TLDR; I’m happy to announce that I’m now working part-time as a freelancer to bring Software Analytics to software developers! Check out http://business.feststelltaste.de for more information.
I’m happy to announce that as of today, I’m going part-time to have 1 – 2 days per week for consulting as Software Development Analyst. This is a huge step for me, being in the middle of life. But the time has come for a new kind of software analysis that can help developers out of their miseries: Software Analytics!
So let’s have a look how I can help you to tackle problems in software development in an open, data-driven and reproducible way!
What are the problems?
As developers, we often feel that there might be something wrong with the way we develop software. Unfortunately, our gut feelings alone aren’t sufficient for the complex, interconnected problems in software systems. We need solid, understandable arguments to gain budgets for improvement projects or to defend us against political decisions. Otherwise, we will be repeating death marches over and over again with big project meltdowns at the end and high developer turnovers.
How I can help
I deeply believe that we developers can help ourselves: Every step in the development or use of software leaves valuable, digital traces. With the right methodology and clever analysis, these data can show us root causes of problems in our software and deliver new insights – understandable for everybody. If concrete problems and their impact are known, developers and managers can work together to create solutions and take sustainable actions aligned with existing business goals. This is what Software Analytics is all about:
“Software analytics is analytics on software data for managers and software engineers with the aim of empowering software development individuals and teams to gain and share insight from their data to make better decisions.”— Menzies, Zimmermann: Software Analytics: So What?
I make Software Analytics thinking and tooling usable for software developers.
How can that work?
My approach is to use an open process for analyzing problems in software systems. By using a digital notebook approach, developers can express their gut feelings explicitly with the help of hypotheses, explorations and visualizations step by step – fully automated. An analysis is always based on the actual data from the developer’s environment and results are understandable to every stakeholder. Thus, wrong assumptions, political decisions or killer arguments don’t stand a chance against cold hard facts (see example analysis).
How can I help you?
- On my blog, I’m writing about my implementation of Software Analytics. There are plenty of articles In the near future, I’ll also dive into the very basic of data analysis based on software data. So stay tuned and follow me on Twitter!
- As trainer, I can show you how you can use problem-solving techniques and open source analysis tools (Jupyter, Pandas, jQAssistant, Neo4j, D3) to solve your own problems in your applications and environment
- As online instructor, I bring Software Analytics lectures and tasks right to you
- As consultant, I can help you to identify and address problems like architectural smells, performance hotspots, knowledge loss, worthless code parts
Next steps
- You can also get more information on my new website http://business.feststelltaste.de/
- For the German audience, there are also some seminars available at http://business.feststelltaste.de/de/workshops/
- I’m also open to individual requests for on-site consulting or brown-bag sessions. Just get in contact!