Paul Khuong: some Lisp

What I look for in GSoC proposals

Mar 23rd, 2014 | Comments

EDIT: Added a link to a solid proposal from last year (PDF).

It’s already Google Summer of Code season; like spring, it’s slightly earlier this year. For multiple reasons – including the accelerated schedule and my transition to having a Real Job – I did not manage to guide any of the students who sent in applications. After an initial ranking, we’re left with a fair number of decent proposals for a Summer of SBCL. They’re of comparable quality, and all leave me a bit uneasy. In this post, I’ll try to explain what I look for in GSoC proposals… or, really, in action plans in general.

I care about the quality of GSoC plans for two reasons. First, because it reassures me that the applicant understands the difficulties they’ll have to overcome to complete their project. Second, because, like TDD, a good plan makes it easier to feel when we’re making concrete progress. To me, these two factors are necessary conditions for a good success rate.

We’ll probably allow additional time to update the proposals we have already received, so hopefully this post can be immediately useful. I have a single vote, and other mentors no doubt have different criteria. I only hope that this post can give ideas to applicants looking to review their proposal.

Why? Software development can’t be planned!

This is a common objection to any form of planning for software projects. I don’t understand where it comes from.

Software development should be easier to plan than most endeavours: we have to deal with relatively few people, and, when we do, it’s rarely in an adversarial setting… and I’m willing to bet most of us can better forecast the behaviour of programs than that of people. There’s currently an electoral campaign in Québec, and I’m certain that, before the date was even announced, every single party had a precise plan for each day, at the riding, regional, and provincial levels. Politicians can do it; why can’t software developers?

Of course, there will be constant adjustments to the initial plan. The reason I think it’s important to spend time and thought on that plan isn’t to stick to it, but primarily because it forces us to systematically consider all sorts of potential issues, challenges, failure modes, etc. This exercise becomes useful when problems crop up: rather than making decisions in the heat of the moment, we can rely on our past (well rested and composed) self’s research, notes, and ideas.

I also find plans tend to become much more handwavy as we get farther in the future. That’s a normal tendency. I think we’re usually pretty good at short-term planning; most people can cook a meal without sitting down to figure out how they’ll cause awesome chemical reactions to occur without burning their house down. It’s a different matter when it comes to month-long camping trips or feeding a thousand people.

The difference is one of scale, and it’s exactly when we’re out of our comfort zone that mindful planning becomes useful. I expect an action plan to be as thorough in its last week as in its first. Most of it will be fiction, but, as I wrote above, the thinking involved in writing that fiction is what I’m after.

The overall structure I’m used to

There are tons of ways to describe a plan. I like this one, but the main thing is what I have in mind when I read each section. For instance, last year’s proposal for register allocation via graph colouring (PDF) had:

  1. the project’s aim, with a description of the high level goal (better register allocation) and of mechanisms to implement (new allocation heuristic, live range splitting and coalescing, etc.);
  2. a plan section, describing each proposed step (find examples of bad allocation, write a new simple allocator, write a visualisation tool, …) in details;
  3. a schedule at a 2-week granularity, with references to the detailed descriptions and deliverables for each step;
  4. a list of risks and challenges in the project;
  5. a short cv;
  6. why the student felt motivated and suitable for the project.

It’s a different structure than what I suggest below, but both mostly present the same information. My wish is to feel confident that the student has done the work to have that information.

First, a description of the goal. SBCL offers prefab proposals, and it’s tempting to just copy-paste. However, I feel much more confident in the intrinsic motivation of a student who’s made the project their own. Many of our suggestions are skeletons for projects; it should be easy to come up with ways to extend and better specify them according to the student’s interests. Others are already fleshed out; those are a bit harder, but even small variations on the initial theme are encouraging. In all cases, if I don’t feel like the student owns the project, I probably won’t rank the proposal highly, and certainly won’t be inclined to mentor them. The problem statement is a simple way to demonstrate one’s understanding of – and interest for – the project.

Second, a review of the current environment. What currently exists, in SBCL or elsewhere? Can we exploit interesting research or code? Has there been previous efforts, and how/why did they not pan out? Perhaps there’s a relevant post-mortem from a similar project that will help understand the problem domain. What potential difficulties do we know of? What don’t we know (known unknowns)? How bad do we estimate unknown unknowns to be, and why? What persons or resources could be helpful? To a certain extent, this is simply demonstrating that one’s done their due diligence. However, it also tells other people (e.g., potential mentors) how they can best work with the applicant. This section should be a good resource to re-read when bad things happen.

Third, the suggested course of action at a high level. Not only what would happen in a perfect execution, but, ideally, ways to address (ahead of time or when/if they occur) some of the difficulties and unknowns listed in the previous section.

Fourth, success indicators, a translation of the initial goal description into a few checkboxes. Ideally, the criteria are falsifiable… much like an experiment, with the null hypothesis being project failure. I find that checking even a few of these boxes gives me a good sense of closure on a project.

Finally the calendar, to show how one might execute the third section and satisfy the success indicators in the fourth section. The first few weeks are usually easy to envision, but proposals tend to become fuzzier with time. I’m more confident in proposals that only use one or two -week periods, with actions and a few testable for each period. Shorter periods make fuzziness more obvious, but, more importantly, they combine with the milestones to let us tell that we’re (or aren’t) getting traction.

In the unfortunate case that we’re somehow not making the expected progress, frequent milestones means we can tell more quickly that something is off. We only have to make up for a one week setback rather than for a month, i.e., one quarter of the GSoC program. The odds of outright project failure are lower, and we don’t risk feeling (as) down for wasting a month of work.

One thing that I find particularly scary in project calendars are “Magic Happens” steps. This seems more common with longer planning periods. Many proposals are quite detailed with respect to preliminary work and research, and to final integration and documentation. The issue is that most of the work is stashed in a 3-5 week interval during which the actual project becomes completed. It’s not clear what the student will do to get there (or even who will do the work ;). Planning each week individually makes such steps obvious.

I know that it’s hard to determine how we’ll achieve a goal when we’ve never done something similar before. But we can pretend. I want to feel that an applicant has a clear idea how to execute the task they propose, if only in an artificial perfect world. Otherwise, why should I believe they can do so in reality?

Planning is fiction

That’s it. I’m told that writers should show rather than tell. I feel the same about plans. I like to be shown how goals could be achieved in ideal and less-than-ideal worlds rather than told when steps will be completed. I think the most important point is that I don’t appreciate detailed plans because we should (or can) stick to them. Rather, I believe that the exercise of coming up with such a plan is an efficient way to ensure we can fruitfully respond to what’ll actually happen when we execute it.

The regalloc proposal was one of the longest ones last year, but I felt confident that the student had a good idea of what challenges made the task non-trivial. In the end, we followed only a small part of the plan: it’s hard to come up with a suite of bad regalloc examples, visualisation turned out not to scale to real code, and there was too little time to work on live range splitting. However, every time there was a change, Alexandra had no problem determining how to adjust the schedule and figuring out the next step. On my end, I could easily follow the modified schedule and see that we were making progress.

This planning exercise is not easy, and it’s certainly not quick. (FWIW, I find it useful to get someone else, even without relevant experience, to look at the plan and ask questions.) Action plans have helped me countless times: when I needed to react to problems; when I felt like I was running in circles but could tell for sure that I was making progress; when a project forcibly came to an end but I still had a sense of closure… Hopefully, they can do the same for SBCL GSoC students.

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