I find that I have a stack of four or five small research projects that have come up (in the sense of “I won­der what would hap­pen if…oh, right, that would be cool”) over the last seven weeks. Any one of them would involve about 40 person-​​hours of work: a very small amount of up-​​front analy­sis and design, some (appar­ently) minor pro­gram­ming to enhance or extend pre-​​existing evo­lu­tion­ary and/​or sim­u­la­tion frame­works that are pub­licly avail­able, some data col­lec­tion and analy­sis, some writ­ing. Any one of them would result in 1 or 2 posters for sure, with an addi­tional 1–2 con­fer­ence talks and papers avail­able through a bit (20%?) of extra effort.

Yet here I sit, merely a first-​​year grad­u­ate stu­dent, with classes and crap to do. I don’t have time to do all of it, let alone my real home­work. Which is a sin. So I want some­body to do it with me, where “with” is a nuanced ver­sion of “for” with a heavy dose of friendly col­le­gial­ity. I want to be, in the par­lance of the agile soft­ware devel­op­ment peo­ple, the cus­tomer on these projects, and that means I need to be involved at least as much on the team doing the work as any one of them is.

I say that last, mak­ing sure to point out I mean “cus­tomer in the sense of agile soft­ware devel­op­ment”, because I know how scary and weird and offen­sive this whole notion is going to sound. It will sound like I’m invok­ing “mile­stones” and act­ing the role of some pointy-​​haired boss who wants to bring the True Light of Six Sigma — no: Seven Sigma! — to the stu­pid, waste­ful lab­o­ra­tory and mess with and ruin the Way Things Are. And that’s wrong, I assure you: I wear a buz­z­cut these days.

No, really. It’s very short.^*

See, I am sur­rounded at work by very bright peo­ple who are forced to do very dumb things with their time and atten­tion. They are busy, all the time, because they are all forced (or choose) at every turn to do every bit of every project they them­selves have thought of. The cul­ture demands it: These peo­ple need to pro­gram and do lab exper­i­ments for them­selves (which is a poor use of their time, and tends to result in sub­stan­dard code/​data and untrust­wor­thy results). If they are not pro­gram­ming and doing lab exper­i­ments for them­selves, they are expected to employ green, inex­pe­ri­enced peo­ple and pay them a pit­tance to learn on the job (which “sink or swim” approach has scant ped­a­gogic value if any, and tends to result in sub­stan­dard code/​data and untrust­wor­thy results). They are often left to play a cow­boy­ish “exploratory” game with their projects, in which they fart around with things and under­take lit­tle exper­i­ments with no accep­tance cri­te­ria or thought of when they will know they’re done, or what they will do with promis­ing leads they have no resources to fol­low up on (which is often a waste of their fund­ing, and tends to result &c &c). And they need to keep their cards to close to their chests, so their “com­peti­tors” can­not “steal” their ideas and grab all the credit, so they work in rel­a­tive iso­la­tion until they are “ready” to pub­lish their work (which &c &c).

And you know what? I can’t give away good ideas in such a place. Not only is there no venue for doing so: there is no audi­ence. Nine­teen times out of twenty, you tell some­body some­thing, and they nod and say “that’s inter­est­ing” — even when they’re repli­cat­ing long-​​known work from some other dis­ci­pline — and carry on as before.

Some research projects I’ve heard about recently make me think of Tibetan prayer wheels: only by repeat­ing the same research over and over in every dis­ci­pline, one at a time, with­out cross-​​reference, can the benev­o­lent atten­tion of Truth come to all dis­ci­plines in turn. Either that, or plain copy­ing is low-​​hanging fruit.…

These will be famil­iar tropes to long-​​term read­ers, who should be bored out of their patient skulls by now. And now I want to do some­thing about it.

So, here’s a stab, with one project I want to do right now:

Hey folks, we’re form­ing a band (of researchers)!
Want to do way-​​cool bleed­ing edge engi­neer­ing and sci­ence, live and in pub­lic? Wanted: Two or three smart folks, at least two famil­iar with C++, for a quick suite of exper­i­ments involv­ing the genetic pro­gram­ming of opti­miza­tion algo­rithms, prob­a­bly using the PushGP and Push­pop sys­tems for auto­matic code gen­er­a­tion. The project will be run at least a lit­tle bit “agile”, mean­ing we will have fre­quent quick and to the point meet­ings online, we will obey 100% shared own­er­ship of all code, will stress unit and accep­tance tests (and will dis­cover what that implies in a research set­ting), and try at every turn to make sure that the stuff we’re doing brings us as close as pos­si­ble to the thing we want. I expect it will take some­where on the scale of 40–50 hours over­all (from every­body) over a period of three months, for which trou­ble we will all get to be coau­thors on all derived papers and blog entries. You need not be an aca­d­e­mic researcher or domain spe­cial­ist to apply, but should be com­fort­able with a devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment that’ll work C++. R lan­guage skills a plus! But don’t plan on keep­ing the project, process or results a secret. Every­thing will be trans­par­ent and avail­able for pub­lic comment.

And at the same time, we’ll be try­ing to dis­cover a use­ful and for­mal agile research methodology.

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^*Oh, and Six Sigma sucks. As I see it. For this. So don’t worry.