Symbian^3 – the proof that something is happening!

We have recently released the Symbian^3 snapshot quality metrics for December.  We have included a comparison between the functionally complete Symbian^2 baseline (PDK2.0.0) and the first Symbian^3 (PDK3.0.a).  I was expecting these two versions to be significantly different, and here are the results per Technology domain:

Codechrun metrics between PDK2.0.0 and PDK3.0.a at technology domain level

The overall change reflected by the metrics is lots of activity in the UI domain – UIaccelerator, Graphics and Homescreen seem to have the larger churn.

Hope this makes it clear that Symbina^3 is a substantial upgrade with respect Symbian^2.  I will keep you post it on further progress.

Mylyn – Why it is worth upgrading to Tasktop

I have been using Mylyn now for a while and it has been great to help keeping on top of large amounts of bugzilla entries. I’ve used it to manage the integration plan for the Symbian platform, which describes the expected contributions into the platform.

One of the benefits that Mylyn offers developers is the reduction on Context Switching. Context switching is not only costly for software programs, but also for humans working on concurrent tasks. Mylyn provides a great integration with the IDE that allows developers using Eclipse to substantially reduce the wasted time on switching between application and work tasks.

However, I am not a developer… so Mylyn did not really provide me with any improvements in this area. Hence, I decided to download the Tasktop 30-day-trial standalone version and see if I could have get some time-saving by exploring the additional features for “Task Context”.  Here are the results:

The first obvious advantage is that it doesn’t really load all the rest of Eclipse/Carbide functionality that I don’t use and that eats a substantial amount of my manager’s-spec laptop memory. Hence, the first improvement is better working speed!

Do you know when is it “week01″ of 2010?

We run our project and release calendars based on week numbers. Taking into account that we run as an agile organisation with 2-weekly cycles, it helps to remember that things normally happy every odd or even week.

I was trying to work out the PDK release schedule for the next few months when I stumble at the oddity that are 2009 and 2010.  My problem was that 2009 has 53 weeks! and clearly 2010 starts with week 01. This creates the unusual situation of having 2 odd weeks in a row…

Ok, I can live with this… I said to myself but then I relaised that my calendar was telling me that 1st Jan 2010 was part of week53 2009… that makes no sense, right?

The Symbian^3 Contribution Plan gets serious!

After reviewing and expanding the list of key features for Symbian^3 , the S^3 integration plan has increase to 38 integration events (out of which 16 have already happened).

The current contribution plan includes features from Nokia, Ixonos, Sun and Texas Instruments.

The Symbian^3 burn down chart provide an agile view of the progress towards Functionally Complete

Bug 322 – Anatomy of a Symbian Contribution

Today I wanted to blog about the contribution infrastructure that we have set around contributing fixes or enhancements to the platform. As a practical example I would like to trace the steps of BUG 322.

BUG322 describes a simple export error from a bld.inf file, and it was identified by Simon Mellor from Accenture. Simon reported the bug, and provided a patch with a proposed fix:

This is how bugzilla displays the patch attached to the bug

Next the Package Owner (Sampo Savolainen from Nokia) reviwed the proposed fix and accepted it as valid. At this point Sampo applied himself the patch to the MCL. As the Package Owner, he is the only person that can do so (unless he has delegated the activity to a commiter).  Although Sampo is the one applying the patch the Kudos and the responsibility goes back to the original contributor. Here is what Mercurial has to say about that:

When is Free not really Free?

No, I am not referring to Google’s less than free strategy (courtesy of @itomuta) but to the attitude of some manufactures to disclaimers on food allergies.

We recently send an email to Hotel Chocolat to clarify the labelling in one of their Christmas products. The product is suppose to be Gluten-free. This is the answer we recieved:

Thank you for your email.

Please accept our apologies for the confusion regarding our gluten-free products.

Some of our products are gluten-free and this is clearly stated on the label, and on the dietary information on the individual items’ pages on the website. However they are all produced in the same environment as products containing gluten and therefore may contain gluten traces.

Please do not hesitate to contact us should you require further assistance.

Kind regards,

[Name Deleted]

Customer Experience Team

Hotel Chocolat Ltd

How can something be free of “X” but contains traces of it? This is equivalent to a software company saying “this is my code but it may contain traces of someone else’s!” If the SW industry can’t get away with it, why do we allow the food industry to do it?

Agile – How and why does Scrum work?

As an agile methodologies SCRUM is pretty simple to follow. There are basically 3 roles , 4 ceremonies and small bunch of practices. So why does it work? let me take a game theory perspective to the how, in order the explain the why.

from wikipedia

Sprints: Deliver often!

A sprint is a unit of  time (in our team is 2 weeks) in which the team plans and delivers an increment of the product that provides value to the customer. Once a sprint finishes a new one starts, the 4 SCRUM ceremonies are held within one sprint.

Classic waterfall projects tend towards a big bang approach to delivery. For the customer and the supplier, it leaves a door open to last minute surprises: “this is not what I ask for, it is going a bit late, I am not paying you, we had to cut that feature…”  This might be represented as deflections by both sides (or players in a prisoner’s dilemma).

Tricking the other side into doing their part without you doing yours, (e.g. increasing your margin by cutting test effort and delivering bug-ridden software) can be  more appealing if the players are not likely to meet again (or at least not in the near future).

However, if these interactions are more frequent and longer lasting, the benefits of ongoing collaboration become more attractive. This approach to fostering collaboration is well argued by Axelrod and it is implemented by scrum in the ’sprint’ concept.

New Graphics Architecture now in Symbian^3

Since Symbian^3 was added to the roadmap , the most significant feature that has been in the making is Nokia’s contribution of the New Graphics Architecture (NGA). I am pleased to say, thanks to a very good engagement with Nokia, we now have a beta version available in Mercurial.

NGA not only incorporates new capabilities to the platform, but also implements a new Khronos standard for composited windowing systems all OpenWF. OpenWF provides a standard interface for key rendering operations such as:

• Scaling (with control over filtering)
• Rotations (90-degree increments)
• Mirroring
• Alpha-blending (per-pixel and global)
• Alpha masking
• Solid background colour

…From the OpenWF website

10+ Million lines already open sourced

Did you know that Symbian has already over 10 million lines of code published in our public OSS repositories? Well, that is what Ohloh.net is telling us!

In previous posts, I have refer to the use of bugzilla metrics to take snapshots of quality related statistics. Ohloh is another great example of free services available to open source projects. Over the last few weeks some guys in the team have decided to get Ohloh up and running for Symbian open sourced packages and other supporting assets. We currently have 18 packages open sourced (of a total of 140) and we are working hard to open the rest before end of H1 2010.

The Hidden Benefits of Open Sourcing the Kernel…

I am jumping on the van-wagon of blogging about the Kernel Open Sourcing Following William’s blog , I wanted to highlight some of the hidden or less publicised benefits that open sourcing the Kernel has brought to the Symbian community. So let’s go!

The Symbian Team demostrates the benefits of Multithreading

Public Product Development Kits

You now can download the PDK and PDT (yes, for free!). We could have waited until the whole platform was EPL, but we were very keen to enable the community to work with the latest releases. We achieved this by releasing some SFL code (mainly header files and build scripts) under a dual license. If you are a member – you still receive it under SFL, if you are a non-member – you will receive it under our new EULA license.

The result is that all PDKs from now on will be open to the general public!