Filed Under (software management) by Emad Alashi on 16-12-2011
Couple of days ago I tried a key I acquired from Microsoft MSDN subscription to activate an Office installation, the activation didn’t work for some reason, so I filed a ticket, and I thought to myself “Oh great! now I will have to wait for ages until such large corporate like Microsoft would answer my ticket!”
And less than 48 hours, I don’t receive an email, but my phone rings! The guy on the phone answers my inquiry and makes sure I am answered.
Considering how large this corporate is and the number of its clients, this is really amazing!
So if you are a startup, or a growing business, please keep this in mind; don’t give excuses to yourself for a low quality of service due to your growing business.
Good job on this Microsoft.
It was a very interesting event “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” which took place last Tuesday; the team did a very good job putting it together, it is really great seeing this great effort put into such fruitful events; moving the community steps forward, so thank you AmmanTT team, you rock.
Hereby I post the slides I presented in my talk:
I will be speaking at “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” next Tuesday 6th of December 2011. Never heard about AmmanTT? quoting from their About page:
Coming to you on the first Tuesday of every month is a 2-hour event that brings industry experts, local technologists/engineers, entrepreneurs, idea-generators and just about any enthusiast together in a casual setting to meet and learn from each other
I will be talking about the real-life side of the software development life cycle, and about the overlapping between Process and Humans in the cycle. So mark your calendars, I will be very happy to meet you there.
Today I was looking for a fast way to find the index of a nth occurrence of a string in a string, so I found this very simple and intuitive site on which you can find and share .net extension methods, the website is http://www.extensionmethod.net Dah! 
I couldn’t find what I looked for, so I shared my solution here; the website made it crazy easy to share this! Something I definitely would add to my log on how to create wonderful websites, simple and effective.
The other day I needed an ASP.NET MVC grid control, and I have always heard about Telerik’s ASP.NET MVC Extensions and the great tools they provide, so I decided to give them a try.
So I followed the installation guide step by step, and prepared my code to use the extensions; I added a reference to the DLL, added the scripts, etc… and I thought I was ready to test-drive it.
I opened Telerik’s sample website which showed the control and below it the code sample that made it work, innocently enough I did what any other developer would do to try out the sample code: copy and paste it in your page and then build. To my surprise there was an error in the View; it didn’t recognize an Extension method called “Configurator”!
It was so strange, why wouldn’t it work? I made sure that I added the correct reference dll, that I added the namespaces in the web.config as advised by the guide, and that I used the “using” at the top of my page, but yet it didn’t work.
Ok now that is really strange, I downloaded Reflector ILSpy and disassembled Teleriks dll to make sure that this method exists, and it wasn’t there! where does this Configurator method come from?!
I opened the sample project to make sure of their code, and guess what…the Configurator method was a method that only exists in their sample project; it wasn’t part of the DLL! I wasted considerable time trying to figure this out, and my conclusion was: never use auxiliary code when you are presenting a sample for another code unless you make it clear.
Today we came across an interesting issue at work: we have two teams A and B who interchange API calls. Team A needed an API from team B to process a business that is owned by team B of course. The signature was like the following:
public OutputEntity MyMethod(List listOfIds);
It appeared afterward that this method was very slow, and the client was already very upset about the low performance, which consequently caused big pressure on the teams by the superiors to enhance the performance.
After investigating the issue, it appeared that the list of ID’s sent as input consists of some ID’s that do not need to be processed, this criteria of “not need to be processed” is a business owned by team B, done by using properties of the entities these ID’s represent. So the solution to this issue was one of the following:
- Moving the business out of the API to the client application to do the filtering, since the calling method already has the entities themselves (not so good to move business out of scope!)
- Let the API do the filtering, but this will worsen the performance because the API will have to retrieve these entities from the database in order to use its’ properties!
So is that a dead end? actually that was stupid! the situation was stressful enough and pressured by our superiors to enhance the performance that we missed a very simple fact: pass the list of entities themselves!
Stressful situations make us stupid, so make as less stress as possible on your team, help them to be smarter.
Last Saturday we had a SharePointSaturday event here in Jordan, in which I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Oleson and Michael Noel for DotNetArabi.
At the end of Joel’s valuable interview, which can happen only in a life time, I stopped the recording by hitting the “Stop” button, simple. Surprisingly, instead of stopping the recording, Audacity just froze! I could hear myself screaming inside “NOOO!!!”, I guess even Joel heard that! the whole machine stuck that I had to force it to a Hard Shut down.
But knowing Audacity as a great piece of software, which really is, I hoped that I could still retrieve the recording. I rebooted and started Audacity again, and here comes the so refreshing alert at the start:
“Some projects were not saved properly the last time Audacity was run. Fortunately, the following projects can automatically be recovered”
THAT is a successful software! of course I lost portions of the recording still, but I can’t complain; I have most of the interview. So, When you design your software, DO make sure you don’t crash gracefully only, but yet to recover correctly from the crash.
I just finished a session about Communication Skills one-to-one for the MSP program with Microsoft and Jordev. As I promised the audience, here are the slides shared on the very good site SlideShare:
I have been reading this book Growing Software by Louis Testa, and I consider it the book of the year for me.
The book is a about how to create a robust successful software; starting from assembling your engineering team, to having a flourishing company with successful software product/services and happy customers.
If you are a new Development Manager, or already a Dev. manager who is in a small company growing fast, this book is for you.
There are many reasons why I find this book so valuable, here is a list of them:
- Scope: I haven’t come across any book that covers this scope of what should be done to create successful software; usually books would talk about the SDLC, Development Methodology and Process, engineering techniques…etc, and if you are lucky maybe about some of the best practices around that.
This book, on the other hand, covers a lot more; it starts from the real beginning of understanding the environment around you, creating an effective engineering team and growing it, defining your product, defining releases, project estimation, project execution, choosing a process, enhancing the process, communicating with other departments, handling customers… and it even covers the future by setting directions, product roadmap and strategy. You can check the main table of contents here
- Practical: the book is obviously coming from a practical background, it tackles details that won’t be found unless the author really KNOWS what he is talking about, and that he actually lived that experience.
This is especially obvious when the author talks about the wrong way of doing things. for example, I have always thought adding an unplanned extra feature to a release is a good thing, in fact that was a NO in Growing Software with enough good reasons.
The real life examples of real instances took place (shown in grey boxes) added a great value; you will always stay skeptical about a theory until you hear someone who had lived it.
Another part of the practical side is the auxiliary spreadsheets the book provides to tackle certain decision-making situations. No Starch Press provide them for download from their site here.
- Realistic: The book doesn’t promise you with a sliver bullet, instead it puts the various options on the table and show you why/when you would choose one over the other depending on the situation, injecting this with the experience Mr. Louis Testa has.
It doesn’t tell you use Agile methodologies, RUP, or Waterfall…it helps you how to choose a process, how to customize it to fit your organization, and how to improve it.
- For Humans: actually this is one of the best things I liked about the book; I have always believed that we can’t separate business, process, establishments, or evolution without considering the emotions, the culture, and the mentality of the humans involved.
Reading throughout the book, you can see that this was kept between the eyes all along when it talks about engineers, fellow executives, or customers. Tackling emotions, behavior, expectations and negotiation. Politics was significantly considered in the book when taking decisions or dealing with the different parties
- Simple: It’s simple; the language is easy to understand, and the structure and sequence of the book is logical. I had no interpretation burden while reading it.
Though, the addressed character in the book is a development manager or a CTO strictly; I’d have really loved if it had shed more light on the Business side of the story, I know it would have widened the scope even more but I believe this is becoming a large need in the Software Industry in general, maybe in another book.
Another thing is that sometimes the book digs little bit too deep in the self-management advices, to extent that intelligent people might want to skip it whole together.
I’d definitely recommend this book for everyone who is interested in Growing his Software house, or being part of it.
