> My opinion is that the first step for Cedric's thesis is for him > to not worry about > defining Quality or Productivity as such, but rather to gain > expertise at using > telemetry-based information to provide novel and interesting > perspectives on development > that are not otherwise apparent.
Indeed, since software telemetry is so new, the "emperical" approach is the way to go. > Hot spots are just one conceptual entity to explore--Cedric and I > sat down one day and > came up with others including "stability", "progress", and the > relationship between the > team architecture and the software architecture. Dan has been > working on the concept of > "project volatility" for a while, which would also be interesting > to explore. All of > these can be operationalized in different ways, and once > operationalized then Telemetry > lets us look at their dynamic behavior over time and watch for > interactions and effects. > And Cedric had been looking at the relationship between volitility and stablity, however these concepts depend on having some reasonable emperical understanding of the telemetry streams. We have to get an idea of what "instability" and "stability" look like before we can create a model to represent it and (gasp!) make predictions. I am eagarly awaiting for the observations on what happens to the streams when the project exploads and how things look over the long run when everything is going smoothly. I have no doubt that many interesting and valuable observations will be made based on telemetry. Heck, even the concept of telemetry for software development is a thesis worthy topic! My $0.02, Dan
