Extra Thimian

The Twitter/Ruby on Rails world is abuzz with the “Rails Maturity Model”.

So, curious fellow that I am, I have taken a look at the website.

And I’m left with a big “huh?”

Yes, that’s right, I have no idea what it is about. And I have the feeling that I’m not alone in this. A lot of the negative reaction seems to be that nobody has an idea what RMM is actually about. The website itself doesn’t make it too clear.

The FAQ says:

A lot of what makes the Rails community special might not have that much to do with Rails technology itself. We could be right about that, or we could be wrong. Either way, we’re interested in finding out about the practices of the Rails community and don’t really care about other communities.

So it’s about finding out what makes the Rails community commercially successful. Fascinating.

But at the moment, it only shows what Rails corporations use. There is no real explanation except a short marketing blurb (nothing wrong with marketing, but it doesn’t allow for critical discussion). There is no discussion as to what the practice is, how it is done, nor what its benefits and downsides are. There is no way to get meaning out of the data.

Of course, if you are in the Rails space, you’ll know everything about TDD, BDD, Cucumber, git, Textmate, and pair programming.

You’ll know about continuous integration, collective code ownership, or Passenger.

RMM is very young. You can’t even sign up for the beta yet, except by sending an email. No problem with that. After all, any database needs seeding with data first, not to mention development of features and bug fixing. No better way than getting user feedback for that.

But to become a database of best practices, it needs to provide context.

For that it needs a couple of features:

• The size, revenue, and target demogrpahic / area of expertise of a corporation using any given technique
• A definition of techniques, and their benefits and downsides. Any technique has downsides. If it is just cost or space requirements
• A way to discuss a technique
• Visualizing how techniques, revenues, employee morale, and corporations relate (if at all possible. How to assign a hard and fast value to morale? Or how to normalize corporations of different sizes, revenues, and markets?)
• A lack of rankings. I don’t care how many people actually endorse a given technique or tool. wycats already expressed why that can be a bad idea.

At the moment, I fail to see what the benefit of RMM is for me, somebody interested in how others do their thing. To be of use, it is at least lacking some of the above features (size & revenue, as well as area of expertise). In short, I can’t build useful relationships from the data presented.

In any case, I’m looking forward to see RMM mature beyond this point. Until then, take a look at it, and keep an open mind, no matter on which side of the fence you are.

Filed under: Rails, Rantings, Society & Culture, Software development by Phill