Cyclomatic complexity

[Richard Gaskin]

Skip wrote:

 >> Richard wrote:
 >>
 >> Here's that thrown-together result:
 >> <http://fourthworld.net/lc/4w-projprofiler.png>
 >
 > I think there might be several people interested in your stack,
 > if you are willing to share :)

Very - whenever I post a screen shot of a tool I'm working on the 
intention is to make that tool available once it's been sufficiently 
debugged and "productized".

As Steven McConnell reminds us in his book "Code Complete", the 
difference in level of effort between a personal tool and a product can 
be an order of magnitude, because "with a tool it need only be possible 
to use it correctly, but with a product it should be impossible to use 
it incorrectly".

My inclination is to give tools and code away at no cost, and sometimes 
even under GPL or other open source licenses when they're a good fit for 
the project's goals, so folks can use them and share them easily.

Despite my inclinations, however, my accountant reminds me I'm not 
getting any younger, and that I need to remain mindful of little things 
down the road like retirement.

Like most of us, I toss together ad hoc solutions to help with whatever 
I need to do in my professional work, and now and then things are either 
so trivial that they don't require much polishing to be worth sharing 
(e.g. gZipper and DeskView), or are so necessary to my professional work 
that they're already at least polished enough for others to use (e.g. 
devolution and Flight Recorder).

But other things require a bit of work to turn them from something 
useful only to me into something that can benefit others as well.

Looking at the GBs of PBIs (Partly-Baked Ideas) on my hard drives I 
realize some of those would be useful to share - if I can find a way to 
make the time for that away from client work.

I've considered various forms of crowd-funding, but for small things 
like dev tools it's often more work to set up a campaign and manage it 
within Kickstarter or even IndieGoGo than to just finish the tool itself.

So while I'm focused right now on meeting some hefty client deadlines, I 
wanted to at least confirm that yes, the code base analysis tool and 
others will become available at first opportunity (devolution 4.0 is 
very close to testable release), and to let you know I'm considering a 
donation-based system to gauge the community's interest in these sorts 
of things.

I'm open to other ideas, but at the moment donations seem a good balance 
of flexibility for both myself and anyone interested in the tools.

There will likely be multiple donation levels to choose from, so if you 
want email support that would be available at a certain minimum, and 
other incentives for higher amounts, yet still allow a gratis option for 
those who may not yet have income streams the tools contribute to.

There are risks with any model, and I don't expect any donations from 
dev tools to do as much for my retirement as consumer apps do.  But 
every little bit helps so that's my intention at the moment, unless 
someone here has a better idea for both making more money to keep such 
efforts viable while also making the tools very easily available for 
anyone who can benefit from them.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com