2006

Improving Agile Communication using Old Tools

By popular demand, I'm blogging about a communication tool we're using on our current project. I've discussed this in my Productive Programmer talk at No Fluff, Just Stuff, and I've answered the Expert Panel question of "What is your latest favorite productivity tool" with this answer. Several people have asked me follow-on questions, so I thought I'd blog about it.

One of the difficulties in distributed agile development is keeping the communication link strong between the geographically (and time zone) separated teams. We are trying hard on our current project but still fall well short of the ideal. We do have some bright spots, though. The primary communication medium between the developers is a wiki we set up for the project. For a while, we attempted to type in really comprehensive summaries of each day's development work. However, we eventually realized that we were duplicating effort: we already put detailed comments for our check-ins to Subversion. So, we had one of our temporary resources cook up the following little developer shim.

He created a tool called SVN2WIKI. It uses the SVN post-commit hook to harvest the comment of the code just checked in. It then posts those comments to the Wiki, creating a dated page if one doesn't exist or adding to the page already there if it does. The Wiki we're using (Instiki) offers an RSS feed for all changed pages. So, we installed an RSS Reader (RssBandit) on the developer workstations. Now, when a developer sits down, he or she can get an up-to-the-minute summary of all the stuff that has happened to the code base since the last time he or she looked. Because it's an RSS reader, it keeps track of what you've already read. This is a great way to keep up to date at a really detailed level for what is happening to the code base.

This hasn't eliminated the need to create daily summary pages, but these can be much more terse, and focus on outstanding questions across the ocean. The Wiki contains a living history of the project, told one check-in at a time. For those who say that agile projects don't keep documentation, the Wiki on our project is a living, breathing history of the project at a really detailed level.

Our SVN2WIKI tool is a good example of piecing together a bunch of old and common technologies (SVN, Instiki, RSS) to create a great time saver for developers while improving the toughest part of our project.

1 comment:

Neal Ford said...

Actually, the little utility was very simple (written for that project in C#). You can read up about how to execute post-commit applications using Subversion (which is well documented). Our little SVN2WIKI tool was an executable, run by Subversion, that did an "svn look" command to get the comment, then did an HTTP post to the wiki (in the format it wanted) to post the comments. Most of the code was to handle stuff like "does this day already exist on the wiki" and midnight rollover.

We're going to publish a version of SVN2WIKI in our book The Productive Programmer, which we hope to have finished by the end of the year.