Monthly Archives: February 2010

Introducing Parallax ALM

I created a CodePlex project for hosting the ALM system.  I even gave it one of those fancy codenames the kids are always talking about: Parallax ALM

Parallax is a scientific term to describe how the relationships of items in space look different from different angles.  According to Wikipedia:

Parallax is an apparent displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.

 

A simple example is the speedometer in a car.  When you are driving you can read your speedometer accurately, because you are staring straight at the speedometer, the way it was designed to be looked at.  However, when your passenger looks at the speedometer, he/she/it will see something different; because the indicator is slightly raised off the surface, the relationship of the indicator to the surface will be distorted, and so it will appear that you are going slower than you actually are (assuming, of course, that you are driving on the correct site of the road).  I won’t even get into why objects in the mirror are closer than they actually appear, but for now you can just assume that it’s a government conspiracy.

In a car, this is a simple case of right and wrong.  The driver is right, and anyone who disagrees can get the hell out and walk.  However, on a software project, that’s not always the case.  As developers, we usually just assume that we are right and the business/executive/PM/QA/ people are idiots, but if anyone has the authority or persuasiveness to tell everyone else to get out and walk, it sure isn’t a bunch of sociologically-crippled developers.

Really, in a software project, everyone is usually a little bit right and wrong.  Sure, there are often gen-u-ine jackasses out there, but they are usually a lot less common than we think, and we are usually right far less than we want to believe.

So we need to get everyone on the same page.  Or reading the same book.  But everyone speaks a different language, especially from one job description to another, so everyone needs their own version.  We need to present the same information to everyone in a way to makes sense to them as individuals, and maybe even makes their life easier.  Just watch a executive’s eyes glaze over as you explain iterative development to him, but put yourself in his shoes as he’s trying to explain why he needs some sort of metric, anything really, to know what the status of a project is and whether it’s falling behind schedule.  All of that information is really the same stuff, just looking at it from a different angle to fill a different job need.  You cannot reliably count on people to solve these problem themselves, because most people had an enormous aversion to putting themselves in someone else’s position, mostly because it throws a giant spotlight on everything they themselves maybe doing wrong.  So let’s solve the problem with some software.  You’ll still need to have people want to work together, but hopefully it will actually be easy for them this time around.

So there you go.

MMDB ALM: Technology Overview

Technologies

So what technologies are we going to use for this thing?  Hopefully a little bit of everything, as one of my goals is to use this to learn some new things.

But to start, it will look like this:

  • SQL Server 2008
  • IIS/ASP.NET 3.5
  • LINQ-to-SQL

 

Moving forward, I’d like to introduce the following technologies at some point, just for fun:

  • Entity Framework (EF)
  • NHibernate
  • Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
  • Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF)
  • Silverlight
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • Microsoft Reporting Services
  • IronPython
  • F# (eh, why not?)

 

Some of these may be used to complement what already exists, such as exposing a WCF layer or sprinkling some Silverlight here or there.

Other things may require replacing a whole layer of code, like changing the data layer from LINQ-to-SQL to the Entity Framework.  Hopefully I’ll be able to create side-by-side instances of the system running each type of data layer, which would be interesting for comparing the performance vs. development effort of each.

Some things I just want to learn, like ASP.NET MVC and IronPython, so I’m going to try to find a way to get that into the product somehow.

Obviously, very little of this experimentation would make any business sense in the real world, but that’s part of the fun of it.  I’ll build out the initial data layer in LINQ-to-SQL because that’s something I already know and have experience with, but then replacing it with NHibernate and/or the Entity Framework will be a great learning exercise, and hopefully to teach me a thing or two about the true pros and cons of each, beyond marketing fluff and fanboy crap.  And along the way, I’ll try to post everything I learn on this blog.

Development Tools

As far as tools, I’m using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, mostly because we already have it through the Microsoft BizSpark program.  However, I realize that it’s pretty impractical for most people to purchase Team Suite, so I’ll try to keep everything limited to the basic tools available in the Standard or Professional editions.  Since one of my goals is to provide something that other people can learn from (whether it be from my successes or failures), I think it’s important that I stick to tools that are readily available to most developers.

As such, I’ll steer clear of things like Visual Studio testing suite, and I’ll make use of more open source tools like NUnit and WatiN instead. 

For databases, I’ll avoid the original Visual Studio database projects (because they are mostly useless), and I’ll avoid the new fancy new Visual Studio SQL Server database projects (because they aren’t readily available to most developers and they are too complicated in my opinion).  However, this is still a sticky problem, as I have yet to see a good and free/cheap tool for managing database development.  Doug Blystone (co-founder of MMDB and resident SQL Server whiz) has been working on a utility that consolidates a lot of the do’s and don’ts concurrent SQL development that we’ve learned over the years, and we plan to release this very soon.  If you find it useful, great; if not, you can at least follow along with everything I’m doing.

 

Anyway, I’m going to get started on the data model first, so stay tuned.

MMDB ALM: The Vision: Work Item Tracking

We’re going to dig into the next major component the of the ALM, the work item tracking component.

Work Item Tracking Component

 

Not A Bug

 

What is a work item tracking system?  Essentially, it is a glorified bug tracker.  And if the world needs anything, it is yet another bug tracker.

The pet project of countless budding developers, the industry if drenched in bug tracking systems of all varieties, from the beautiful to the ghastly, and everything in between.

Over the last few years, there seems to have been a shift away from “bug tracking” towards “work item tracking.”  If you have ever watched or participated in the arguments between developers and QA about whether something is actually a “bug,” you may appreciate how “work item tracking” is a more accurate (albeit clunky) term.

 

Reinventing The Wheel

 

So what are these systems missing?  Not a whole lot, at least when you look at the whole ecosystem.  However, I’ve been hard time finding a simple and affordable solution that did exactly what I need.

Again, at MMDB, we use BugNET, and it works great.  However, there are a lot of features I’d like to see added, like better workflow control and the ability to make my custom fields first-class citizens in the system.  Obviously, as an open-source project, I could contribute these additional features, but that would not be nearly as much fun.

Many years ago at GHR Systems, we used Mercury’s Test Director (which has since been acquired by HP), and it was wonderful.  It included many of the features that I’ve been looking for ever since, and have yet to find.  It allowed us to create some simple workflows to for tracking our work, so that a bug needed a “fixed in version” before it was submitted to QA, and needed a “tested in version” before passing QA.  These things can all be enforced manually, but without the system enforcing these simple rules, they will never be followed.

 

The Silver Bullet

 

This leads to the one real feature I want to have.  It’s the catalyst for this whole thing, the one feature that got me thinking about doing this system in the first place.  Requirements association.

Again back at GHR, after a round of arguments about whether something was a bug or an enhancement, we decided yet again that we need a better way to manage whether something was a bug because it didn’t match the requirements, or whether it a enhancement because it was never covered in the requirements.

The development manager, having just finished reading Karl Weiger’s Software Requirements book, insisted that every new bug entered into the system much also reference the requirements item that it was conflicting with.

Obviously this was insane.  I don’t think the manager actually expected it to happen, but he was trying to prove a point.  It was very important that the requirements be closely followed while testing in order to truly determine whether an item was a bug, not because of the stigma of the bug itself, but because bugs were handled differently.  Bugs were prioritized in order to get them fixed quickly, while enhancements were scheduled to be reviewed and possibly implemented at a later date.  Allowing new features to be classified as bugs would cause the scope to creep out of control.

However, there was not really a good way to do this.  We could add a new field to the bug tracker, but what would go in that field?  Many of the requirements documents used Word’s outline format, which would create unique numbers for each line item, but those numbers were not consistent; if someone added something to the top of the document, the rest of the numbers would change.  Also, as we’ve described at length already, these documents were not immutable.

This got me thinking that we needed to track requirements and work items in the same system, so that there could be an inherent link between them. 

 

How It Works

 

This is the key feature.  Once the requirements are approved to some degree, the work items can be created for each feature.  Then, bugs can be logged against those features.  If there is ever a question about the requirements, the developer or QA resource can quickly view the associated requirements from inside the work item. 

If there was any conversation about the during the requirements phase about this item, it will all be there already.  If the user has additional questions, they can ask them right there, and the question and answer will be recorded as part of the history. 

By providing an easy way for people to get answers about the requirements, we trick them into building up a knowledge base about the system.  Over time, the number of repeated questions and recurring misunderstandings will decrease dramatically.

 

Here We Go

 

So that’s the idea.  This is the two major components of the system, and it’s probably enough to get started with some code.  I plan on dog-fooding this system the whole way, so at the very least I want a work item tracking system ASAP just to get myself organized.  Then I’ll build out the requirements piece and use that to define the requirements for the rest of the system.

Besides, I’m a developer.  I want to write some code.

MMDB ALM: The Vision: Requirements Component

To get a little more detailed, here’s what I’m thinking of for each component.  We’ll start with the Requirements component.

Requirements Component

 

The Best of Intentions

 

Right now, in a company much like yours, Larry, a business analyst, is spending hours writing up a requirements document.  Because Larry has been yelled at so many times by developers about not providing sufficient requirements, he is being is being particularly anal, documenting every feature, expected inputs and outputs, validation conditions, etc.  Once they are done, the document is beautiful.  It is 87 pages of clearly defined requirement bliss.  The problem is that the document is not done, and very soon it is not going to be alone.

Larry sends the document to his supervisor (1 copy), who makes a few rough edits and sends it back (another copy).  Larry then cleans up these edits to produce a revised final version (yet another copy) and sends it back the supervisor, who says to run with it.  In this initial review, we have now seen 3 copies of the document, each of which was a little different, and will live forever in email histories, hard drives, dark corners of SharePoint, or printed out on someone’s desk.

Larry sends the latest copy out to the development team, and schedules a meeting to discuss.  By the time the meeting comes around, he realizes he needs to make a few more changes, and brings a new copy to the meeting.  Meanwhile some developers have absentmindedly filed a copy off to their hard drive, and will forever reference that copy anytime a requirements issue comes up.  The meeting generates a lot of discussion, which causes several more changes.  The result is several more drafts of the document. 

 
The Hydra Emerges

 

All the while, the supervisor has taken his “final” copy and shown it to the CEO “just to given him a rough idea of where we are at”.  The CEO, despite his best intentions, will remember this conversation as “here’s exactly what we’re committing to”.  He especially likes the Universal Data Widget feature, which the development team has just notified the Larry is not possible.

The next time the Larry meets with the supervisor, they both have different copies of the requirements, and so the supervisor doesn’t notice that the Universal Data Widget feature, which the CEO loved, is now missing from the latest document.  A few weeks later, when someone else points it out, and nobody can remember why it was removed, and the supervisor plays the “what the CEO wants” card, and so it is added back in.  Meanwhile, the development team has already started coding, and has no knowledge of the feature being added back into the requirements.

 

Reality Strikes

 

3 months later, after the testing phase, the CEO asks “where’s the Universal Data Widget?” and everyone panics.  The development team has no recollection of the feature, and Larry can’t remember when it as added back in.  In their own defense, everyone produces a different copy of the requirements, each of which supports their own case.

After much finger pointing, the supervisor says, “whatever, just add the damn Widget right now!”  The developer takes a stand, pointing to his copy of requirements in hand, and insists that he’s not allowed to make any changes without a documented change request.  So the supervisor grabs a yellow sticky note, writes “Add the damn Widget” on it, and sticks it on the developer’s copy, and storms away.

Everyone started out with the best of intentions, and now they are completely frustrated with each other.  Everyone wants the product to work well, and yet they no have a list of things to blame on everyone else.  So much useful communication was lost in verbal meetings and hallway conversations, and the product suffered as a result.  In the end, the developers still say that the analysts don’t produce sufficient requirements, the analysts still say that the developers will never be happy with whatever requirements are produced, and the management still seems them all as a bunch of finger-pointing whiners who can’t get a product finished.  And honestly, I can’t really blame any of them.

 

Are Requirements Counter-Productive?

 

I’ve seen one variation of this or another so many times over the years.  The sticky note part is actually true: on one project where the requirements were spinning out of control, the development lead was became fanatical about documenting change requests, and the PM actually resorted to placing sticky notes on his copy of the requirements. (The development lead was the same as this guy, the original less-embellished story is here).  The end result is that people stop writing requirements, because it just makes things worse.

There has been a push over the years to move away from requirements, usually as some sort of eXtreme Programming (XP) method.  Requirements get replaced with looser “user stories.”  In in some requirements are abandoned all together, in favor of having the customer “always available” to answer questions and fill in missing details. 

Given how hard it is to get specifications right when you’re really trying to be thorough, it’s hard to imagine how non-technical customers can be expected to make rational, thoughtful, and cohesive requirement decisions by the seat of their pants.  It is the customer’s job to want the best and coolest thing, without consideration to the overall design, because that’s what normal people do.  Conversely, it’s the job of the analyst/PM/developer/whoever to adjust those requests to reality and ensure that the customer’s seat-of-the-pants vision remains consistent with their business objective.  Otherwise, if the design is based on what the customer wants at a given time, Frankenstein’s monster arises.  All of the parts are individually beautiful, when when assembled, the sum result is grotesque.

A lot of great information has been provided about the importance of requirements.  Joel Spolsky has written a series of posts about why the are necessary, and Karl Weiger has written the definitive book on how to do it well.  Over the years, I’ve realized that a lot of people are not actually arguing that requirements are helpful.  Instead, they are arguing that they are not practical, because everyone is always changing their minds.

Again, this is not surprising, because when you have complex documents written in Word being email around, it is not practical to maintain.  The problem here is not the content of the documents, but the approach to maintaining them.

 
Is There A Solution?

This always seemed like a difficult problem to solve, but not an overly complicated problem.  I’ve written more systems than I can count with far more complicated workflows than this.  In my opinion, the idea that anyone, much less software developers, are using Word documents in this day and age is inexcusable.

I have been waiting for years for a solution to arise to solve this problem.  Many systems have come along, either bug trackers or planning tools, with a requirements component bolted on to the side, usually as a wiki or a document management tool.  There are also tools that focus primarily on requirements, and then have a project planning or bug tracking component bolted on as an afterthought. 

However, none of the systems I’ve seen systems really captured the evolving nature of requirements and tied them to work items and bugs as a core system function. 

 
So What’s The Solution?

 

The solution is that we do what we’re always paid to do.  We build a system that accurately reflects the business model, in a way that makes it easy for people to do their jobs well.  It will be a centralized, intuitive system that easily facilities and records the natural conversations that take place in the development of requirements.  It will be a like Word’s track changes feature, but it will actually be useful.

Here’s the new story:

Larry enters his requirements into the new system in a outline and line-item format.  Because it is naturally geared towards his specific needs of entering requirements, he is able to leverage features like reusing requirement sections and building mockups, and is done is half the time that it would take him to create the same requirements in Word.

Larry then clicks a button to submit the requirements to his supervisor, which sends a notification to the supervisor.  Instead of clicking on a document, the supervisor clicks on the link to the system, and reviews the requirements.  He asks a few questions and enters a few suggestions, each of which is attached to a specific line item in the system.  Once he’s done, he clicks a button to send the requirements back to Larry.

Larry reviews the feedback from his boss, makes the changes he suggested, enters a few clarifications of his own, and then forwards it back to the supervisor for final review.  The supervisor clicks the Approve button, and the system has tracked every step of the way.

The process proceeds the same one the developers get involved.  Everyone is looking at the the same copy on the “document.”  If anyone sees something they don’t understand, they can click a button to request clarification, and the analyst can respond right there in the system, so anyone else with that same question can see the same answers.  6 months later, when developer and QA person are arguing about how a feature should work, they can look back the sole latest version of requirements, see all the discussion that took place, and quickly get an answer; if the answer is not there, they ask it through he system

 

How Do You Get People To Use It?

 

People will need to want to use it, but we’re try to build it so usable that they actually want to use it.  We’ll do everything we can to keep the learning curve of the system as small as possible, so it’s easy for people to look at it and just start using it.  It must be an intuitive, pleasant, frictionless interface, or it will be a failure.

You usually lose people when they look at the system and don’t know where to start, or were to go next.  They’ll complain about the system, and all they get back is “well this is a very powerful system, so you need to spend a lot of time to really learn how to us it.” 

This answer always infuriated me, whether it was Oracle or Linux or TFS.  You can always build a simple that is powerful and easy to use a the same time.  It is not easy, but that is why it is so rare.  It is the last mile of the design, and one of the hardest parts, and it’s what separates powerful products that most people hate from great products that most people love. 

Take a look at stackoverflow.com.  When you get down to it’s guts, it is an extremely complicated system, but it is still and inherently easy system to use, because so much effort was put into making it so.

 

Get On Board

 

Just one more note about getting buy-in.  I pitched this idea to a friend of mine, with whom I worked with for years in the trenches, and he said that the business analysts and project managers would never go for it, because it puts too much accountability on them.  I was taken aback by this, as it had a lot of the pessimistic “us-versus-them” partisanship that I want this tool to solve.  The idea here is that people usually have at least somewhat good intentions in this process, and so far it has been the tools that have failed them. 

However, he was right in some cases, and often times you find yourself working with people who are actively dishonest and try to cover there tracks.  In that case, fire them if you have the authority, because they are a detriment to the company.  Or, if you’re lower on the totem pole, quit if you can, because that is an awful place to work in and there are always better options.  Of course, again this may not be practically in all cases, so I often fall back on calling them out and trying to shine the light of truth whenever possible, but that has usually just gotten me in trouble.  This too can be problematic, because often you can come across as a complainer (After one such incident, one of my recruiters suggested I read Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends & Influence People”, which was actually far more useful than I expected).

 

Here We Go

 

So that’s hopefully what we’re going to build.  At least part of it. 

Am I qualified to define how a requirements system should work?  Good gravy, no.  But I’m going to do it anyway.  I have a rudimentary understanding of some basic principles, but I am by no means an expert in requirements analysis and collection.  I just see a broken system and want to improve it.  It may not have all the bells and whistles that some other requirements systems have, but that’s OK. 

And of course, this is an exercise in developing software, not building a marketable product, and so that grants me the latitude to pursue things that I’m completely unqualified to pursue.  Plus sometimes it’s just fun to let go and try to do something you suck at.

MMDB ALM: The Vision

For now, this working name for this project will be referred to as the MMDB ALM, until I can think of a better name, which may be never.  ALM stands for “Application Lifecycle Management”, which is what we’re building.  MMDB refers to MMDB Solutions, who will own the source code to this application, under some sort of open source license to be determined later.

So what are we going to build?  I touched on this a little bit in the last post, but here’s the general overview:

 

This application will be made of a series of integrated yet independent components:

    1. Requirements
    2. Project Planning
    3. Work Item Tracking
    4. Testing
    5. Customer Response

 

I like bullet lists.  Here are some high-level requirements for this application:

  • Integration: These components will all be integrated into a single aggregated data source.  This does not necessarily mean a single physical database, but all of the data must be able to be tied together and traced through easily.
  • Independence: These components can behave as silos, so that any one component can stand on its own.
  • Portability: These components will all have integrated points to existing systems, so that any part could be replaced with another third party system.
  • Performance: The performance must be sufficient.  Notice I didn’t say “as fast as possible”, just sufficient to meet the expected load of the system, as demonstrated by load test.  If there is to be a tradeoff between code elegance and performance, the integrity and readability of code will always win over performance unless there is documented evidence that the performance change will resolve an existing issue.
  • Usability: The system must be easy to use.  No end-user reference documents will be provided, for several reasons.  First, I hate writing them.  Second, nobody reads the damn things.  Third, they are perpetually out of date.  Lastly, and most importantly, they are a crutch to avoid creating usable software.  The mark of a truly usable system is that any person can start using it with no training and it never occurs to them to ask any questions.  It sounds like a lofty goal, and it’s really hard to do well, but it is definitely doable, and it’s a lot better than writing documentation.
  • Quality: All code will be run through automated tests, but not necessarily the type of unit testing you may be used to.  A common approach is to create a series of unit tests for every little method in every little component, which I find to be a poor investment of time, and gives a false sense of security because it doesn’t account for the variations you get when you string components together.  Instead, we will focus scripting out full end-to-end tests from the front-end UI (using WatiN or something similar), basically automating the QA regression process.  I feel that this approach gives you a better return on your time by providing more useful tests in less time.
  • Configurability: Administrators will be able to define their own rules for workflows, authorization, user defined fields, etc.  I don’t want to create a system so configurable that it’s useless, but every company has different needs, so many of the most common rules will be configurable.  For example, a company may want to say that anyone can enter a bug; but then it gets assigned to the development manager; who then can assign it to a developer, who must enter a fix description, number of hours, and version number to mark it ready for testing; etc.  However, it should be noted that usability will always win over configurability.

 

This is a first pass, and we’ll add more as we go.  You’ll notice that this approach will age this document, so that it will eventually be very out of date.  That is intentional, as this is one of the problems we’re trying to solve.  Yes, I know right now many of you are screaming “that’s what a wiki is for!”, but that’s just too free-form for what we’re trying to do.  I’m reminded of those label-maker commercials that imply they will make your life will be more organized, but you still get stuck doing the same damn organization, it just looks a little prettier.  I want to have an application to gently guide the users towards an organized solution, doing just enough to make it easy for them to do their job well, but not enough to shackle them into a subjectively awkward process.

Anyhow, we’ll get into these bullet points a little more in the next few posts.

Something to write about

So I need something to write about.  I’ve considered starting a blog at several points over the years, but I never got around to it.  Not because I didn’t have things to say, but because I didn’t anything to talk about.  I didn’t want to throw together a bunch of random thoughts, or worse a rant about whatever was annoying me that day.

Then I figured if I was going to write about developing software, I should just go ahead and write some software, the only problem is what to write.  I have a few ideas for viable commercial products that could make a profit, but those aren’t really things that I want to publicize until they’re finished.  I could talk about one of our existing products, like SportsCommander, but again that is a closed-source product, and I don’t think talking about a product that has already been built frankly would be all that interesting.

Then it occurred to me that I should build something that I’ve always wanted to build but never had a good reason.  Something that includes features that I’ve always wanted in similar products but could never exactly find despite a ridiculously saturated market.  Something that I wish I could build and sell, but probably would not be profitable, again because of the market saturation.  Something that would inherently addresses many of the development management concepts that I’d like discuss in this blog.  How about a bug tracking system?  Or better yet, how about an application lifecycle management system (ALM).

Years ago, like most developers, I wanted to build my own bug tracking system, but obviously the last thing the world needs is yet another bug tracker.  At MMDB, we’ve been using BugNET, and it works pretty well for a free open-source system.  Every company has their own, some use classic open source freeware like Bugzilla or JIRA, others use expensive enterprise systems like HP Quality Center or Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS), and many companies just build their own. 

Many of these systems start out a bug tracker, and then people want to use them for tracking new development work and enhancements too, which is fair enough.  They want to track enhancements.  The want to attach requirements.  They want to plan projects.  Sometimes the system handles these things easily, sometimes not.  Bug tracking evolves from tracking just bugs, to tracking issues (bugs and other things that need to be changed), to tracking work items (any generic type of work that needs to be performed).  For years I had seen the evolution of these systems into something bigger and more integrated, and I wondered when the developer tool market would catch up.  I began to hear about Microsoft’s Team System, which sounded cool, but it was supposed to be extremely expensive and no place I was working would shell out for it any time soon. 

Then, in 2006, as I was reading Eric Sink’s blog (the only blog I really read at the time, unless you count www.thedailywtf.com), I saw his pitch for SourceGear’s new ALM product, Fortress.  Go read it right now.  It’s worth it.  I’ll wait.

I was fascinated.  Tying together requirements and work items and bugs into one integrated system.  My mind spun a vision of some fantasy system where entire when you open a bug, there is the original feature attached to it, and a link to the relevant requirements, including who wrote them, who approved them, any clarifications that have been made, and who to talk to if you have questions.  A system where requirements were a living, breathing, evolving system, rather than a stale Word document that has been tweaked a million times.  A system that solved all the problems I’d seen over the years, and actually made everyone’s job easier.  A system that covered requirements, project planning, QA testing, work item and bug tracking, build management, and change control.  Heck, maybe even a call center module that allows a company to build up a knowledge base of common issues and their resolutions, and allows the company to feed those statistics back into the requirements and planning phases so that they can be prioritized, so that you can be confident that you are actually solving the point-points that your customers facing.

So I downloaded Fortress and tried it out.  It was a very cool system, and certainly worth the money for many organizations, but it couldn’t really live up to the hype that I built up in my head.  Nothing could.  My expectations were too unrealistic.  I was disappointed.

So I looked at other systems.  Most were too complicated.  Most were too expensive.  Most were too difficult to maintain.  They didn’t capture the end-to-end integration the way that I had pictured.  No product met my vision.

So I should build my own, right?  Not so fast.  Building and distributing a commercial software product is really hard.  We always look at the code and think it’s easy, just code it and the money will come, but the reality is that the code is a very small part of the process.  You have QA, documentation, marketing, distribution, payment processing, customer support, and more legal issues than you could shake a stick at.  If you have a great focused product idea that is going to be easy to build and distribute, and will make a lot of money, and will fill a specific need in an underserved niche market, by all means plow ahead.  But if you want to make money by building yet another bug tracker, glorified as it may be, you’ll make yourself miserable.

So that’s where I found myself, with this possibly-great idea floating around in the back of my mind, knowing that it would probably never see the light of day because it was just not practical.  I moved from job to job, working with different systems, and remain moderately irritated that none of them, in my humble opinion, got it right.

I thought maybe I could build it just for MMDB’s internal use, and maybe release portions of it as open source portions of it, but it really wouldn’t be worth the time.  Between working full time consulting contracts during the day, working on MMDB projects at night and weekends, and a wonderful wife and two boys that I’d rather be spend my time with, I have an pretty clear idea of what my time is worth to me, and it’s quite a lot.  If I’m going to spend my time on a system that will never produce a profit, it will need to make my life a whole lot easier, or it will need to fill some other need.

So I’m multi-purposing here.  I’m writing the blog I always wanted to write about writing code and designing applications.  I’m writing about the process of software development, and I’m building the system that I always wanted to.  It will probably never get done, but that’s OK.  I may very well get bored and wander off, but that’s OK too.  The product may be a mess, but even that will teach me something.  The process itself is now the primary benefit.  I’ll get to experiment with some ideas and share what I find, and maybe get some feedback, and I’ll do it on whatever schedule I feel like.  I get to do something grossly impractical just for the sake of doing it, without the commitment of having to get it done.

I’ll go through the whole process here on this blog.  I’ll discuss what  I’m trying to accomplish, why I’m doing things certain ways, lessons I’ve learned over the years, and lessons I’ve learned just recently.  I’ll deal with specific issues, and I’ll go off on a few tangents.  Hopefully people find it interesting and useful.  If you get something out of it, great.  If not, too bad. 

I’ll try to use this as a testing ground to experiment with new technologies, because the only way I can really learn about something is to build something with it.  I’ll put all the code up on CodePlex or SourceForge so you can see it all for yourself. 

Here we go.

Hello World

Greetings,

Apparently it’s about that time, the time that I go ahead and create a blog.  I finally got on Facebook a year ago, and I’m at least a year away from convincing myself that Tweeting is worth my time. 

Why a blog?  What could I have to say that is of any possible use to anyone?  We’ll see.  Probably not much, but it’s worth a shot.  My friends and coworkers have repeatedly said that I should write a book full of the absurd crap that I rant about every day.  My high school and college teachers said I was good at writing, but maybe they were just being nice.

Who am I?  I’m a software developer, focused primarily on .NET.  I’ve been a software engineer, a programmer/analysis, a technical consultant, and an application development consultant.

What’s the purpose?  Honestly, it is that I like to hear the sound of my own keyboard.  Like most software developers, I have a lot of strong views about software development, what works and what doesn’t, and ways that I’ve learned over the years to make my job easier.  If someone can read this and learn a thing or two, great.  If someone has an opinion on why I’m wrong, even better.

I change jobs a lot.  I’ve worked for small aggressive software companies, large sluggish software companies, and body-shop consulting companies.  I’ve done software for mortgage companies, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and food service companies.  I’ve seen some stuff that worked, and I’ve seen a lot of what hasn’t.  I’ve learned a little from the best places I’ve worked at (GHR Systems, Strohl Systems, etc).  I’ve learned FAR more from the worst places I’ve worked at.

I like well-defined process and systems.  I like the development process to run like a well-oiled machine.  I like simplicity.  I like to make everyone’s jobs a little easier.  I think it’s a very simple equation to figure out whether a process is too simple (not really solving a problem), or whether it’s too complicated (and costing more time that it saves).  I consider design patterns to be good, but I consider Design Patterns to be mere guidelines, not building blocks.  I always try to remember that I’m getting paid to build something that works, not something that is cool.

What am I going to write about?  Lots of things.  Design approaches.  Common mistakes and how to avoid them.  Source Control, version control, and change management.  My general theories on development management.

Will it be any good?  Statistically speaking, probably not, but we’ll see.  Here we go.