This article 👇 offers an introduction to #MoldableDevelopment.
It's written for a first time reader. It's not quite short, but it's not that long either (~4000 words). It has concrete examples, but also a little broader theory.
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It starts from the reading problem: reading accounts for the single largest expense in software development today, but it's just a strategy to gather information from the system. We can automate much of it, but we should do it through custom tools.
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To give a hint as to why this is relevant, I describe of an experiment in which we gave student teams the same requirements and a constrained tech. They produced very different structures which suggests that a system's inside emerges over time and that we need to react to it.
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I then describe a public exercise in which we explored the use of system properties and feature toggles in Open edX. Automating the detections necessarily required a custom solution that matched the internal framework used for defining these properties.
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Even more interesting was how once we had an overview of the definitions and usages of properties, we could also identify dependencies that would otherwise remain hidden.
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You can learn more details about this exercise here:
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This is just an example, but it shows what building custom tools could mean. For this proposition to be practical, the construction of custom tools must be inexpensive. We develop #GToolkit to show how #MoldableDevelopment can work in practice.
gtoolkit.com
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#GToolkit is not only an enabling technology, it is also an elaborate case study of #MoldableDevelopment. To exemplify this idea, I show a couple of scenarios in which we use the environment to document and reason about the environment itself.
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The technology is important, but the key resides in the method of working. This implies new skills (and roles) and new opportunities for working as a team.
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By decreasing the cost of insights about the system, #MoldableDevelopment introduces a new feedback loop that has far reaching consequences also for the business.
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Working with @BenLinders on this article was just extraordinary.
I hit a writer's block at the beginning of the year, but Ben kept pushing diligently for 8 months! Along the way he helped me refine the article to make it more digestible for first readers.
Thank you Ben!
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