PDD in Action

Puzzle Driven development (PDD) is a methodology we’ve been practicing on our teams for more than seven years. Using PDD, we delegate the responsibility of task decomposition to its performers, eliminating the role of a project manager. We’ve been using our proprietary software for that. A month ago, we made it public, open source, and free. It is available as 0pdd—a GitHub-based chat bot.

Here is how you configure it, in two steps. First, you grant access to @0pdd in GitHub (if your repository is private).

Second, you add a webhook to your GitHub repository: https://www.0pdd.com/hook/github (with just push event and any content type). I would actually recommend to send GitHub notifications through ReHTTP and use this URL for the webhook: http://p.rehttp.net/https://www.0pdd.com/hook/github.

Now, your repository is being watched by 0pdd. Every time you git push something new, it does a git pull and retrieves your changes from GitHub. Then it runs pdd, a command line tool that scans the entire code base (only the master branch) and finds all occurrences of @todo markers.

For all newly found markers, 0pdd will submit new issues to the GitHub issue-tracking section of your repository.

Also, when you remove markers from your code base, 0pdd will immediately close issues it created.

Now, when an issue is assigned to a programmer, we allow him or her to cut corners and return incomplete code back to the master. If and when the code is not complete, we ask the programmer to leave @todo markers in the code, called “puzzles.” Later, these puzzles will be assigned to other programmers, and so on. Eventually, the problem will be fixed when most puzzles are resolved.

0pdd helps you automate this process and provides a summary report of the current situation with all puzzles in the entire code base. You can even add a nice badge to your GitHub repo:

If you click it, you will see the full report of all puzzles currently present and previously seen.

This mechanism helps us in many projects. You can use it for free. It’s an open source Ruby product; feel free to contribute.