Custom Code Bad, Custom Code Good – Notes for your Software License Agreement

At a vendor presentation recently, I saw something funny on a slide of "best practices" for implementing supply chain planning in SAP: Avoid ZAPO and ZATP ... which means Avoid customizing ATP and APO functions in SAP <aside> A bit of tech humor there; the convention for naming customized code in SAP is to prefix with a Z. Most platforms have unique styles for calling out their customizations. For QAD (written in Progress/4GL), the accepted prefix is xx_. On AS/400…

Components, IT Responsiveness, and the Rosemont Horizon

Technical people are often engineers at heart, and really want to see controlled processes in and around their computer systems. We see source code control, configuration management, and process documentation as ways to manage long term maintenance costs and deliver repeatable, reliable results from our systems. In the realm of ERP systems, this would seem to be a common and well-regarded mind set; however, the businesses supported by these systems often demand information transparency, process flexibility, and quick turnaround of…

Pendulum swings – Santayana says …

I saw Stewart's article on customized software in ComputerWorld this week, and googled (Googled?) a bit more and found a pair of good posts from Scavo (Keller/AMR started it all), speaking of an apparent trend back to favoring custom-built software in business today. A few thoughts ... A classic blunder made by many corporate IT groups is to buy into the idea that custom software is easy. It's certainly fun - much easier to develop a brand new piece of…

Going all the way – central reporting database

When implementing centralized reporting systems, you need to make sure you are prepared to go "all the way" - after the implementation is done. We've recently finished the first phase of a project to centralize and consolidate financial reporting in a single tool / platform; pretty common stuff, and this story is relevant to any data warehouse / consolidated reporting platform. A week or so ago, we had an internal IT meeting to review report requests. One of the business…

Motivating Maintenance Programmers

7 January, 2005
Application Development, People Management
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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"…

Interesting Design Sessions

Had two interesting design sessions yesterday, both of which got me thinking / observing ... Push to Prod A team of techs, working in a Unix / Progress environment (QAD MFG/PRO eB2), reviewing our plans for improving our Dev/Test/Prod cycle for controlling / auditing the movement of source between environments. A little history - we didn't get off to a good start because of two key mistakes: Mistake #1: We started with the concept(s) of Development, Test, and Production environments,…