Four short links: 7 June 2016
Radio Future, Open Source Productivity, Maturity Models, and Engineering Principles
- The End of Shows? — Here’s what I think the future sounds like: you will get in your car and say, “Play my news briefing, plus all of last night’s baseball scores, including highlights from the Yankees game. Oh, and give me last week’s Vows column from the New York Times.” Then, like magic, your audio system will assemble this playlist. I disagree: this news overview function will be taken care of via speech synthesis. Long-form reportage, opinion, and storytelling will be much harder to automate away. (via Marginal Revolution)
- Team Productivity and Coordination in Open Source Software Projects (Paper a Day) — When you look at actual contributions (they analyse commits and settle on the Levenshtein edit distance between before and after files as a measure of contribution), it turns out that open source projects follow the same laws as everywhere else, and adding developers reduces the average productivity.
- Maturity Model: A Metric for Institutional Transformation — where’s the modern software engineering team maturity model? (via Courtney Johnston)
- Khan Academy’s Engineering Principles — also check out the blog post laying out context for those principles. The opening paragraphs are a splendid introduction to why a team should have such principles.
