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‘Signature Survey’ Revisited

Ivan Moscoso, Thursday, March 5, 2009 @ 10:24 pm

Hieroglyphics

'hieroglyphics' by Em_G

One of the things I most admire about Ward Cunningham's work is that you can read something like 'Signature Survey' and still find new things to appreciate, even years later.

Ward's original article discussed a method to tackle large code bases (based somewhat on Tufte's ideas on data visualization). To quote the original article, he summarized the process as the iterative application of two steps:

1. Inspection. Browse the report looking for startlingly regular or startlingly irregular structure. Examine the source code associated with each (ir)regularity.

2. Projection. Modify the summarization program (the cgi script that generates the report) so as to represent aspects of the inspected code that seem relevant to the inquiry at hand.

The real lesson I took years ago from 'Signature Survey' is that, when dealing with any sufficiently complex problem, knowing which questions to ask may not be obvious. And rather than approaching each problem with the same set of questions or criteria in mind, it is useful to let the problem itself guide you to the right questions.

All of this should seems obvious right? It is, after all, a simple idea. Still, if you have never done so, I would ask you to really give this idea some thought. Sleep on it. Think about it during your walk back from lunch tomorrow and take your time with it. Toy with the idea and some current problem you are working on. I'm not kidding-- the exercise will be worthwhile in the end, and will continue to pay off.

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Topics: agile thinking, data visualization

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