Tracking work to be done

My team had the task of porting code off of an old API onto a new (hopefully-mostly-equivalent) API.

Diomidis Spinellis wrote an article in IEEE Software titled "Start with the Most Difficult Part" (on his blog here, official reference here). Now seemed like a good time to apply the advice.

So I wanted to measure: What was the most difficult part. I wanted to know how many usages of the old API were present and where I should focus my efforts first.

So I wrote macker rules to detect usages to port. And I wrote a ruby script that drove the ant macker target and pulled the usage counts into a list of counts. Then I published the current counts and started a graph so we could get the usages to zero.

Here is the chart we ended up with:


This drove us to two useful behaviors:

1. Getting our tests converted first, the most complex one first (exposed a lot of issues early).
2. Giving our work a metrics-driven feel -- all we have to focus on is getting this to zero.

There were also two things I missed:

1. The hardest task to port was one in which the new API didn't have anything near what we needed, and the usage measurement didn't catch that. ==> A quick pass over the tasks looking for especially risky ones (where the port would be really hard) would have exposed that earlier.
2. Another team was doing other work that intersected with ours, and we were unaware of the impact of their efforts on what we were doing. ==> Being able to get their changes quickly and easily may have helped expose the problem earlier.
   

Now that we've started using git, I'm going to suggest that we do two things:

• Get an SVN task branch so we can integrate as a team during the sprint
  
• Get an SVN task branch right before merging to release and re-apply all our git patches onto that task branch so the merge is really smooth

Or maybe if we can get done in time, we could volunteer to do that for the team that has the sprint-long task (getting them on everyone else's changes with a minimum of svnmerge.py headache).