about
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this whole thing is about me paying attention to software development, project management, and testing. i hope it suits you as much as it suits me.
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Notes from Enterprise IA discussions (Sydney) ( Column Two ) |
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I presented at the Oz-IA conference today in Sydney on "Succeeding at IA in the enterprise". I'll share the presentation file as soon as I work out why it won't let me upload the file to my site. In the... 2006-10-01T16:56:24+10:00
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Presentation: Oz-IA conference (Sydney) ( Column Two ) |
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I gave a presentation today at the inaugural Oz-IA conference in Sydney. The topic of the talk was on "Succeeding at IA in the enterprise", covering: Reworking our methodologies Taking a strategic approach Tackling organisational change Understanding technology Taking a... 2006-10-01T17:23:11+10:00
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The enemy of intranets is apathy ( Column Two ) |
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Many intranet teams see themselves as battling resistance to change when attempting to grow the intranet or deliver new functionality. The challenge is perceived as overcoming these barriers to a successful intranet. In practice, though, the real enemy of intranets... 2006-09-30T14:44:18+10:00
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The intranet homepage, protect it with a policy ( Column Two ) |
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The intranet homepage can be the most coveted piece of online real estate in your organisation. Everyone will have their own firm view as to how the homepage should be used to drive organisational imperatives. Managing these competing priorities is... 2006-09-30T14:37:57+10:00
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Separate design and the CMS ( Column Two ) |
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There are two major elements to most web redevelopment projects: the redesign of the existing site, and the selection of a new (or replacement) content management system (CMS). These two elements reflect the underlying issues that typically drive web projects:... 2006-09-30T14:50:28+10:00
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The ideal designer & PM ( Column Two ) |
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Scott Berkun has written an article on the ideal designer and project manager. To quote: One question I'm often asked is what is the ideal designer? - I get this from managers or VPs in tech companies, trying to figure... 2006-09-30T15:32:48+10:00
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Mysql Tuners ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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Tuning a new MySQL install from the excellent MySQL performance blog. See also: MySQL performance blog, Related Entries Revisited, Recent Comments bug fix, Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications Tagged as: mysql performance Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:59:04 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Snapple grapple ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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Friday Fun: iPod vs Zune ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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Friday Fun: iPod vs Zune -- Great head-to-head comparison. Favorite observation: "Now that's what I call planning." 2006-09-29T17:33:00Z
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Feedburner Ad Network ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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I'm going to experiment with splicing ads in my RSS feed. I've joined Explore Social Media (a FeedBurner Network). If any subscribers object to this, please let me know in comments and it will weight heavy in my decision. I'm... 2006-09-28T18:55:34-07:00
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De-Centralized Intelligence Agency ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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This week I participated in a workshop with the CIA on blogs and wikis. What was fascinating was not just that the participants included Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Jerry Michalski, Eugene Kim, Marcia Conner and Jay Cross. The agency perhaps... 2006-09-28T07:54:13-07:00
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Branding the intranet ( Column Two ) |
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Toby Ward has written an article on branding the intranet. To quote: Does this mean though that the intranet home page should look like the Internet home page? No it doesn't. It should not be a replication of the external... 2006-09-28T11:41:42+10:00
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I’m Giving a Public Class in Wisconsin ( James Bach's Blog ) |
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The only public class I’m giving in the U.S. this year will be in Wisconsin, on October 18-19. It will be a version of my Rapid Software Testing Class, focusing on Exploratory Testing.
Details can be found at http://wisqa.org/bachclasses.htm
Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:57:05 +0000
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More on boolean expressions ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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My examples below use a simple rule for deciding what values of a boolean expression to test. I should probably describe it and justify it.
Given an expression with all
So the table for
The case for
The reasoning behind these rules is based on mutation testing, the name for a long thread of academic research on testing. The way I state it (which is different in an unimportant way from how it's usually put) is that mutation testing involves assuming that the code is incorrect in some definable way, then asking for a test suite that can distinguish the incorrect code you have from the correct code you should have. Now, for any given program, there are an infinite number of variants, so mutation testing depends on picking a definition-of-incorrectness that (a) lets you generate a reasonably small set of alternatives, but (b) gives you confidence that you've caught all the plausible errors. The usual approach is to assume one-token errors.
For example, suppose you are given
One-token errors aren't the only ones you could make. For example,
you might completely forget that
Suppose you have the original Trying all the possible combinations of variable values will either find a one-token error or kill all the mutants. But you never have to try all of them. There will be some test inputs that don't add anything: any mutant they kill will be killed by some other test input. So you can construct a minimal set for any given expression.
If you look at the table below, you can see that the rule
for
Remember all this assumes that tests powerful enough to catch
one-token errors will catch more complicated (but still plausible)
errors. A way to convince yourself is to try and find a variant
of
These rules are easy to memorize. The cases for expressions that
mix
When using the style I described earlier, I don't think you need
multi, because I'm tentatively advocating always breaking tables that
combine
1 I can't remember if the transformations I used when
working all this out included substituting one variable for another
(like 2 I'm leaving what it means to "run a program" vague. That gets to the difference of whether the mutation is "weak" or "strong". See this post by Ivan Moore. I didn't find much in the online literature about mutation testing; if you want to know more, you'll have to go to the library. There are some starting references at the end of this paper (PDF). (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Off the rails ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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I'm too sick to write what I should be writing, and I can't sleep, so I decided to collect my thoughts and references about a current political topic I've been studying as I have time. The normal sort of posts will return shortly, but for the moment I'll use whatever reputation I have for careful-but-sympathetic thought to push back against an all-but-inevitable failure. My understanding is that habeas corpus is a method by which prisoners can challenge their imprisonment before a judge. The idea has worked pretty well for 700 years. It fits with John Adam's phrase "a government of laws, not men": no one has exclusive power; everyone is subject to being checked and balanced. It is now due to be removed in a hastily-considered bill. Despite what some say, the idea of habeas is not to "give terrorists rights"; it is to preserve the rights of those wrongly accused as terrorists or unlawful combatants. There have been many such people already. Sometimes people are just detained; some are sent to Syria and tortured. The bill allows for review of detentions by military commissions, but to date only ten have been held. People can be held forever without any recourse. (Some people have continued to be held even after review found them innocent, though a large number have been released.) In newer versions of the bill, "people" can include US citizens. Unlike the military's current definition of unlawful combatant, which covers only "those who engage in acts against the United States or its coalition partners in violation of the laws of war and customs of war during an armed conflict," the new one covers anyone who "has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" or its military allies. Who are our allies? What does "material support" mean? I guess some of us might just find out. During detention, what? It is simply not the case, as the President stated, that Geneva Convention Common Article 3 is impossibly vague about the treatment of prisoners. Ironically, on the same day as that statement, the US military released its new procedures, which explicitly conform to the Geneva Conventions. It's not surprising that, in over fifty years, we've been able to come to agreement about what the Conventions require. But now we're going to replace them with new language that will have to be freshly interpreted. Everyone, save the people who'll actually be making the decisions—who refuse to commit themselves—is running around saying "waterboarding is allowable" or "waterboarding is not allowable", but that's silly. In the absence of court review, what's allowable is whatever's done. The legal principle is that "there is no right without a remedy." (Stories about what's being done will leak, I suppose, as they always do. That could lead to some sort of remedy. I wonder if leaking, receiving, or reporting leaks counts as "material support"?)The pros apparently don't think torture is effective:
But there's no institutional check on the non-professionals or the rogue professionals. We'll just have to rely on the moral character of everyone involved. That's of course entirely opposed to the American tradition of rule by laws, not men, but <sarcasm> apparently we face a threat more grave than the 45,000 nuclear warheads the Soviet Union had at its peak and a struggle more threatening than World War II, and so cannot afford the traditions that have worked for more than two hundred years </sarcasm>. We certainly face threats—always have, always will—but I don't see any reason to give into the "this time it's different" fallacy. All this matters to me because my parents grew up in Nazi Germany. I grew up knowing that cultures can descend into madness, and that it can happen without the majority ever really explicitly willing it or being really conscious of it. No, I'm not saying that America is just like Nazi Germany; I'm saying that men like my grandfather—not politically involved, just trying to live their lives—somehow, through fear or anger or depression or just passivity, let decency slip out of their grasp. It also matters because I grew up knowing that the Americans were the good guys. My father (in the German Navy) was captured near Marseille. He didn't mind; he and his fellows didn't fight back. They wanted out of the war, and they wanted to surrender to the safest force: the Americans. Prisoner of war camp (American and French) was no picnic—my father weighed 130 pounds when he got out—and there was abuse, but it was not institutionalized (except in one camp, for a short time). He got what he expected, and he believes he has no cause for complaint. In contrast, my Uncle Paul was captured by the Soviets on the eastern front. I imagine he fought harder than my father to avoid capture, because everyone knew what happened to Russian prisoners. And it did happen: it was 1950 before he even knew the war was over, and he came home broken for life. There's practical value to being seen as the good guys, the just guys, the humane guys. That's not just true when fighting Germans; it works in the middle east, too. Out of fear or anger or depression or just passivity, we're letting our elected representatives—our employees—reinforce hysteria to no effective end. If that bothers you, here is your Senator's contact information, and here is your Representative's. Although this bill is being pushed by Republicans, I believe it should not be a partisan issue. The bill does not square with the conservative tradition of Chesterton's gate. It's being rushed through because what being a Republican politician today means is all about winning at domestic politics. (Just as being a Democratic politician appears to be all about not losing.) I can echo the the author of this fantastic essay: I miss Republicans. I miss Eisenhower; he'd surprise you. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Stevey on Agile ( Joel on Software ) |
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Steve Yegge: “Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called ‘Agile’ programming, namely that it’s an idiotic fad-diet of a marketing scam making the rounds as yet another technological virus implanting itself in naive programmers who’ve never read ‘No Silver Bullet’, the kinds of programmers who buy extended warranties and self-help books and believe their bosses genuinely care about them as people, the kinds of programmers who attend conferences to make friends and who don’t know how to avoid eye contact with leaflet-waving fanatics in airports and who believe writing shit on index cards will suddenly make software development easier.” See also Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP. Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people. 27 Sep 2006 19:33:11 EST(link) [ Joel on Software ] |
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Gmail Storage Limit ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”Over the past couple of weeks, I've reached my Gmail storage limit, currently 2768... 2006-09-27T07:48:42-07:00
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Introducing collaboration technologies to the enterprise is a challenge ( Column Two ) |
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Dennis McDonald has written a piece on the challenge of introducing collaboration technologies in the enterprise. To quote: Successful collaboration tool introduction is based less on the characteristics of the tool itself than on the motivation users have to use... 2006-09-27T13:26:59+10:00
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Sponsoring Techmeme ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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I was too busy to blog this yesterday, but Socialtext became one of the first sponsors of Techmeme's new ad format and it might be helpful to share the rationale. What is appealing about the format itself is the ability... 2006-09-26T22:00:30-07:00
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Question: How do you stay sharp as a tester? ( James Bach's Blog ) |
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Shrini writes: How does a good tester keep his testing abilities sharpened all the times. compare it with keep our body fit as we grow old ( walking, jogging and going to Gym, eating healthyfood etc) - what you suggest for keeping “Tester health” in ‘fit and sound” condition?
Testing is analysis and problem solving. Here [...] Mon, 25 Sep 2006 06:56:04 +0000
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Describing yes/no choices in Fit ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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Using Fit to describe boolean (yes/no) decisions can be much clearer if you just insist that all decisions be expressed in multiple, uniform, simple tables. No boolean expressions in the code may mix Suppose you're given a jumble of three packs of cards. You are to pick out every red numbered card that's a prime, not rumpled, and is from either the Bicycle pack or the Bingo pack (but not from the Zed pack). Here is a way you could write a test for that using CalculateFixture:
I bet you skimmed over that, read at most a few lines. The problem is that the detail needed to be an executable test fights with the need to show what's important. This is better:
That highlights what's important: any card must successfully pass a series of checks before it is accepted. This test better matches what you'd do by hand. Suppose the cards were face down. I'd probably first check if it were rumpled. If so, I'd toss it out. Then I'd probably check the back of the card to see if it had one of the right logos, flip it over, check if it's black or a face card (two easy, fast checks), then more laboriously check if it matches one of the prime numbers between 2 and 10 (discarding Aces at that point). The code would be slightly different because it has different perceptual apparatus, but still pretty much the same:
It does bug me that the table looks so much more complex than the code it describes. It still contains a lot of words that don't matter to either the programmer or someone trying to understand what the program is to do. How about this?
From this, the Fit fixture could generate a complete table of all the given possibilities, run that, and report on it. (Side note: why did I pick Queen as a counterexample instead of Jack or King? Because if the program is storing all cards by number, the Queen will be card 11. Since I'm not going to show all non-primes—believing that more trouble than it's worth—I should pick the best non-primes.) The same sort of table could be created for cases where any one of a list of conditions must be true. Now, many conditions are more complicated than all of or none of or any one of. However, all conditions can be converted into one of those forms. Here's an example. Suppose you're allowed to pay a bill from an account if it has enough money and either the account or the "account view" allows outbound transfers. That would be code like this:
However, that could also be written like this:
I claim that code is just as good or even better. It's better
because there's less of a chance of a typo leading to a bug
(writing The corresponding tables would be like this:
In this particular case, I left off the Example and Counterexample columns because they're obvious. I'd expect the fixture to fill them in form me. I didn't include a table about the balance being correct because I wouldn't think the programmers would need it, nor would others need it to believe the programmers understand it. One thing that worries me about this is that the table doesn't rub your nose in combinations. Such a table is more likely to force you to discover business rules you'd forgotten about, that you'd never known about, or that no one ever knew about. (Well, it does that for a while - until the tedium makes your mind glaze over.) In a way, this fixture makes things too easy. On the other hand, there's something to be said for protecting later readers from the process through which you convinced yourself you understood the problem. I'm tempted to launch into implementing this, but I have other things to work on first. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Melbourne, Sydney, London and Rotterdam ( Column Two ) |
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It's going to be a busy few weeks in terms of conferences, four in three weeks: Southern Currents (Melbourne) I'm going to be giving an extended presentation to a room full of legal librarians on the design and enhancement of... 2006-09-24T20:17:12+10:00
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Toomas Hendrik Ilves Elected President of Estonia ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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Toomas Hendrik Originally uploaded by MukiFuki. The first Estonian diplomat I ever met, Toomas has been elected President of Estonia. Back when I worked at the U.S.-Baltic Foundation and through when I worked for Lennart Meri, Toomas was the ambassador... 2006-09-23T19:32:52-07:00
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My Own Store On Amazon ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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My Own Store On Amazon -- Something new. A storefront with items for both Focused Performance and Unfocused Pleasure. 2006-09-23T18:13:00Z
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Press! ( Column Two ) |
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Press! I have a 50mm macro lens for my camera, and it's a joy to work with. What I love the most is being able to make extraordinary photos out of the most mundane of situations, such as this... 2006-09-23T23:31:21+10:00
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The compelling business reason for a global intranet ( Column Two ) |
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Jane McConnell has written a piece on the compelling reason for a global intranet. To quote: I was recently asked to help a company define the compelling reasons they should have a global intranet. In other words, why not just... 2006-09-23T17:06:27+10:00
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The importance of user experience: the poster ( Column Two ) |
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Frank Spillers has posted details on the poster presenting the importance of user experience. To quote: Here's a poster that reflects some thoughts about user experience...all of the bottom row items (outcomes of positive user experiences) in the poster are... 2006-09-23T18:58:07+10:00
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A Question About Test Strategy ( James Bach's Blog ) |
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Maria writes:
A) Your presentation “Test Strategy: What is it? What does it look like?” applies to creating a test strategy for a specific application (I’ve also read Ingrid B. Ottevanger’s article on “A Risk-Based Test Strategy”). How can I apply the idea to an overall test strategy for the company that I’m working for? Is [...] Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:46:00 +0000
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Do good work ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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I read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff a zillion years ago. One passage hit me then, and it's stuck with me. The time is somewhere in the beginning of the Mercury program: Asking Gus [Grissom] to "just say a few words" was like handing him a knife and asking him to open a main vein. But hundreds of workers are gathered in the main auditorium of the Convair plant to see Gus and the other six, and they're beaming at them, and the Convair brass say a few words and then the astronauts are supposed to say a few words, and all at once Gus realizes it's his turn to say something, and he is petrified. He opens his mouth and out come the words: "Well... do good work!" It's an ironic remark, implying "... because it's my ass that'll be sitting on your freaking rocket." But the workers start cheering like mad. They started cheering as if they had just heard the most moving and inspiring message of their lives: Do good work! After all, it's little Gus's ass on top of our rocket! They stood there for an eternity and cheered their brains out while Gus gazed blankly on them from the Pope's balcony. Not only that, the workers—the workers, not the management but the workers!—had a flag company make up a huge banner, and they strung it up high in the main work bay, and it said: DO GOOD WORK. That came to mind when I read this abstract: This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities—a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures. Since this is by no means the first report, I feel safe in saying Diebold is not DOING GOOD WORK. I wish people who could matter—that especially means you, Fourth Estate—cared. We're all on top of the freaking rocket. (Not just the US, since the size of our military and economy puts much or all of the world on the rocket too.) I'm sure there are people at Diebold who feel embarrassed or even humiliated by what their company is selling. If any one of them wants throw caution and good sense to the winds and hang up a DO GOOD WORK banner, I'll buy it for you. Seriously. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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RSS the Oprah Way ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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“So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m ‘Ready for Some Stories’. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. ” — RSS the Oprah Way See also: RSS Feeds in Movable Type, Blogger.com feeds deemed annoying, Introducing Feed Crier, Category feeds and Control Tagged as: explanation feeds howto rss Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:49:49 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Socialtext 2.0 ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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This morning we announced Socialtext 2.0. Techcrunch has the story. This screencast gives an overview of the first major enhancement, the UI: Charlie Wood highlights the second part, Wiki Web Services.In addition to UI enhancements, SocialText 2.0 adds what the... 2006-09-21T12:07:44-07:00
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Followup on freezing MacBook Pro ( Joel on Software ) |
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Remember when I complained that my Mac kept freezing with bouncing beach balls? A lot of people suggested it might be a hardware problem, but the diagnostics on the setup disks didn't find anything. Well, Daniel Jalkut over at Red Sweater Software suggested that I look in the console app to see what was going wrong, and lo and behold, there were lots and lots of messages that said: Sep 19 22:56:39 joel-spolskys-computer lookupd[711]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local This totally corresponded to what I was seeing... suddenly any app that tried to do a DNS lookup of any sort would go into permanent beachball mode and never recover. Some Googling around led me to a page by John Bafford that said "Lookupd has a bug (rdar://3632865) in its cache cleanup code that causes it to randomly crash. CrashReporter, the system crash log agent, does not properly handle lookupd crashes, and as a result, when lookupd crashes, the process is not terminated. Since lookupd has not terminated, mach_init does not respawn lookupd. From this point, any application that attempts to access lookupd, either directly or indirectly, will hang." Hmmph. Kindly, John provides Unlockupd, a daemon that watches lookupd and restarts it if it gets jammed up. I'll try this for a while and see if it helps. In the meantime, if it's true, it's odd that Apple hasn't fixed this bug in over two years. If somebody inside Apple wants to peek into that bug (link only works inside Apple) and let me know what they see there, I'll update this article! |
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A survey results now available ( Column Two ) |
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Lou Rosenfeld has published the results of IA surveys conducted over the last few months. To quote: For the new edition of the polar bear book (almost done!), Peter Morville and I conducted five surveys of the information architecture community.... 2006-09-21T20:16:16+10:00
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Introduction to the Intranet Leadership Forum ( Column Two ) |
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As revealed a few days ago, we've embarked on a brand new initiative, the setting up of the Intranet Leadership Forum. We're still pulling together all the details, but I can provide a sneak peak into the structure of the... 2006-09-21T20:45:02+10:00
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Why people don't use collaboration tools ( Column Two ) |
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Shawn Callahan has posted an entry on why people don't use collaboration tools. To quote: David Pollard offered for anyone on the net to join him is a joint collaboration project using Writely. The topic: Why are conversation and collaboration... 2006-09-21T20:34:13+10:00
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Learning from you ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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I've been invited to the Software Practice Advancement Conference. The idea appeals: expense-paid trip to London, opportunity to rouse the rabble along some lines I'll be previewing here as I have time, and a conference that's said to be good (I've never been). On the other hand, I hate overseas flights because I can't sleep on planes, and Dawn almost certainly can't come with. Here's what would tip me over the edge. There are lots of people I could learn from in London. If there are teams there who do something really well (making small stories, writing FIT tests, release planning, etc. - anything), I would like to come work with you for several days. Not just visit and watch, but act as much like a team member as I can. Let me know. P.S. The idea of visiting practice is part of what I want to rouse the rabble to, something that lives in the same space as the MFA for Software, something that's part of my formal discussion of Jim Waldo's OOPSLA essay On System Design, which will be titled something like Surviving in a World of Ever-Looming Malignity: Or, Monasticism for the Married. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Blogger.com feeds deemed annoying ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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If you use Blogger.com for your blog, you’ve just lost a subscriber. Sorry, I really liked your content, but the constant and random switches that Blogger makes between full and partial feeds has finally broken my will. Several times a day I end up with dozens of “new” items in my reader simply because the feed contents changed from a full to a partial feed or vice versa. For a while, I just told my reader not to re-display updated feed items, but it seemed that every time a feed was actually updated, Blogger decided to show a partial item. Blogger was a pioneer — even I used Blogger for a year shortly after starting this blog. But it seems that Google’s ignoring their acquisition. Things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. See also: Blogger Pro, Introducing Feed Crier, Radio Blogger, Projects need leadership Tagged as: blogger bubblegeneration feed missrogue mitadlab Wed, 20 Sep 2006 15:51:42 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Innovation survey: results summary ( Column Two ) |
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Scott Berkun has posted the results of an innovation survey that he conducted. To quote: Last month I ran an open survey on innovation to help with my book in progress. Nearly 100 people from scientists, to programers, to writers... 2006-09-20T10:19:10+10:00
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Transpective Dialogs for Learning ( James Bach's Blog ) |
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One of the techniques I use for my own technical education is to ask someone a question or present them with a problem, then think through the same issue while listening to them work it out. As it proceeds, I ask handfuls of Socratic questions. As I ask each question out loud, I answer it [...] Wed, 20 Sep 2006 01:58:15 +0000
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Amazing X-Ray Glasses from Sprint! ( Joel on Software ) |
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Over the last six months, Sprint has been trying to get bloggers (like me) to write about their new Power Vision Network by sending us free phones and letting us download music and movies and use the phones for free. That’s rather nice of them, but honestly, I have a really strong aversion to writing about things just because some PR person wanted me to. Basically, there’s no better way to make me not want to write about something than to ask me to write about it. I accepted the free phone because, gosh, well, it’s a free phone, but I decided that I simply wouldn’t write about it no matter how much I liked it. As it turns out, I had the opposite problem. The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don’t work right and cost way too much. So I’m going to review the dang phone anyway, even though if anybody from Sprint is paying attention they’re going to lose their lunch and some executive bonehead over there is going to go nuts and I sincerely hope that this doesn’t put an end to the entire free-phones-for-bloggers boondoggle, because I’d hate to get beaten up at Etech next year by all the other bloggers who would hate me for spoiling all the fun. Now, on to the review. I was pretty excited to try out this phone because I’ve been longing for one that could double as a decent MP3 player. Most days, I get to work via a combination of subway and walking, which takes about half an hour, and listening to podcasts makes the commute much more pleasant. So I’ve been carrying a phone (a Motorola RAZR) and an iPod (Nano) with me everywhere. Merging the two into one device would be great. When it finally arrived, the physical appearance of the phone was rather disappointing. If you’ve been spoiled by Motorola’s latest phones, or the seamless, screwless, elegant iPod, the LG Fusic will strike you as butt-ugly. Where a Motorola RAZR has a solid case made out of almost sensual matte-black steel that just feels great, the LG Fusic is made out of the cheapest kind of gray plastic, the same material you find on a $3 toy. Where Motorola goes to great lengths to hide the screws, and minimize bumps and seams, the LG Fusic has dozens of ugly protuberances, gaps, holes, screws, seams, etc. Worst of all, the LG Fusic has no less than three of those evil, flimsy, rubbery plug-caps that are connected to the phone by the thinnest of filaments. You know, those stupid rubber plugs that you have to pull away to plug anything into the phone, and then they just dangle there like chicken wattles (when they’re not getting in the way of the thing you’re trying to plug in) for a couple of weeks until they finally tear off. The phone is almost twice as thick as a RAZR. It comes with a break-offable front plate which can be used to change the accent color of the very front of the phone. Your choices are Barbie Pink, Barbie Green, Barbie Blue, and Black which would be the only stylish choice, if only it didn’t clash so badly with the rest of the phone. (Believe me, it is hard to make black clash with anything, but LG did it.) Overall this phone seriously looks like a Fisher Price toy, not a top-of-the-line cell phone. OK, maybe you’re not so vain that appearances are a big deal. I tried to get over it. I really did. I promise I won’t talk about the style thing any more. I opened the clamshell and turned on the phone. The screen lit up instantly! Wow, something about this phone is nice. Oh, wait a minute. What’s going on there? The main screen shifts between pictures of Mount Fuji, the Eiffel Tower, etc. That’s charming. But what’s that bus? There’s a cheezy little black and white child’s drawing of a bus bouncing up and down in front of the cheezy tourist pictures. Again with the Fisher Price Toy theme. The first thing I try to do is find a better screen saver. Everything looks like some kid’s 6th grade BASIC graphics project. Oooh, look, colored squares flying around. Terrible clip art of a “DJ”. One of the screen savers is called “Funny.” You get a silhouette of a lizard climbing around on a pink background. Bwa ha ha! That is funny. TO TWO YEAR OLDS. OK, ok, I promised I’d stop talking about style. On to UI design. The main menu was really, really confusing. The first thing you see when you click on the Menu button is that you missed some alerts: Although, it turns out, you didn’t, that's just the name of the menu item that comes up first. You can’t see all the icons at once because someone had the bright idea of using a weird 3-D perspective, and the currently selected icon comes zooming out in front, covering up some of the other icons. All the unselected icons are shown in silhouette, so at first they just look like a background. It took me quite a while to figure out just what the menu was and how to find things I wanted from the main menu. But don’t worry… there are random bits of sparkle that fly around on the screen. That’s the important part. The random bits of sparkle, again, a 6th grader’s BASIC graphics project. Now, on to the whole reason I wanted this phone: the MP3 player. There’s no desktop integration, no ITunes integration, no feature for subscribing to Podcasts, nothing like that. When you plug the phone into your computer using the supplied USB cable, it thinks you want to use the phone as a modem. Yes, one day I might want to do that, that’s true, but for now I just wanted to get MP3s onto the thing. Somehow, somewhere, I managed to stumble on a menu that made the phone act like a USB hard drive. Tada! The phone pops up on my computer looking like a hard drive. And then there was already a MUSIC folder there, and I could drag MP3 files in. Yay! I downloaded TWiT episode 69 manually and headed off to the subway to listen to it. Wait… I need headphones. Ahh, here they are. Wait a minute. The headphone cord is only about 8 inches long. Am I supposed to hold the phone up to my chin to listen to music? Oh, I see, there are two cords. You have to plug the headphone cord into the microphone cord and plug that into the phone. Now it’s long enough. OK, it’s awkward, but I can live with that. To listen to the MP3s you’ve downloaded: All right. TWiT is more than an hour long, and I only listened to half of the episode by the time I got home. Luckily, there’s a handy PAUSE button on the outside of the clamshell. Unluckily, it doesn’t work. Pressing it once informs you that the buttons are locked, and you have to press and hold the pause button to unlock. So you do that, and the key guard goes off, and you press the pause button again, and nothing happens, so you press it again, and finally you’ve paused the music. In the meantime, if, say, hypothetically, you were pausing because you live in a country where the police brutalize people, and a policeman was brutalizing you, and you wanted to stop the music so you could try to figure out what the policeman wanted and perhaps there was some way if you could just hear him that you could get him to stop beating you with a riot bat, you’re already DEAD by the time you figure out how to make the pause button actually pause. While the MP3 player is paused, the backlight on the external display just won’t go off. So inadvertently, the phone almost completely runs down its battery overnight staying in “Pause” mode. Why not turn the phone off overnight? Well, because then I’d have to listen to the first half of TWiT all over again. Can’t you fast forward? No. Doesn’t it remember where you’re up to like an iPod? No. Pause is your only hope. The next morning, with a single bar of battery juice left, I got into the subway and resumed listening to the podcast, and I’m a wise guy, so I decided to see what the battery looked like, and of course, the phone lost power, oops, lost my place in the Podcast. Put back the battery. Turn on the phone. Go into the MP3 player again. There’s no signal, and, guess what? You can’t get into to the MP3 player unless you can establish a network connection to the Sprint Music Store. Even to play your own MP3s! OK, so this is an MP3 player that doesn’t really work on the subway and won’t work on a plane, the two places I’m most likely to listen to MP3s. Not very appealing. A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature. I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player. OK, onward. Yes, you can watch movies on this phone. For example, for $5.95 a month, you can get something called mFLIX. Until you pay the money, there’s no way to find out what mFLIX is or what it is you’re getting for your $5.95. I’ll tell you what you get: a bunch of garbage film-student videos that nobody would ever vote up on YouTube, in a tiny blurry window that reminds you of QuickTime 1.0 (“look! It’s on a computer but it’s moving!”). That was disappointing. I thought this thing was supposed to have full length movies somewhere. Ah yes, how about “MSpot Movies?” It says I’m going to get “Full-length Hollywood movies.” Only $6.95 a month. Yes. Buy buy buy. (Thankfully Uncle Sprint is paying for this). Oh look… you can preview before you commit to spending! Clicking Preview brings up a page that says PREVIEW with a “Done” button. That’s it. OK, maybe they don’t want me to preview. Fine. After you click Buy, you’re thrown back to a main menu somewhere and then you have to remember what the hell you bought and go find it again. Annoying UI, again. OK, MSpot Movies. A menu comes up with a bunch of folders: I don’t understand. Are these movie titles? Not movie titles I’ve ever heard of. Yep, it’s true. What you get for $7/month is about 10 movies that seem to be in the public domain. Literally nothing worth watching, least of all on a smudgy 1 5/8” (diagonal), pixelated screen. I did, actually, as a part of my sacred duty as a reviewer, try to watch a whole movie. I could only stand about the first 1/3rd of it, and the battery was dying, and the phone was getting too hot to hold. I cannot imagine anybody finding any value in MSpot Movies. If Sprint makes any money off of them, it’s probably by mistake. This service is literally as much of a scam as those X-Ray glasses they used to advertise in comic books to steal a few bucks from some little kids. The only kind of content you might really want to watch on this device is the stuff you find on YouTube, or video podcasts like The Show with zefrank. But that’s not what Sprint gives you. Instead they give you $7/month, ripoff, non-previewable scammy garbage. A long time ago, I was working on MSN 1.0, and there was a long line of content providers working to make deals with Microsoft to put their content on the Microsoft Network, but in those days, it wasn’t clear exactly who should be paying who, so hardly any deals got made. In the meantime, the whole Web thing happened, where anybody could provide content without signing a deal with a Microsoft executive, and there was tons of content, and some of it was garbage, yes, but some of it was good, and we found the good stuff, and it floated to the top, and all was well, but Sprint doesn’t get this. They relish their ability to serve as the gatekeeper to what they hope will become a new medium, because the gatekeeper gets to charge tolls. And it’s 2006, and I almost can’t believe I’m writing this, because way back in 2000 I wrote almost exactly the same thing about WAP, and how cell phone companies keep failing to insert themselves as toll collectors because they’re so darn clueless about how the Internet works, and about the value of many-to-many networks instead of broadcast networks. And now suddenly someone at Sprint read some book by Scoble and then they read Malcolm Gladwell’s theories of tipping points in the airport and Hey Presto! Maybe we can make this work by finding the tipping point people! You know, the bloggers! And all the bloggers get free cell phones, and Sprint gets tons of publicity, but frankly all the publicity in the world is not going to help them foist on us a product that is utterly pathetic. The phones they send us are so lame there is literally no area you can go into without being disappointed and shocked at just how shoddy everything is and how much it costs and what a rip off scam they’re trying to run here with the music that costs too much and the movies that you don’t want to watch on the screen that makes them unwatchable and you just KNOW that if you call to cancel the extra $7/month, their customer service department is going to give you the phone menu runaround and then put you on hold for an hour and then you’ll get some cancellation specialist with an incomprehensible accent who will spend 15 minutes trying to talk you out of canceling the useless service until you just give up and let them have the goddamned $7 a month. No amount of pampering bloggers and calling them Ambassadors is going to get around the fact that you’re sending us plastic junk phones that look like bath toys. (Hey, does it float?) All the “tipping point” theories in the world won’t protect Sprint from the basic truth that the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do. Wait a minute. Wait just one minute. Maybe I completely missed the point. Maybe this phone is for four year olds! It all makes sense now! The nonsensical menus don’t matter—four year olds can’t read! The toy-like appearance—duh! The ripoff movies—who cares, as long as the kids press BUY by mistake and the parents keep paying the bills! Now I get it. So really the only stupid thing that Sprint did is to send this phone to a bunch of know-it-all, hipster-wannabe, pretentious early-adopter engadget-reading 41-year-old bloggers, with our pretentious black iPods and our sleek gun metal RAZRs and our MacBook Pros and our so-called “Podcast” listening habits, watching zefrank tell potty jokes about The Decider. No no no no no. This phone is for 4 year olds, albeit spoiled 4 year olds with rich parents. They’ll love the colors, the plastic, the impossible UI, they can watch the one 1936 movie that inadvertently fell into the public domain in class when the teacher is getting boring, and they sure as heck aren’t going on a subway with that thing. Ohhhhhhhhh kay. I gave the phone to a friend’s 4-year-old. NEVER MIND! |
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Getting MarkDown and SmartyPants working with EditPad Pro ( Joel on Software ) |
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MarkDown is a simple processor that converts text to HTML. For example, it converts &42;text surrounded by asterisks&42; to italics. SmartyPants replaces "straight quotes" with “curly quotes” and makes a few other typographic improvements. EditPad Pro is a very respectable text editor for Windows. It’s fast and contains scrillions of useful features. It’s not the fanciest thing in the world, but if you’re still using Notepad for the occasional bits of text, it’s a fine drop-in replacement. Here’s what it takes to get them all working together on a typical Windows setup: |
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Final Days to Register for CITCON London 2006 ( Developer Testing (RSS 1.0) ) |
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CITCON London registration will be closing this week, it is just hard to know if we will hit the deadline of Friday September 22nd or the cap of 120 people first! At last count we have 85 people signed up and if history is a guide the remaining spots will go fast. For those who aren't aware CITCON is the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, a free open spaces (or unconference) event on continuous integration and the testing that goes with it. Given the open spaces format it is impossible to predict what the exact session topics will be but a sampling of the topics (and notes) from the CITCON Chicago event from earlier this year is available on the wiki. Also available are some photos, feedback, links to related blog entries and more... More than enough to be convinced that you should sign up today! 2006-09-18T17:26:49-08:00(link) [ Developer Testing (RSS 1.0) ] |
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Enterprise fears ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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Overcoming management fears of Enterprise 2.0 See also: Startups jobs - Simplelinks, XHTML Services?, Policy scars, What is a weblog? Tagged as: blogging enterprise intranets policy weblogsatwork wiki Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:13:26 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Enterprise Web 2.0: barriers and answers ( Column Two ) |
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Rod Boothby has written a blog post that provides answers to Enterprise 2.0 barriers (which were listed by Jerry Bowles). To quote: In the end, the adoption of Enterprise Web 2.0 technology is an issue of both risk and reward.... 2006-09-18T18:57:40+10:00
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Sunset at Watsons Bay ( Column Two ) |
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Sunset at Watsons Bay On Sunday I headed out to South Head to take some photos around sunset. This is one of my favourites, taken at Watsons Bay.... 2006-09-18T20:31:47+10:00
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Writable intranet ( Column Two ) |
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Indus Khaitan has written a piece introducing the concept of the writable intranet, as a way of explaining 'enterprise 2.0'. To quote: "Writable Intranet" is the corporate intranet of the future where employees collaborate using Wikis, Blogs and applications interoperate... 2006-09-18T18:44:05+10:00
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Going my way? Don't get taken for a ride ( Column Two ) |
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Rahel Bailie writes about the process for selecting a CMS, using a vehicle metaphor. To quote: To extend this metaphor, let's look at typical pre-purchase exercises. A couple setting out to buy a car responsibly will discuss, first and foremost,... 2006-09-18T21:34:49+10:00
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Some Remarkable Results from V1 Survey ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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Our friends at VersionOne have been kind enough to share their market research survey results with the community. Robert Holler started this online survey in early July and got over 100 respondents. I personally think there are two remarkable results in this survey. (1) The average length of time a company had been using agile was only 1.9 years, (2) when asked who instigated agile in your organization, 28% responded that it was a VP or Director, and when you add in the numbers for Project Manager and CEO the total adds up to 50%. We often assume that agile is a grass roots movement instigated by developers. It would appear that as agile has crossed the chasm in to mainstream adoption, the people driving adoption have changed. The message is clear, if you are in the business of selling tools, services, consulting or training to the agile community then you need to be targeting managers. Additionally, these results are very encouraging for the future of the Agile Project Leadership Network that I helped to start. The APLN should grow rapidly and remain healthy as there is clearly a strong pool of pro-agile managers emerging. If you are one of those managers, reading this and looking for advice on managing agile projects, then I'd recommend that you join the APLN and get involved in a local chapter. If you don't have one then form one. Sunday, September 17, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |
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Racing through the Argyle cutting ( Column Two ) |
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Racing through the Argyle cutting On Saturday night I headed down to The Rocks to take some night photos. This was one of my favourite shots, of cars "racing" through the Argyle cutting.... 2006-09-17T22:07:44+10:00
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Agile - Losing Sight of the Goal? ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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I've seen a lot of discussion recently about what truly represents an agile method or not. It's being discussed in agile community discussion lists and Yahoo! groups, executives in commercially companies are discussing it, some authors like Boehm & Turner, Highsmith, Larman and others have tried to classify or identify agile methods, and most recently I've heard that analyst research firms are getting in on the act. I'm increasingly seeing Ken Schwaber's criteria use to classify what represents an agile method used as the standard measure. As a reminder, Ken said, an agile process is
Frankly, I think the whole debate about which processes are agile or not is somewhat pointless and particularly is this is the criteria used to determine the result. Why am I disillusioned with this? Because some of us in the agile community have lost sight of the goal. Agile for agile's own sake is pointless. The agile movement ought to be about delivering value to the wider community. So how about my criteria for whether a process represents the spirit of the agile community?... A process is agile if it
Before we become a community of inward focused homogenous navel gazers, let's remember the goal! Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson Saturday, September 16, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |
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Proposed definition for "expertise management systems" ( Column Two ) |
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Dennis D. McDonald has written an article providing a possible definition for expertise management systems. To quote: Expertise Management Systems help people identify other people who can be contacted to "... answer a question or solve a problem." The system... 2006-09-16T09:56:41+10:00
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What Scenarios in MSF are not ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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There continues to be some confusion over the definition and meaning of scenario in MSF. We know this is causing some pain for our customers. It's been pointed out to me that Scott Ambler has a definition of usage scenario in his agile modeling body of knowledge. This is fueling the confusion. Last Tuesday I offered our new definitive definition of scenario in MSF. Scenario in MSF is indeed short for usage scenario but those usage scenarios have nothing to do with legacy from OOSE and the requirements and analysis technique called use cases. There are no use cases in MSF. MSF does not describe procedures of interaction in the system architecture. And there are no abstract analysis concepts such as actors and the use cases they perform. MSF uses very specific, detailed definitions called personas and scenarios. I hope this helps to clear up any confusion. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF Friday, September 15, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |
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Google Video RSS ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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Get an RSS feed of Google Video searches straight from Google. (via Jason Bentley) See also: Broadcasting on the Internet, Google woes, Google on the desktop, Google Alerts Hack: Atom or RSS feeds Tagged as: google googlevideo rss video Fri, 15 Sep 2006 12:24:24 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Blogging over here... ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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We won't get Bubbled again SocialCalc and Social Computing Telegraphing Social Media What makes wikis work Share Control to Create Value... 2006-09-15T14:59:40-07:00
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Welcome to Catherine! ( Column Two ) |
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Our team has just grown again, with the addition of Catherine Grenfell, who is a former manager of a successful intranet team, along with other roles in the corporate world. In the last 8 years she has been dedicated... 2006-09-15T12:59:05+10:00
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What term do you use for 'user experience'? ( Column Two ) |
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Brandon Schauer has published the initial results from an Adaptive Path survey, looking at the terms used for 'user experience'. To quote: There's a range of vocabulary that can be used to refer to user experience: 'usability', 'interface', 'human centered... 2006-09-15T16:31:49+10:00
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Blasts from the Past - 9/10-9/16 ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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Blasts from the Past - 9/10-9/16 -- From this week in 2003, Predicting Uncertain Futures, using familiar weather maps as a metaphor. (One of my favorite posts.) In 2004, the series on Multi-Project mangement continued. And last year, I was exploring David Allen's process for Getting Things Done. (Still working on making it work for me.) Tagged: Management, Project Management, GTD 2006-09-14T12:28:00Z (link) [ Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ] |
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Report Author for MSF Team ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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Do you know how to author reports for Team Foundation Server? Are you interested in a temporary position with the MSF team in Redmond that might grow in to something more permanent? Would you like to be responsible for developing the next generation of reports for MSF? If so then drop me an email and I'll forward it on to Steve Elston the Group Manager for MSF. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, TFS, Team+Foundation+Server, Visual+Studio, Microsoft Wednesday, September 13, 2006
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Broadcasting on the Internet ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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Jeff Jarvis rightly takes NBC’s new NBBC veture to task saying,
Fred Wilson, meanwhile, praises the effort because NBBC is sharing the wealth with content creators and distributors. His vision of the future of media is to…
I don’t think Fred really read the details on the announcement. He’s excited that he can show The Office on his blog, but NBBC won’t allow that. He thinks he’ll get a share of the revenue for showing NBC clips, but that’s not in the plan. He thinks NBC is opening up, but this is a case of same thing, different pipe. NBBC gets a failing grade on every one of Fred’s four points. They’re trying to build a walled garden. Lazy Sunday on YouTube scared them because they lost control over the distribution. “In the future, when we have a Lazy Sunday clip, NBBC will make a lot of money on it.” This venture shows that. They’re deciding what content I can see. “NBBC is going to keep a distance from the hottest trend in online video — programs created and uploaded by users. The company wants to work only with established producers.” They’re deciding where I can see it and how I can consume it. “NBBC is not going to allow the programs it distributes to be inserted on personal blogs or Web pages.” It’s microchunked — for now. “NBBC will distribute programs under seven minutes. Over time, it may experiment with longer programs.” Broadcast networks are about lead-ins — making Scrubs a success because it played right after Friends. Microchunking is about quality — making Scrubs a success because it’s entertaining and smart. NBBC’s “longer programs” are going to mean that the great Lazy Sunday video is going to be embedded in a group of other videos so NBBC can force-feed me a couple of videos they want me to watch before I can watch the one I want to watch. Sure they’ve got the monetization down, but if I can’t create the content and participate, what’s the point? To help existing media companies find new revenue streams for existing content? See also: Numbnuts Broadcasting, HBO to Test Video on, It's the network, Open ad marketplace Tagged as: fredwilson futureofmedia jeffjarvis nbc tv video Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:06:35 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Numbnuts Broadcasting ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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“No, fool, you made a lot of money from YouTube because your long-dead stinker of a show, SNL, got new audience because your public — the ones you don’t trust — put the video up and got it seen … until you foolishly made them cease and desist.” See also: Broadcasting on the Internet, Lock-in is bad, It's the network, Open ad marketplace Tagged as: clueless distributedmedia jeffjarvis nbc snl tv Wed, 13 Sep 2006 08:18:31 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Jeff Nolan Leaves SAP ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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Jeff Nolan has moved on from SAP. He has really served as a model to follow for others working in a large company that hope to move it forward. I'm sure he rustled some feathers along the way, but it... 2006-09-13T07:25:16-07:00
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SDBP: Clean Code by Robert Martin ( Developer Testing (RSS 1.0) ) |
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Listened to Uncle Bob give his Clean Code talk today and took some notes. Here are the bits I thought were worth sharing. 2006-09-12T12:35:55-08:00(link) [ Developer Testing (RSS 1.0) ] |
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Creating an "intranet concept" ( Column Two ) |
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Intranet teams need to be clear on where they are heading, and what they will deliver. Typically, this involves writing either a bullet-point list of goals or a 20-page intranet strategy. In practice, the list of goals is too short... 2006-09-13T15:50:03+10:00
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Monthly intranet tasks ( Column Two ) |
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The intranet is not a one-off project. Instead, it must be supported by an ongoing process that ensures that the site continues to be effective. Beyond this, the intranet must also grow to match the ongoing evolution of the organisation... 2006-09-13T16:07:51+10:00
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Search analytics survey results ( Column Two ) |
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Lou Rosenfeld has published the results of their search analytics survey. To quote: To help us (Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins) gather information for our forthcoming book on local site search analytics, we invited 206 people to complete a brief... 2006-09-13T11:20:09+10:00
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Types of portal: a definition ( Column Two ) |
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Portals are not a ‘one size fits’ all solution. Although the term portal is often treated as synonymous with enterprise information portals there are actually many, different types of portals; each one tailored to meet a specific business need. This... 2006-09-13T15:57:44+10:00
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Correcting the Definition of Scenario ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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We've had some problems with the somewhat loose wording that sneaked in to the MSF Glossary in the process guidance. The in-the-box wording has conjured up a lot of use case type imagery and confused a lot of people. We'll be correcting the definition in the next release of the guidance. In the meantime, here is the new definition.
This new definition is intended to underline the origins of personas and usage scenarios from the human computer interaction and user experience design community. MSF is intended as a methodology that encourages good user experience and interaction design and is founded on requirements techniques from the user experience community. Specifically, personas originate from Alan Cooper and Kim Goodwin and Usage Scenarios from the HCI department at Virginia Tech. [As an interesting footnote: Alan Cooper was the creator of Visual Basic and by incorporating some of his work on user experience and interaction we are re-connecting with an old friend.] Tuesday, September 12, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |
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Discount for Project World in Orlando this November ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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As I've mentioned before, I'm presenting at this year's Project World Conference in Orlando in November. As a reader of Agile Management Blog, the organizers are offering you a discount on the attendance fee. Use priority code SPKRM1820DA to insure you get your discount.
Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Project+World Tuesday, September 12, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |
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Implementing a Virtual Kanban System with VSTS ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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Eric Lee from the VSTS marketing team has been busy building a demo that shows some neat integration between VSTS and BizTalk server. He has chosen to show how to implement a virtual kanban system similar to the one Dragos Dumitriu implemented with the XIT Sustained Engineering team at Microsoft. This is very cool. It is clear evidence to me that I had a positive influence on the direction of MSF and VSTS and that it will be live on after my departure next week. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Eric+Lee, Kanban, MSF, VSTS, Visual+Studio+Team+System, BizTalk Monday, September 11, 2006
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Thoughts on September 11th ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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Where were you five years ago today? I had a breakfast meeting with Steven Huber from the User Experience team at Sprintpcs.com. He arrived a little late and reported to me that he'd heard on the radio that a small plane had crashed in to the World Trade Center building in New York. I remember we talked about a similar incident that had happened many years earlier to the Empire State Building then we got on with business. A couple of hours later, I was in my office on the Kansas City side of State Line Road, standing on the balcony of the 2nd floor overlooking the lobby. The security guard had dragged a TV set to a location where a crowd could gather to watch the first tower burning and hear the emerging news. Clearly that early radio report had been misinformed. I arrived back just in time to see the second tower hit. Quite simply a World changing event was unfolding in front of me. I tried to call my wife to tell her to put on the TV. She didn't believe what I told her. She had photos of her standing in the restaurant at the top of World Trade Center. She couldn't believe it was gone. Later that day all the Sprint staff got an email from top management asking us not to use our cell phones in order to free bandwidth for emergency services. This wasn't actually an issue in Kansas City. Next day the doors to the office buildings were locked. This heightened security lasted for months. You had to wave your badge at the security guard who would come and open the door. My boss was stranded in Alaska with a bunch of my colleagues who were attending a WAP Forum meeting in Anchorage. Some other colleagues were in Seattle at a conference. They rented a mini-van and drove it back to KC. The team in Anchorage rented a private jet after the ban on small planes was lifted several days later. As a kid who grew up in Britain in the Cold War, during the 1970's when the BBC carried public information video showing how to build a nuclear bomb shelter under the kitchen table and gave advice on what kind of tinned food to store for the aftermath of disaster, I truly thought my children would grow up in a kinder world where such security concerns were history. Anyone, like me, who had to make business travel in the weeks and months after September 11th - we launched the Sprint PCS Developers Network and our Sprint PCS Vision (and WAM) initiative one month later in Las Vegas - was quickly to realize that our children will grow up in a World with its own set of challenges. A four hour queue to get out of Las Vegas was evidence enough of that. The line was backed up out in to the parking lot in 100 degree heat. Staff from Southwest Airlines were walking the line giving out bottles of water. At least back then we could still carry bottled water on to the aircraft. For me personally, the most moving thing happened a couple of weeks later. I got an email from Jeff De Luca. He was simply checking up on all his US resident friends to make sure none of them had been involved. Monday, September 11, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |
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SocialCalc Beta ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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This morning Socialtext released SocialCalc Beta 1, the Commercial-Open Source version of wikiCalc. Dan Bricklin has made great progress with the wiki-based spreadsheet since we started working together. Download it now on SourceForge and let us know what you think.... 2006-09-12T14:28:34-07:00
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Optimizing method calls ( Joel on Software ) |
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Avi Bryant describes a method for making method calls really fast, even if they do happen to be duck-typed. Cool! (Ruby's still slow. Film at 11.) |
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Ruby Performance Revisited ( Joel on Software ) |
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Jack Herrington emailed me, in reference to the issue of Ruby on Rails performance, to write: I agree with you about unicode. And I agree that Rails needs some time to evolve. But I use a bunch of web technologies and they all have issues. I do disagree with the scalability statements. I don't think Rails has scaling issues that can't be gotten around, and which don't have cousins in other technologies. What I would ask is that you at least put some framing around your scalability comments. Tell us about the scalability problems. Even if we don't fix it for you, the entire community can gain from your experience. David Heinemeier Hansson wrote: Rails is for the vast majority of web applications Fast Enough. We got sites doing millions of dynamic page views per day. If you end up being with the Yahoo or Amazon front page, it's unlikely that an off-the-shelve framework in ANY language will do you much good. You'll probably have to roll your own. But sure, I'd like free CPU cycles too. I just happen to care much more about free developer cycles and am willing to trade the former for the latter. By way of clarification, I'm not concerned with Rails performance, I'm concerned with Ruby performance, and here's why. I've seen lots of comparisons of Ruby's performance with bytecode languages like Java which I would consider slow, and I see a lot of reports of performance claiming Ruby is 10x slower, 50x slower, etc. Besides the random blogobuzz, Ruby comes pretty darn close to dead last in the Computer Language Shootout Benchmarks. Without knowing much about the implementation of Ruby, I would guess that the biggest issue is around late binding and especially duck typing, which prevents type inference or strong typing, which means that function calls will always be slow because you can never get something compiled down to the point where a function call is just a single CALL instruction (on x86)... you always have to be exploring the object, possibly even scanning a hash table to find the function you want to call. Calling methods on objects is really, really, really, really common, especially in pure OO languages, and that bit of the code needs to get down to at least a CALL indirect on the CPU for Ruby to offer the same performance as languages where the type of the object can be determined at compile time and therefore the instruction where you're jumping to can be gotten either at compile time (like in C) or with a single indirection through a single vtable (like in C++). I understand the philosophy that developer cycles are more important than cpu cycles, but frankly that's just a bumper-sticker slogan and not fair to the people who are complaining about performance. Even though our product, FogBugz, seems like something that should be perfect for Ruby on Rails, we have several parts of code where performance is extremely important. In FogBugz 6 there's one place where we need to do literally millions of calculations to display a single chart on a single web page. We have gotten it down to 3 seconds or so in our current development environment with a lot of optimization, but frankly with a duck-typed function call I really don't think we could do it before the web browser gave up and timed out and the sun cooled down a couple of degrees. We also have to scan incoming email messages for spam using Bayesian filtering. This is compute-intensive can take 1 sec. per message. Receiving one email per second is not unreasonable for many of our customers so we are very close to being CPU pegged. That is using a language which we know to be orders of magnitude faster than Ruby at this type of code. We would be absolutely dead on Ruby. Even classic, simple CRUD applications -- the kind of application that basically just shows you a table from a database and gives you operations to add, delete, and edit records -- often discover somewhere down the line that there's something enormously computationally intensive that they want to do, for example, blog software might want to add Bayesian filtering to eliminate spam from comments. This is where you suddenly realize that if your language of choice is 10x slower than the competition, you may be simply unable to add that feature, or you may have to call out to another language (with all the marshalling overhead that implies).
I understand that there are plans for Ruby to address performance with some kind of bytecode compiler and that will be nice. When these things happen and when Ruby starts getting competitive benchmarks it will be a lot more appropriate for a lot more types of applications. In the meantime I stand by my claim that it's not appropriate for every situation. 12 Sep 2006 13:51:19 EST(link) [ Joel on Software ] |
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Presentation: Enhancing the potential of your taxonomy (Sydney) ( Column Two ) |
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I gave a presentation today at the Enhancing the potential of your taxonomy conference in Sydney. This was on "Understanding and evaluating your taxonomy", covering: Three goals of a taxonomy Records management case study Information architecture Card-based classification evaluation Understanding... 2006-09-12T18:29:30+10:00
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In Boston for SDBP ( Developer Testing (RSS 1.0) ) |
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I'm in Boston tonight, in town for Software Development Best Practices. I'll be giving a talk on Wednesday, along with Alistair Cockburn, on "Creating Change One Tic-Tac At a Time". The idea for this talk grew out of a conversation that Alistair and I had back at the Jolt Awards in March and it incorporates information and ideas from a wide range of sources. For my part I'm drawing on The Moral Animal for the importance of status, Taking Charge of ADHD for the idea of a token economy, Flow for insights into what people consider rewarding, Influence for some "weapons of persuasion", not to mention a host of others I can't name, plus my own experiences leading development teams and our experiences at Agitar helping our customers adopt developer testing. These last two categories are probably the most important, because that is where I've come to believe that cultural change is simply the most difficult task anyone can undertake, and changing the practices of a development team in any significant way require a change of culture. Alistiar has a similar view on the importantance and difficulty of cultural change and brings his own diverse and illustrious experiences to bear on the discussion. If you're at SDBP hope to see you there, but if you're not I'd be interested in your thoughts on the topic (j t f at a g i t a r dot c o m). 2006-09-11T18:57:41-08:00(link) [ Developer Testing (RSS 1.0) ] |
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Across the chasm ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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A couple of years at the Agile conference in Calgary, a big topic of discussion was whether Agile was poised to cross the chasm from visionary early adopter types to the early mainstream. This year at Agile2006 it sure seemed to me we had. If I recall the high-tech adoption curve correctly, a big difference between the Visionary early adopters and the Pragmatist early mainstream is who they talk to. The Visionaries talk to the Technology Enthusiasts to find ways to have big wins. The Pragmatists talk to other Pragmatists, especially ones in the same industry, to find ways to have safe wins. My main client these days is a good example of a Pragmatist. Before adopting Scrum, they methodically went to visit other companies that had been using Scrum successfully. That's the first time I've seen that. Agile in the mainstream is definitely a good thing, but every silver lining comes with a cloud. I worry that the clear sunshine of innovation will be obscured by the mists of scale. (Sorry about that...) If you believe Moore, the mainstream market naturally shakes out into a single dominant "gorilla" and several "chimps" that scrabble for the leavings. He uses Oracle as an example of the gorilla, companies like Sybase as examples of chimps. Or you could think of the relational model in general vs. other ways of organizing and accessing persistent data. On the one hand, that's good for innovation: the chimps have to find some angle to distinguish themselves from the safer gorilla choice. On the other hand, the innovation is constrained: it can't be too wildly different from the gorilla or else you're no longer in the mainstream market. (The distinction here might be between object databases—never made it in the mainstream—and adding object-ish features to relational databases or just figuring out how to make object-relational mapping work.) But more important, to me, is a redirection of talent. The gorilla of Agile is Scrum + a selection of XP practices (perhaps most often the more technical ones like continuous integration or TDD). Consultants and consultancies can make more money, grow their practice faster, and have more influence by helping new teams start with Scrum+XP and by taking steps to make Scrum+XP more palatable to large segments of the mainstream market (the later mainstream, what Moore calls Conservatives). People doing that don't have time to do other things. We saw that at Agile 2006, where the proportion of novices perhaps reached some sort of tipping point that made it more like a conventional conference. That's not a criticism: the Agile Alliance is there to help Agile projects start and Agile teams perform—says so right on the website—and making sure the beginner is served is absolutely necessary to those goals. So that's all good. But I'm not comfortable unless I've got the feeling that there's something just beyond the horizon poised to surprise me. I'm not usually the one to find it: I'm more of a synthesizer, amplifier, or explainer than an innovator. So I selfishly need people out there searching, not teaching Scrum+XP. I'm getting a sense that some significant chunk of people are ready for Agile to take a surprising jump forward. See, for example, what Ron Jeffries has recently written. Some part of my next year will be spent in support of that. I have at least one whacky idea, a bit related to the MFA in software. I'll be poised to spring into action soonish. Just let me get this book done, please let me get it done, without any of the changes in response to reviewer comments introducing a nasty bug. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Groundbreaking ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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Sometimes when you’re trying to find a new way of solving a problem you need to ask yourself, “are you being groundbreaking or merely digging yourself a hole?” See also: Anthology of Requirements quotations, Comment Spam makes the news Tagged as: groundbreaking questioneverything quotes Mon, 11 Sep 2006 13:44:53 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Skype usability on OSX ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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In Skype on OSX, the contact information window doesn’t allow you to copy fields to the clipboard. If you want to put one of your contacts mobile phone numbers into another application, like your address book, you have to manually type them. But the information window is only visible if Skype is the active application. Once you click another window, the information window vanishes. This means that you have to memorize the phone number in order to type it in as you can’t see it on the screen when you’re adding it to the address book. This is just poor usability on Skype’s part. See also: Skype at 25,000 feet, Usability test serendipity, More Form usability, Usability Required Tagged as: skype thisisbroken usability Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:22:23 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Guestblogging by Telegraph ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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I'm guestblogging for Shane Richmond at Telegraph.co.uk. First post: share control to create value. Most of my posts will probably be relating what's readers of this blog already know. But if I make good fun of British newspapers or come... 2006-09-11T21:59:04-07:00
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Composing in TextMate with MarkDown ( Joel on Software ) |
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Normally I use CityDesk to compose things for Joel on Software, but the long articles on recruiting were written from home where I have a MacBook Pro (CityDesk is Windows only). I was trying to find appropriate software that I could use to compose long articles that felt smooth on a Mac, that generated extremely clean HTML, and that generated curly quotes (“”) which I've grown fond of, especially for longer articles. The combination I found that made me happiest was TextMate in Markdown mode. It was a surprisingly good experience. TextMate is an "emacs inspired" editor for the Mac, with tons of build-in stuff for editing different types of text files that they call Bundles. Markdown is a very simple way to format text, for example, putting &42;asterisks&42; around text that you want italicized; it generates nice clean HTML. Even Markdown source is quite clean and still highly readable, useful if you need to post the same content to Usenet or use it in plain text somewhere. I have a few complaints though: OS X antialiasing, especially, it seems, with the monospaced fonts, just isn't as good as Windows ClearType. Apple has some room to improve in this area; the fonts were blurry on the edges. Also, I don't understand all these people who say that Macs never crash. I probably had to reboot the MacBook Pro (hard reboot -- hold down the power button for five seconds) about every two hours. It was always the same problem: the Wifi network would go down for a second, something which happens to everyone, but on Windows, it just comes back, while on the Mac, I get a spinning colored ball and everything is frozen. Everything. Forever. If I try to wait it out the beachball will still be spinning the next morning. If anybody is aware of this problem and knows of a specific fix I'd love to hear of it. It was like a Windows 3.1 deja vu all over again thing. I still have to say that composing large amounts of text with Word 2007 on Windows XP is a better experience, all told, because of the autocorrection and the better screen display. One more note -- all the pictures I've published in the last few days are of the Fog Creek office, of course, taken recently by photographer Gregg Conde. |
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From Frontline - Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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From Frontline - Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero - If you didn't get enough of 9/11 over the weeked, be sure to check out Frontline's reruns of their 2002 piece, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. Moving, thoughtful, and authentic, unlike the made-up "reality" of some other offerings. 2006-09-11T10:13:00Z
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Another wave of Enterprise 2.0 definition has been kicked off by MR Rangaswami's otherwise good post on the trend. He defines it as enterprise software using the latest in technology, development and delivery methodologies. Andrew McAfee rightly brings it back... 2006-09-10T09:21:58-07:00
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Frontline: Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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Frontline: Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero - If you didn't get enough of 9/11 over the weeked, be sure to check out Frontline's reruns of their 2002 piece, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. Moving, thoughtful, and authentic, unlike the made-up "reality" of some other offerings. 2006-09-11T10:13:41Z
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Top Marketing Blogs ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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My Trip To Taipei ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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In my tradition of bringing you old news in an untimely fashion, here are a few shots of my trip to Taipei. I was there from August 12th to 17th and on the 16th I was part of a Software Engineering day event organized by the local Microsoft office. The event at the Grand Hyatt in Taipei attracted 450 visitors. I gave the keynote speech and then appeared on a panel with some local experts to talk about CMMI, agile and software engineering in general. You can read all about it in this press release (PDF, traditional Chinese).
This is me opening the proceeding in the morning with the keynote speech.
And later on the panel session with Nien Chen (NC) Liu and Peter Hu from Microsoft to my left and the panel of local experts to my right: Professor Cheng, Professor Chou and Mr. Hu (the first CMMI Lead Appraiser in Taiwan.)
A few empty seats in the front row but otherwise it was a full house at the Grand Hyatt.
As you can see better from this angle.
We got quite a few questions from the floor.
Here I am giving a press interview earlier in the week. Everything involved eating. I put on 5 lbs over the 3 week trip to Asia. So lots of biking to work for me to take it all off again, now that I'm back in Seattle. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Taipei, MSF, Microsoft, Software+Engineering Saturday, September 09, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |
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Improving portal usability ( Column Two ) |
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Janus Boye has written an article on improving portal usability. To quote: In organizations worldwide, the enterprise portal has increasingly become the default interface for employees and business partners to interact digitally with each other. Many useful services -- such... 2006-09-09T11:54:06+10:00
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The process of defining the problem ( Column Two ) |
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Luke Wroblewski has written an article on the process of defining the problem. To quote: Several years ago, I was called in to help redesign the registration process for a large European e-commerce site. The company had put together two... 2006-09-09T12:28:31+10:00
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What about my speaking engagements? ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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Some people have been asking me whether or not I'll be fulfilling my scheduled speaking engagements following the news of my departure from Microsoft. The simple answer is that I will be fulfilling all my obligations. There are only three, namely, the PNSQC in Portland Oregon in October, Project World in Orlando in November and OOP in Munich in January. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, PNSQC, Project+World, OOP Friday, September 08, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |
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Mars Needs Women ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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I gave up my speaking slot at Office 2.0 to my co-founder and VP of Products, Adina Levin. Hopefully this guesture restores the gender balance and brings harmony to the blogosophere. Or perhaps inspires others to attend this great event.... 2006-09-08T10:09:02-07:00
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Installing Vista RC1 in VMWare Workstation ( Joel on Software ) |
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If you are trying to install Windows Vista RC1 in VMWare Workstation, you may see setup appear to hang on the text-mode screen that says "Windows is loading files...". Actually what has happened is that Vista Setup is already in graphics mode trying to do things, but something about the way it switches the display adapter into graphics mode is not working right on VMWare. If I were VMWare I'd be pretty ticked off at Microsoft right now; since Microsoft makes a competitive product, Virtual PC, it is Highly Suspicious that they come out with a major new test release of an operating system that just happens to not work on VMWare Workstation, something which is practically the de facto standard for developers testing new operating systems. Shabby and slimy, Microsoft. They're probably testing Windows Vista with tens of thousands of applications; not testing with VMWare is inexcusable. There's a workaround, for now, while VMWare works on the problem: edit the virtual machine's .vmx file to include You can get Vista installed in VGA 16 color 640x480 mode (it will look awful) and then when you get everything running, install VMWare tools and take out those two lines and you'll be good to go. Thanks to anonymous user echelon9 from the VMWare board for this tip. I'm assuming that the Aero/Glass UI's heavy demands on the graphic card may mean that it can't be tested under VMWare, but I'd love to be wrong. |
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Now accepting summer internship applications ( Joel on Software ) |
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Last year we set the application deadline for internships to February 1st, which was fine, and the deadline did a good job of forcing students to get off their butts and apply, but we made the mistake of not considering applications until they were all in, which we thought would be most fair. It was fair, but it also meant that by the time we even looked at the resumes, some great applicants had already accepted summer jobs at Microsoft. Grr... This year summer internship applications will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis, so basically, if you're a college student looking for an internship, you pretty much should just apply now, instead of puttering around indecisively. |
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Patching Code is Easy in Ruby ( Testing Hotlist Update ) |
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A nice thing about open-source software is that you can change the code yourself if necessary. If you want to fix a bug or add a feature you can make the change yourself. You don’t need to get permission... 2006-09-09T04:46:38-06:00
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Sorting Resumes ( Joel on Software ) |
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“To top programmers, the most maddening thing about recruiters is their almost morbid fascination with keywords and buzzwords. The entire industry of professional headhunters and recruiters is bizarrely fixated on the simple algorithm of matching candidates to positions by looking for candidates that have the complete list of technology acronyms that the employer happens to be looking for. It becomes especially infuriating to realize that most of these recruiters have no idea what any of these technologies are. ‘Oh, you don’t have MSMQ experience? Never mind.’ At least when real estate agents prattle on about Subzero refrigerators and Viking stoves, they at least know what these things are (although any stainless steel refrigerator counts as ‘Subzero’ these days). The easiest way to catch-out a technical recruiter is when they inevitably insist on 5 years of experience with Ruby on Rails, or refuse to consider someone for a ‘Windows API’ job when they only have ‘Win32’ on their resume.” -- From today's third and final installment in The Guerrilla Guide to Hiring, Sorting Resumes. |
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Wells Fargo -- broken business processes ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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When I picked up my temporary card from Wells Fargo, they told me that my wife couldn’t get a temporary one because she wasn’t cancelling an old card, just ordering a new one. No one could explain to me why this arbitrary restriction exists. The fact that she did cancel a card doesn’t matter; this new card isn’t being ordered in direct response to a cancellation, so no temporary card for her. Not that it matters, since we can only use the temporary card on Tuesdays in November following a heavy rain after a full moon. And then only if we’re wearing red. Or something. Wells Fargo screwed up. They didn’t send a card when they were supposed to. They’re unable to provide a ready replacement, and the reason is they didn’t send the card when they were supposed to. Their mistake is triggering this bad business process and keeping me from my money. And get this… when I picked up my temporary card, I got the same old song. It doesn’t appear that a card has been ordered. So let’s do that now. And it will take 7-10 days for the new one to arrive. That’s four times in a row this has happened to my wife. And now once for me. That’s right, they had no record that my card had been ordered either. Oddly, however, when I called Wells Fargo tonight about the missing deposit, they were able to see repeated orders for new cards, followed by cancellations. So someone is lying. Or their systems are seriously in trouble. Either way, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in my bank anymore. See also: Wells Fargo strikes again, Wells Fargo is stupid, Logitech support sucks, It's Popcorn time again Tagged as: businessprocess customerservice wellsfargo Thu, 07 Sep 2006 08:06:32 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Commissioned Headhunters on the Job Board: Good or Bad? ( Joel on Software ) |
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It was only a matter of time before the new job board got its first policy violation: a recruiter posting a job without disclosing the name of the company that it was for. The reason we require a company name, as opposed to a recruiter's name, is because I think that job seekers are sick of looking at generic lists of seemingly anonymous companies. The reason recruiters don't like to post company names is because they don't get a commission unless they refer the employee, so they don't want to take any risk that the candidate will go directly to the company and cut them out of their commission. Also, once the recruiter establishes a relationship with you, they can convince you to apply to all their other jobs, further increasing the chance that they'll get a commission. And they want to build up their resume-files so they can do their job well in the future. There's a place for recruiters; many of them are very ethical and do great work for their clients on both sides. However, I think there's also a place for a more open market where people can look directly at jobs, then jump to the company's website and decide if that's the kind of company they might want to work for. As I wrote earlier, top developers have a choice of where to work, and they're not very enchanted with the prospects of working for a "leading developer of software products" that needs a "C/C++/XML/HTTP/HTML" to fill a slot. This is something of a dilemma. I'm pretty sure that job seekers have no interest in a seeing list of pseudo-jobs that are often nothing more than invitations to call a headhunter. On the other hand, headhunters are probably the biggest single spenders on job boards, so I might be antagonizing my biggest potential audience of paying customers. |
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Company Name = Quality Jobs ( Joel on Software ) |
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Wow, I have never seen such developers all over the world so unanimous on any issue. If anything, I underestimated how much people hate job boards clogged with anonymous posts put up by commission- and resume-fishing recruiters. The jobs board policy will remain: We will continue to require a company name and take down posts that don't disclose the actual company. Recruiters can use it if they post the name of the company that is actually hiring. This, I think, will only be of interest to recruiters doing exclusive searches (also known as "retained searches"). Finally, summer intern Noah has added a feature to display the Joel Test score on the main page for companies that choose to fill it out, which seems to be quite a lot of them. Thanks, summer intern Noah! |
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Friday Fun: ZeFrank at TED - Google Video ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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Friday Fun: ZeFrank at TED - Google Video -- Also, check out his piece from today on 9/11. (Transcript here.) 2006-09-08T10:18:59Z
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Field Guide to Developers ( Joel on Software ) |
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“So my experience has been that a number of excuses all pile up until it’s virtually impossible to get private offices for developers in any but the most enlightened of companies, and even in those companies, the decision of where to move and where people should work is often taken once every ten years by a committee consisting of the office manager’s secretary and a junior associate from a big architecture firm, who is apt to believe architecture-school fairy tales about how open spaces mean open companies, or whatever, with close to zero input from the developers or the development team.” -- from today's installment in the Guerrilla Guide to Hiring: the Field Guide to Developers. |
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Marketing Project Management ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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Marketing Project Management -- No, that's not marketing Project Management, but rather Marketing project management. From DM News, an article by Jane Eggers of Quickbase plays up how to support the collaborative needs of managing marketing projects via (no surprise, given what Quickbase is all about) technology. In Five Steps to Simple Marketing Project Management, Eggers offers up steps to get started: Not sure if those are steps or tips (don't really see a "workflow" there), but the supporting material does make sense. I'm about to take her fifth point at in setting up a small internal wiki to document our processes, and as suggested, I was planning to forgo all the bells and whistles and fancy look and feel and perfection (for now), and just get it started. Tagged: Marketing, Project Management 2006-09-07T12:38:00Z (link) [ Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ] |
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Still Working for BillG ( Agile Management Blog ) |
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So after yesterday's old news, here is some new news. I am leaving Microsoft and my job as the architect for the MSF methodology. I am taking up a new position as the Senior Director for Software Engineering at Corbis. The company is owned by Bill Gates. So I might be changing employers but my ultimate boss remains the same. In any career move, like this one, the decision is always complicated. People might want to jump to conclusions. There have been lots of people leaving Microsoft recently. However, whatever people may conclude, I loved working for Microsoft and I thought I had a really cool job. Working on MSF as part of Patterns and Practices and Visual Studio Team Architect was a great place to be. The team is changing the way we engineer software and manage software projects. It's been a privilege to work with each and every one of them and I wish them all well. I have made many friends at Microsoft. However, when I took the job I told Sam Guckenheimer that I could only do it for two years. After that I needed to get back to managing a team and leading people doing real work. If I stayed too long in the MSF ivory tower I'd lose my credibility to talk about management and agility and software engineering. So when the chance came up to go to Corbis and get back to leading a team I jumped at it. Just as I have sad feelings about leaving Microsoft and an unfinished job with MSF, I am equally excited about the opportunities and challenges at Corbis. So stay tuned to Agile Management blog. I'm not going away. Instead I'm going to show how to scale agile and achieve enterprise-wide results. [Oh and I won't mind the easier commute from Ballard to downtown Seattle - giving me back about 60 minutes of every day.] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, Microsoft Wednesday, September 06, 2006(link) [ Agile Management Blog ] |