A hive mind invaded my place of work recently, causing some very geek-specific thrills, and also providing a pleasant reminder that sometimes the software business isn't completely brain-dead.

As developers working near the top of many layers of shifting C++ source code, at work we spend a fair amount of time waiting for projects to compile. The company spends to keep developer machines powerful in order to avoid such wasted time, but there can still be substantial waiting at various stages throughout the coding day. The delays can be long enough to convince one to work in ways that avoid long rebuilds whenever possible, and usually this means some other quality of the code suffers.

So, tool-driving Andrew Birkett downloaded a thirty-day evaluation version of a neat utility by the (dodgy) name of IncrediBuild from a company called Xoreax. It's a compile farm that integrates nicely into DevStudio. In English: when one developer needs to compile something, then their computer can get help from other computers that happen not to be working so hard at the time, offloading work onto them. Typically we developers are thinking and writing and browsing the web more often then we are stuck waiting for the machine to compile, so there's plenty of spare computer power around to use in this way.

Now, this is a simple idea, but IncrediBuild deserves credit for having implemented it so effectively. The tool has worked without any serious technical problems so far, and it has worked very well. With eight or so machines in the farm last week and all the developers working as usual, on average we were seeing things working about four times faster than usual. This kind of access to distributed resources gives sad software geeks like us a buzz - normally relatively sane and sometimes sober people were getting quite excited about having tens of GHz of processing power to compile with. Also, there were lots of pretty colors as well as the fast changing numbers. Yay! Um. Oh, right, yes: this kind of Grid computing use of computer power is also currently a bit trendy, so it was great to see the concept in practice, working to do something useful.

The thing that gave me the most pleasure, though, was the way in which a non-technical problem got resolved. A few engineers installed the software earlier in the week and, enthused, were evangelising others to try it. Sooner or later someone was bound to read the click-through license that appears when installing it, and this said we couldn't use the evaluation version for commercial development work.

Groans of frustration, because there's no way for us to effectively evaluate the software for practical use unless we use it practically - little tests limited in time and scope aren't going to show up the relevant issues. Without much hope, I suggested we write Xoreax to let them know they were shooting themselves in the foot with this license. Then we all stop using the software, and it looks like another neat idea has been suffocated by some truly silly legal baggage.

But within twenty-four hours, someone with power at Xoreax writes back, and basically says: yes, you're right, the terms of the evaluation license don't accord with what we're trying to achieve here, we'll change them, and do please go ahead and evaluate it sensibly in the mean time.

I think that's commendable behaviour from a software company: this sort of immediate exercise of common sense (rather than a week of meetings) deserves success. Their response made this geek even happier than the power and the numbers and the pretty colors.

Tags: software_development
Current Mood: pleased