Loosely Coupled

Interesting article on Forbes titled " Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best Talent ". As a person whose changed jobs a number of times in my career, many of these items rang true. Here are the ones I identified most closely with: 1. Bureaucracy - it a shame when corporate politics and policies get in the way of delivering the best products we can to our customers. This drives me crazy! 3. No Performance Reviews - we crave feedback on our work. We want to know if we're doing a good job and how we can do an even better job. 4. Lack of Career Development - who wouldn't want to hear that they fit into the company's future plans? 7. Tolerating Mediocrity - there's a reason why the Yankees are "The Yankees". Everyone wants to work with the best and for the best. "A rising tide lifts all boats" but when members of a team aren't accountable for pulling their weight, it can really sink morale and productiv...

I was inspired by this talk from RailsConf given by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin. It's a really entertaining talk and you should check it out if you haven't already. During the talk, the topic of professionalism came up and what it means to be a "professional software developer" (maybe 2/3 of the way through). Professionalism in software development is a topic that's not well defined and certainly has different meanings to different people. Can you be considered a pro, for instance, if you don't provide a set of automated tests for your code? What if you don't use source control? Do you feel the need to always create a custom build file (make, ant, or maven script) so you can build independent of an IDE? Do your "professional" standards change depending on if you're creating "prototypes" rather than designing code for production? I know which things I strive to do on every project I work on. But the standards for the t...

When is the right time to adopt some new technology - the shiny "silver bullet" solution that's going to meet all your current and future business needs, make your team ultra responsive to your users, and totally allow you to kick butt? Before screaming "get it now! get it now!", consider the following. This technology is new, cutting edge stuff. Not many people are doing it. Where can you find help and support when you inevitably hit some road blocks? Will you be forced to troll message boards and user groups for solutions? Will you be using the technology in a way that hasn't really been anticipated, pushing you out even further from the mainstream and making it even harder to get good support? Is this a technology you're buying? If so, how's the company's technical support and reputation? What success stories can they point to? Can you "make do" with some existing (better supported, more widely implemented) solution until thi...

Nova's episode this past week was titled "The Spy Factory" . It wasn't quite what I expected, but it was fascinating. Basically, it was about the NSA and how it was tracking Al Qaeda members and their movements (in the US), long before the September 11 th attacks. It also touched on the CIA and how they also tracked Al Qaeda movements into the US. The CIA approached the NSA to share information (since they couldn't legally conduct a domestic investigation on these potential terrorists) but the NSA refused to share any information. Once Al Qaeda activity came stateside, it seems neither agency alerted the FBI. It all seems so foolish. All of these agencies are supposed to work together for our common safety. Was their unwillingness to work together driven by ego, politics, the desire to be national heroes, any or all of the above? Obviously, this sort of behavior is not limited to government offices. I've seen this same behavior on teams and in org...

Why are these three words so hard for some people to mutter? The fear of being caught without an answer is so scary, that some people will say anything to avoid having no answer at all. It's a big problem. Consider this: you ask a question and you get an answer. You accept the answer as true because you think, "why would someone mislead me?". And you're right, they're not intentionally misleading you, but they have an intrinsic need to give you an answer - any answer - so that they don't "lose face" or something. I just can't wrap my head around this behavior because most likely, you'll take some course of action based on the answer to your question. But when you start to notice things - things that don't make any sense and couldn't possibly happen if the information you got was correct -you'll spend a lot of effort reevaluating your beliefs and doing your own research. Eventually (and after some frustration), you'll fin...

Contractors - programming contractors, general home contractors like builders, plumbers or electricians, and even mechanics - have bad reputations. While everyone needs these skilled professionals to complete work where they have little expertise, there an inherent distrust in these relationships. Distrust - where total trust is needed. Many times it's unwarranted because contractors are as honest and hard working as anyone else. So why is it so? I think a number or relatively minor, easily correctable behaviors lead to this perception. Personally, I have changed mechanics more than I care to comment on. Not because I felt they were screwing me necessarily, but mostly because they didn't explain the work they were performing to my satisfaction. This led me to doubt their abilities. The doubt and distrust lead me to look for another mechanic who I have more confidence in. It's too bad. I hate shopping around for new mechanics. At home, we recently added a room to ou...

I'm the type of person who constantly looks for ways to improve. No matter how well things go, I'm always striving to "plus" an experience - smooth out the rougher edges to make the next time even better. Sometimes the need to do this drives me a little nuts. It drives my wife really nuts! When things don't go well, this task can be a little overwhelming (and depressing). There are so many areas for improvement, it's hard to know where to begin. I've spent the last year or so, reexamining my software development experience - looking for trends in the tools and ideas that helped the teams I was on to be highly productive (and conversely where the lack of some practices led to a lack of productivity and frustration). Combined with many of the things I've read by Spolsky , Fowler , and the Poppendiecks . I've created a list of criteria I'd consider essential in an ideal software development environment. Talk to the target user...

I'm usually not in charge of scheduling. I've contributed to schedules, but someone else - usually someone from management - drives schedule creation. I also can't remember a situation where the schedule actually worked. What I mean by this is, a lot of time was spent to create schedules for 2-3 months into the future - then not really revisited (adjusted) for a month or more. By this time something invariably happens (priorities change, initial tasks take longer than expected, vacations/time off weren't accounted for, etc.). This throws the entire thing out of whack and quickly makes it obsolete. A month or more will pass, then the whole process starts again with the creation of another schedule. For the project I'm currently on we've spent a lot of time creating 2 schedules from scratch and are currently creating a third. The first two have been complete failures and I have low expectations for the third. It's frustrating to spend a lot of time and ...

Steve Yegge has this great post today about business requirements and building software that you'd personally use in a domain that you actually know . Great stuff! I need to figure out a way to print wallet size copies to hand out at requirement meetings.

I know I need to let this go, but I can't stop thinking about the nonsense of this BPMN -> JCAPS -> .Net web service architecture proposed by management at the client I'm working with. The main reason for the base web services to be implemented in .Net rather than directly in JCAPS is that this organization has 10x as many .Net developers as it has Java/JCAPS developers. The thinking is that this ratio will make it easier to find available bodies to maintain and enhance these services. While this makes sense, any guess on how many people know BPMN? A small handful... all of them contractors. There's not even a BPMN modeling tool in place at the company. Yet they're convinced this is the way to go. Is it reasonable to expect business users to create BPMN models? While I realize the GUI interface makes it less like "coding", I think that it'd be helpful to have a basic understanding of boolean logic, parallelism, and exception processing in cre...

Come hell or high water - this company is hell bent on including JCAPS as part of it's enterprise architecture, even though it doesn't plan to use any of the features that might set it apart from it competitors or open source alternatives. The long-term plan here is for the business users to use a BPMN-compliant tool (not the one from JCAPS) to create the business processes. These processes will integrate web service calls, creating a sort of business mashup of these services. The services will be written in .Net, not JCAPS. The only place JCAPS enters the equation is as the platform to run the BPEL generated from the BPMN. Make any sense? Not to me. Isn't a BPEL engine included in Glassfish? I'm sure this is just one of several free or low cost alternatives to execute BPEL. What I can't figure out is this company's infatuation with JCAPS. Given the shortcomings they've encountered already, why they are so intent on looking for more places to impleme...

Yesterday two people at the place I'm working gave notice that they'll be leaving the company. There has been a lot of turnover in the six months I've been here. Based on what I've seen, I'm not really surprised. Still, there always seems to be some head scratching by management and some longer tenured employees on why these people are leaving. Here's some of what I've seen. I've already mentioned the poor tooling and processes in place here - starting with Lotus Notes - so I won't rehash that here other than to mention the tooling shortfall has been brought to management's attention many times with no real action. Some people I sit near are in a constant state of emergency. Their production systems break daily (even nights and weekends) because the company's trading partners send messages that don't conform to their messaging API. Instead of rejecting these transactions, management's approach is to ignore the problem, askin...