Real Time Development

Not to be confused with realtime systems. This is a term I have coined to see if it will catch on, if I'm honest. It's based on the following philosophy:

The ability to capture and deal with feedback is a great indicator of quality, both of working practices and the end deliverables. Feedback comes in all shapes and sizes and the earlier it can be captured, the easier and cheaper it is to deal with.

What if we could get feedback in realtime? It's an ideal for sure, but consider the trends of Agile development, lean startups, super fast test executions with file watcher triggers and so forth. You could say we're not that far off from this ideal with all the magic efforts the community has put in.

From a developer's perspective, here are the key feedback areas and how they are detected:

Feedback	Detection mechanisms	Currently Implemented
Code quality	Static analysis	Test Coverage
Regression	Automated testing	Unit & end-to-end acceptance
Exceptions	Logging	Soon
Performance	Monitoring	Soon

Of course each one of those detection mechanisms needs to be implemented, and this is often missed out all together in an end-to-end deployment pipeline, let alone on an individual developer's machine. RTD is the toolset and wiring required to get the above-mentioned feedback.