Are two heads really better than one? By sponsoring a Reality TV-style battle between the world's finest software developers, the Hydra Versus Dragon Coding Competition, N-BRAIN, Inc. intends to definitively answer this question.A chance to win more than $7,000 in prizes is offered to software developers at the contest which begins June 23 and offers Java. Prizes include A fully loaded Mac Book Pro from Apple Computer, Subversion hosting from CVSDude, UNA licenses and hosting from N-BRAIN and Virtacore, and agile training from Industrial Logic are some of the prizes included.
The contest, which is the largest spectator event in the history of software development competitions, is designed to draw tens of thousands of viewers from the global software development community. Delivered daily over the span of two weeks, viewers can track the progress of their favorite teams in online episodes. As developers race against the clock trying to solve fiendishly difficult problems, the episodes will feature highlights from actual coding sessions. Industry veterans, who will analyze and comment on the approaches taken by the different teams, will narrate the episodes. Helping to determine the winner of the competition, viewers of the episodes will be able to rate teams.
Qualifying contestants compete in teams of two. All teams compete in the Dragon style for one problem, and the Hydra style for a different problem. Each team works to solve the problem using a single-user edition of UNA, communicating through e-mail, and using a shared version control repositoryi in the Dragon style, while in the Hydra style, each team works to solve a different problem using the real-time collaborative edition of UNA, communicating using UNA itself.
The Hydra style represents N-BRAIN's approach to software development, while the Dragon style mimics how software has been developed for the past few decades, which emphasizes working together in real-time as a way to increase quality and lower costs.Team submissions are passed through an automated test suite, then assigned a score based on the number of passing tests, the time taken from contest start until program submission, and the rating given to the team by viewers of the competition. While all participants receive a free license to UNA Personal Edition (a value of $100), each member of the winning team receives the full suite of prizes.
