What On Earth Is Moldable Development

Chances are you have never heard of moldable development. And that is OK. But it is an interesting approach to try to solve the biggest time sink in development, namely understanding the current system. Developers spend over 50% of their time trying to figure out the system - can we make this more efficient? Enter Moldable Development.

The whole concept is about reimagining software engineering as decision making which I think is an interesting take. If you think about, data is never explored in its raw format, so why should code be treated in the same way in order to understand it. To do this sort of gathering of understanding, you need to build tools to create this view and this is what Moldable Development is all about. Think of it like Test Driven Development, except driven by examples to drive an understanding of the underlying code instead of unit tests.

It follows a simple methodology, namely start with a hypothesis, look at existing ways to analyze and then perform the analysis, interpret the results and then repeat or make a decision.. Moldable development comes in when the existing analysis is not the best approach. You can mold a tool to enable better analysis.

But do you have to do this custom each time? Well software requires context and, often, context is specific. So cutting the barrier to entry for creating examples is key. Enter Glamourous Toolkit - aimed at making this easy to do.

Check out https://moldabledevelopment.com/ to learn more.