Singularity.

At lunch the other day, Anay and I were lamenting the sharp bug-detection skills of our team's Business and Quality Analysts over dry, flavourless rotis. At one point, while defending a feature he hadn't implemented yet against accusations of systemic circumvention, Anay blurted out, "That's because you haven't filed a bug for it yet!" (With the standard XXL Anay Grin plastered on his face, of course.)

However, our humour inadvertently led to revelation. The differences described by experts between "defects" and "features" are purely semantic. And after considering the application of this theory wholesale to our current project, we arrived at a much juicier solution: Bug-Driven Development. Submit a bug, have it implemented by our crack team of developers.

Subversion is here, but we'll probably move to Google Code when we write... some code. (I tried making an issue tracker on Lighthouse... but lo-and-behold! It sucks. Thanks Web 2.0 for providing the world with a bunch of over-simplified applications written by 15-year-olds which are only free when they're totally useless. I'm not bitter.)

Anyway. No software exists yet, but you are welcome to submit bug reports. No development environment exists yet, so bug reports are welcome as comments on this blog post or emails sent to me. A good first bug report would be the lack of a bug reporting system. Maybe the software should be a bug reporting system? Oh, we also don't have any developers yet, so another suggestion for your first bug is recommending the assembly of a team.

Enough hints! Welcome to Singularity: The First and Last Real Software Ever.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Interesting idea. But I'd say that many open source applications (and even some non-OSS) already work this way where users file requests and people also vote on them. Atlassian's JIRA/Confluence are good examples.

All the best with this guys. :-)

First bug: Get a issue tracking system up!