Rothman suggests we use the term Defect, not Bug - as if Defect is a more honest / real word, and Bug is somehow more evasive, non-descript. Au contraire - my guess is that Ms. Rothman does not have a programming background! When you say to a Programmer that their software has a bug, they typically take great offense; I remember how fast a consultant turned from smooth professional to defensive techno-geek the instant I suggested their work product had…
(attrib) I was in a meeting yesterday - first time with this particular group of folks, all at same time, on this topic, although I had already established a working relationship with all. Anyway, subject matter was one that most of them had talked about at length over the past few weeks, but I was a new addition to the mix. Suffice it to say, I didn't have too much to add to the conversation, not until the very end…
Had a week full of vendor meetings and presentations this week, captured some random thoughts: Bad Buzzwords 1 - I definitely tune folks out when they use the word "cool" to describe some piece of technology - how 1990's. The weird one came this week from a older gent, representing a fairly large company that has mixed hardware and professional services areas. A true moment of cognitive dissonance to hear that one. Bad Buzzwords 2 - Another one - probably…
Interesting article in Thinking Faster, just getting around to capturing my comments ... On Requirements "The first reason that business folks don't get what they need from IT is because they aren't sure what they want" The fundamental challenge of capturing and managing knowledge - it's much easier to understand something than it is to describe, document, teach it. Why do so many organizations do knowledge transfer and training by saying "follow that person around for 3 months"? Of course,…
Well, we're not exactly seeing agressive price drops, but we are looking for ways to either cut or control growth of software costs. Some specifics: Understand how the software is licensed. Concurrent Users? Actively monitor the number of users during peak times. Make sure you are paying maintenance only on the number of users that really attach - not the number of named users. Processor count or power? Watch out for server upgrades - you may get stuck with an…
Interesting project that I have to take a deep-dive on this week - has to do with automating a piece of barcode printing software, and integrating it with a newly developed labeling process out in the shop. Project was hitting some significant snags, and I was asked to step in. Here's where hands-on software development skills are a boon and a curse ... The perception is that we're trying to get the forms software to work in a certain way…
Interesting conversation today with one of my application managers. As we move into the new year, we're doing some "spring cleaning" of the older projects in our PMO. Two from last summer had languished - efforts to develop simple web front ends for order inquiry and dealer information - and I asked my lead web developer to audit them (make sure we've got source code under version control, check out the tech architecture for the supporting database, etc.) before "closing"…
Well, Raymond Chen has blown me away with his detail, but I have another take on the whole History of Spam thing - the impact of spammers changing message formats to get past the spam filters. My curious habit is to count my email into two categories; read vs. unread. This was originally meant to be a measure of the pointless cc: / newsletter / internal announcement stuff I receive everyday; I have Outlook set to mark an eMail as…
The outgoing intranet was nice, in that it gave content owners the ability to control what was visible / available. Unfortunately, we've come to discover that a number of corporate services areas (Safety, HR, Transportation, etc.) in our organization used the intranet but never took part of the content management (CM) - it all came "from above". Basically, these folks are about to get a "crash course" in CM and Knowledge Management (KM), albeit in small bites. When you read…
This week, we're kicking off a new project, implementing an intranet / portal for our newly independent company. I'm fascinated at how the "state of the art " has moved forward so much since the "old days" of the 90's. This is actually my third or fourth cut at an application like this (depending on how you define "portal"), and I'm sure it's going a bit faster simply because we're skipping over some portal design and admin process "dead ends"…