Faster Cars and Smellier Air

Troubling news here at the only blog with an Irish Pikachu category.

The heavily-anticipated Super Smash Bros. Brawl is out in the United States, but apparently without our beloved Hibernian Hero! [ Gamespot forums post | entry on disturbingly-named blog ]

This proud member of the diaspora cannot recall a comparable disappointment since the tragic failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and I have read two whole books on Irish history!

I for one am holding out hope that Pikachu’s leprechaun hat is tucked away hidden inside the game somewhere, waiting to be unlocked by the right combination of moves (perhaps right then left then 70 consecutive Peach/Wario match-ups.)

A sad development indeed with St. Patrick’s Day just a few days off.

Software development has been compared to construction and, more recently and compellingly, gardening.

I’m here to tell you friends that as usual, everybody’s wrong. Software development is like asteroids. Specificly, Asteroids the video game.

Early on in the “life cycle” of many software projects, money is spent on a bug database. Required fields generally include a brief symptomology, version information about the afflicted software, and a log date. Less generally they include steps that might be taken to reproduce the problem, the name of the tester who found it, and a severity rating necessarily relative to that tester’s own unique temperment.

The data field I have not yet seen, but bet would be really useful is the diameter of the bug.

As anyone who has spent time piloting a crudely-triangular spaceship beyond the orbit of Mars knows, asteroids don’t magically vanish upon contact with artillery. Instead, they break apart into multiple, smaller asteroids. It’s the same with software bugs.

The amount of time remaining in the wave/project is only loosely correlated to the initial number of asteroids. A really big asteroid might exceed a kilometer in diameter. Blasting it will only serve to increase the chance of a collision. Shooting an asteroid doesn’t actually help matters until it can be completely pulverized, or, perhaps more realisticly, knocked into an orbit that sends it out of the asteroid field (and hopefully not towards any planets you are friendly with.)

By way of analogy, any reliable estimate of the time remaining to complete a software project should involve a survey of not just the number and severity of outstanding bugs, but also their diameter.