We are consultants.
We are researchers.
We are authors.
Our mission is to make the inside of software systems explainable. We believe this is achievable by affecting the way we look at systems. We regard software engineering as being primarily a decision making activity, and we treat tools as being essential.
We contribute two things towards our goal. We invented Moldable Development, a way of programming through which we construct custom tools for each software development problem. To show how this can be practical, we are developing Glamorous Toolkit, the moldable development environment.
Timeline
2009
Tudor Gîrba authors the Humane Assessment method which pioneers the idea that software development should be regarded primarily as a decision making activity, and shows how systems can be made explainable through systematic construction of custom tools.
2011
The first incarnation of the Glamorous Toolkit inspector shows that individual objects can be visualized in practical ways.
2014
After intensive applications of software assessment in industry, Tudor’s work receives international recognition through the Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize. He is the only recipient of the prize acting from industry. His acceptance keynote puts forward the concept of software environmentalism.
2015
feenk is founded and takes on somewhat odd, but ambitious customer projects.
2017
The work on the new generation of Glamorous Toolkit starts.
2018
2019
The first public demo of Moldable Development. Moldable Development is a generalization of Humane Assessment, and the demo provides an overview of its applicability.
2020
Glamorous Toolkit beta is released.
2021
Lepiter is integrated in Glamorous Toolkit.
2023
Glamorous Toolkit 1.0 is released.
Funding
We fund ourselves through customer projects. We work with two kinds of customers: those that face some sort of a challenge with a legacy system, and those that seek a competitive advantage.
On the one side of the spectrum, we work with teams having to deal with large legacy systems that are considered difficult (and often impossible) to move forward. Typical problems take the shape of either strategic assessments, or of steering agile architecture. A strategic assessment is required when the team faces a broad decision, such as migrating to a new technology, adopting a new architecture, or evaluating the path to perform a crosscutting change. The steering agile architecture scenarios relate to teams that want to internalize the ability of making informed architectural decisions and evolving the system in a piecemeal fashion. The two often co-exist: a strategic assessment is often complemented by the need of steering the technical work to reach the goal.
On the other side of the spectrum, we work with startups to help them innovate faster. We do this by materializing the domain in code that acts like executable specifications in that it is visualized in a way that non-technical people can evaluate.
While these problems are typically considered radically different, we approach them uniformly. For all these projects we use exclusively the same tools and technique we create. There are two reasons for it. First, we believe our tools and techniques provide unique abilities. Second, applying the same tools and techniques to a broad range of real-life scenarios provide empirical evidence supporting the generality of our research.
feenk etymology
feenk is a word we made up and comes from feel and think. That's because, even in our technical world, the way we feel is as important as the way we think.
Team
Ioana Girba
Storyteller