Chip Childers' Blog

Software Development Philosophies

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:57:00 +0000

Sam Halperin (a good friend of mine), just posted some interesting thoughts about software development, and I thought I'd reply with my thoughts here.

"Someone once said that the number of bugs in any software system is constant."

That is certainly true, but only because the number of bugs in a non-trivial system is equal to N+1, where N=the number of bugs that you know about. So if you start with N+1 and then subtract 1 from N, the value of N has gone down by 1. But, you still have N+1 bugs in the system!

It's important to remember that this is for non-trivial systems, and is more of a macro perspective than that taken at the lower levels of the software development process. It is absolutely possible to design a function that is bug-free (assuming that the underlying compiler, machine language and hardware that it will utilize do not have any bugs that will directly effect its operation), it just can't have many function points in it.

"When do you throw out a system entirely and start from scratch with a new version?"

Sam asks a good question here and, when something like this comes up, I always like to validate my thinking by finding out what better minds than mine have to say on the topic. In an interview by Bill Venners, Martin Fowler answers a question just like the one Sam asks:

Bill Venners: In Refactoring, you list several problems with refactoring, including situations when you shouldn't refactor. How do you decide when you should start from scratch and throw away existing code versus refactor it?

Martin Fowler: The answer is: I don't really know. If you have no tests and cruddy code, then you should probably throw it away and start again because you'll have to do all the testing, as opposed to if you have cruddy code with many tests. If the code is riddled with bugs, then behavior-preserving transformations will of course preserve the bugs, so that might be an argument against refactoring. I think the answer to your question also changes as your comfort level with refactoring increases. As you become more confident with refactoring, you'll want to refactor something that you'd otherwise want to rewrite because you're more skilled at refactoring.

Martin has an interesting perspective here, and one that I actually agree with... again, as long as we are talking about non-trivial systems. Besides the engineering aspects of executing a good refactoring program within an organization, there is often a financial benefit of not always starting over. However, the comment that Sam makes about the difficulty of taking over a code-base that might not be designed or implemented in a way that is conducive to understanding and refactoring (think about all that spaghetti code that you have run into in life), is a major concern as well. In order to be in a position where it actually DOES make sense to use refactoring instead of rebuilding, you have to start on solid footing.

One other area to consider in this discussion revolves around technology shifts, and their impact on a "legacy" code base. Every couple of years (it seems to be 3 to 4 years), enough of a shift in the technology landscape has occurred, either as a jump or as accumulated organic changes, that you have to seriously consider the potential value of migration to a new platform or approach. This obviously costs money to do, but the risk is that the further behind you get the more costly catching up can be.

This leads me to a topic that I've been thinking about recently, the buy vs. build decision process that organizations are constantly having to answer for themselves. I'm working through my thoughts on that right now, and will be sharing it some time soon.

Infrastructure Investments and the value of Service Providers

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:45:00 +0000

Last week, on his blog Thinking Out Cloud, Geva Perry wrote about how he thinks that we are going to see a wave of innovation surrounding data center infrastructure in his post Infrastructure is Sexy. I have to say that not only do I agree, but we are seeing it in action right now. We have the opportunity to work closely with some of the leading infrastructure hardware, software and service vendors in the industry, and I can tell you without a doubt: the investment wave has already begun and we will begin to see the rewards of that investment in the first half of next year. In fact, I was talking with one of those vendors just yesterday, and I'm excited about what is about to hit the market. (I can't share details though, as I need to respect their NDA.)

In my role, one of my focus areas is infrastructure management software and automation. Given that focus over the years, I've been very frustrated with the level of support provided by the software vendors for service providers (and this includes ITSM applications, in addition to the automation frameworks). While this might have been an acceptable way to focus on getting into the enterprise market, trends in IT are going to drive CIO's to continue to push their infrastructure into service provider's hands. So... it's our turn for some focus from the vendors.

The shift to service providers is due to a combination of cost cutting pressure and the fact that the increase demand for infrastructure has created what seems to be a never ending stream of capital investments required to meet that demand. Shifting spend from capital to variable, with cost drivers linked to real demand, is exactly why cloud computing is exciting. Service providers have an opportunity to provide clients with different expense models by leveraging scale and the laws of averages to drive down the overall capacity requirements across a wide variety of customers.

For us to be effective at this, we have been relying on massive customizations or manual work-arounds when using the current generation of automation software packages. For the next generation of systems, my hope (and I think I may be in for a treat) is that we see more focus on multi-tenant solutions and increased programmatic access into the packages. No vendor will own our entire management infrastructure, because no vendor can really manage all of the different elements that we need to manage. It has remained up to us to sew these things together, using whatever hooks we can grab a hold of and some standards (SNMPv2 as the most basic example). The more vendors understand this reality, the more they will be willing to support our need to put these packages together in unique and scalable ways.

"Portal" Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:30:00 +0000

I've recently been tasked with working on a corporate portal strategy, which lead me down a path of thinking about a couple of important questions. First, what exactly is a portal these days? Second, given that definition, what exactly is a "portal strategy"? I'll delve into what I believe to be general answers to these questions, avoiding the particulars of my company's effort.

What is a portal?

Back in the late 1990's, I was never a fan of the term portal. If I was handing out awards for "buzzword of the year" back then, the term portal would have been a gold metal winner. For a few years the word seemed to decrease in usage (with the notable exception being the product vendors that focused on "portal" platforms). This was a bit of a relief for me, and allowed me to focus my buzzword angst on other targets. When I joined my current company, I was happy to be using the term "extranet" to describe the project that I was running. Things changed again when we purchased another managed services provider, and our leadership began to use the term portal anew. For the last four years, I've had to get over my issue with the term and come to embrace it as a good description of the integration platform and web application delivery tool that we have developed.

When trying to pin a definition on a buzzword, I always like to get the crowd-sourced opinion. A quick search of Wikipedia for the term "portal" returns the expected disambiguation page, but from there you can find two links related to this topic: Enterprise Portal and Web Portal. The enterprise portal page defines a portal as a "framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries". The first line of the web portal page says "A web portal is a site that provides a single function via a web page or site." That's certainly a non-intuitive statement (and not one that I agree with). I couple of sentences later, it states "Portals present information from diverse sources in a unified way." Now that's a much more logical description. The key words seem to be "integrated" and "unified".

So, given my past experience and what the masses have to say about it, I've boiled it down to a couple of key aspects:

Web-based - It's got to use HTTP as the primary mechanism of accessing the system. I only say this, because there really isn't another protocol as widely adopted that caters to the application and content use cases that get associated with the term portal.
Integrated applications - Especially with in "Enterprise" portal solution, but even in several consumer portals on the Internet (such as iGoogle and Live), integration of different applications into a single interface is key.
Personalized and Customized - Personalization and customization are two keys to a successful user experience with a portal. While they aren't required, I'm adding them as key aspects because of their importance to the success of the system.

What is a portal strategy?

This is where I think that the conversation gets tricky. If we exclude any talk of a consumer oriented solution, a corporate portal strategy could really be one of three things:

Customer Portal Strategy - This is basically an extranet-style solution. The strategy around this should focus on the following:

Consolidated experience across multiple lines of business (if they exist)
Contractual, billing and operational transparency
Self-service support
New service purchasing

Internal Portal Strategy - If the customer portal strategy was an extranet, this is the intranet side of the solution. Strategy points for this:

Operational Efficiency
Infrastructure / Development Cost Reduction (Common Platform)
Employee Satisfaction
Knowledge Management
Collaboration

Web Strategy - If you get rid of a log in prompt, the customer portal begins to look more like your corporate marketing website. Strategy points for this:

Corporate Web Presence
Search Engine Optimization
Brand Protection / Reinforcement
Web Analytics

Where they intersect - There are a couple of strategic areas that these three ideas have at their intersection:

Customer Acquisition, Retention & Up/Cross Selling
Intellectual Capital / Property Management
Common Technical Architecture
Governance & Standards

So to answer the question (What is a portal strategy?), I've come to the conclusion that it's something made up of most of the elements listed above. We will see how this plays out in the next couple of months (and as we engage with different leaders in the interactive industry), and I'll certainly write again if my perspective changes.

Making Progress on the House

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:14:00 +0000

It's been almost a year now, but I'm finally making progress on the second floor middle room that we gutted again. The wiring is done, the rusted out heating duct has been replaced, the bay window is insulated now, the closet has been re-framed and the wallboard is all up. Now I just have to get through getting all the drywall compound applied and sanded before the one year mark! In all fairness to myself (hey, it's my site), I did get distracted with some other house work over the summer... but I'm back on track and focused on wrapping this room up.

Posted by Picasa

Belated Photos from Barcelona

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:02:00 +0000

I just published a couple of photos from our September trip to Barcelona on PicasaWeb here.

I really like the wacky parts of a city... In particular those that make an interesting photo to share later.

Apparently people in Barcelona require reminders not to step out into traffic or they might die.
And on the beaches... the problem people seem to be the Brits and Americans.
While not in Barcelona, our trip to see the Dali Theatre and Museum in Figueres was definitely a highlight.

Posted by Picasa

Mapping my social media use

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:29:00 +0000

I was thinking about what a nasty little web (pun intended) of connections I've created recently with all the social media sites. For fun, I spent a few minutes diagramming the connections last night. The hardest part was laying out all of the lines and bubbles to make sense of the connections.

One thing that I considered after the fact was how I work with the tools. For example, I find it kind of amazing (even being a technology professional) that I can be anywhere in the world with cell phone coverage, and send a text message that gets propagated across several sites in one shot. The text message goes to twitter, which then gets pulled into FriendFeed and Plaxo. From FriendFeed, the message is then forwarded as my status to LinkedIn and Facebook. My website also shows that message via a FriendFeed gadget.

The interconnections in the web definitely represent something more powerful than what is accomplished with just one site. This is where the real power of the web is these days.

Update: Jon Udell has an interesting post about a similar concept. While I just marveled at the current state of affairs, John describes some goals that he wants to see fulfilled.

Innovation for technology departments

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:15:00 +0000

It's interesting to me to think about the challenges of innovation within any organization, in particular a profit seaking enterprise. While small companies have the potential to innovate by virtue of their size and large companies have the ability to put capital directly towards formalized innovation strategies, there's a gap in the middle where it is a bit harder to drive change. If you have a small number of people, trusting that team to do what is best for the organization is really driven by hiring decisions. If you are large, you can set up a R&D function or implement corporate-wide processes for identifying and fostering valuable ideas. If you are in the middle, you lose a little control over who gets hired (not that you don't try to get the best people possible). Mid-size companies also don't typically have the capital available for dedicated research activities.

CIO Magazine recently published an interview with Tony Scott, the CIO of Microsoft, in which he talks briefly about their innovation strategy. Two interesting things to note: first, Tony makes a point that Microsoft tries to foster a culture of innovation, but at the same time it is important to remember that the company also spends large sums of cash every year running Microsoft Research. While there are certainly some skeptics that believe that Microsoft has become too large (for some time now) to really innovate and that they have only really driven major changes to their product set through aquisition activity, but I think that we might just be asking for too much from one organization. Sure, they are going to do things that are in line with what other market players are doing... but I really do like their Live Mesh platform strategy.

To me, the real question is how do you drive innovation without large budgets or small teams. Thoughts?

Book Review: The Wall-Mart Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:54:00 +0000

Insightful, scary and impressive

Charles Fishman has managed to both intrigue and scare me with The Wall-Mart Effect. This book is worth reading for anyone interested in the economy, corporate growth models, supply chain management, manufacturing or sales. Even those with no interest in any of those topics should read the book, just to understand why you SHOULD be interested in this company.

Not being focused on traditional retail or physical product manufacturing in my daily life, the book was still able to get my mind racing with thoughts about how to work with or against the massive force that Wall-Mart exerts on all of us.

Reviewed on Amazon

Service-Now.com Executive Briefing

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:56:00 +0000

I spent yesterday up in New York at a service-now.com executive briefing, which was actually very interesting. Service Now is a SaaS provider for an ITSM suite of applications, but they are also a platform for developing similar applications. We had spoken with their sales team back in October, but getting to sit down with some of their more experienced and technical folks was worth the train ride.

The top two presentation of the day were from Fred Luddy (CEO and founder of Service-Now) and Dave Osman (VP of Global Process and Information Engineering at Deutsche Bank). Coming in third was Rod Phillips (Director Solution Consulting at Service-Now.com), who was a very dynamic speaker that provided two of the demonstrations. He also fielded questions about the implementation process exceptionally well.

If you have an interest in ITSM tools, I definitely recommend that you spend at least a little time looking at Service-Now.com.

Eagles game with BMC

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:22:00 +0000

I had a chance to go to the Eagles game on Sunday night, courtesy of BMC Software. It's a shame that they lost, but it was fun anyway. The biggest problem that the Eagles had was stopping the Giant's run game (excluding some bad coaching calls), which made me think about similar scenarios in the business world. While you have to watch for the big market moves (the passing game) and prepare to make a few yourself, never forget to protect aginst the smaler moves that can become big quickly.

Book Review: Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:46:00 +0000

I just recently read a book called Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, published by O'Reilly. Amy Shuen has done a wonderful job with this book. Its ability to blend the business, marketing and technology conversation around Web 2.0 philosophies into a cohesive discussion makes this book worth the read. While I was slightly disappointed that the book didn’t spend much time on internal uses for these strategies (which could easily have been added as a seventh chapter), the focus on the value to changing a business was well researched and valuable.

In particular, spending time understanding the various value propositions around Web 2.0 was excellent. From innovation models, to monetization strategies and harnessing the long tail of a potential market, the revenue potential is clearly explored.

One comment that I read from another reader was that he felt that the language was contrived and not engaging enough. I couldn’t disagree more. The book was articulate and readable, especially given the fact that the book covered so many of the dry topics that are often ignored for the sake of hype generating content.

Frustrated that I didn't execute on an idea last year...

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:15:00 +0000

...but then again, I couldn't have topped Microsoft anyway.

I've joined Microsoft's Tech Preview of Live Mesh, and although it's very early in the product's life cycle, I'm already getting value from the tool. One of the ideas that a friend and I bantered around last summer was to solve the problem that file synchronization solutions like Groove have in dealing with devices being off line. We wanted to create a synchronization service that would handle the files "in the cloud". The only difference was that we wanted to only store files until they either expired or were pulled down to the devices that were not connected at the time of the original upload. We were being pessimistic about our ability to manage the sale of storage required to support a fully accessible file store for the web.

Regardless of the argument about Microsoft's intentions (does the Mesh support the "cloud" model, or defend against it), they are going to have a hit. To me, the "cloud" model has it's limitations and the local desktop / OS has other problems. Merging the two is what will get people into the cloud way of thinking.

Lost Access to Work Email

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:46:00 +0000

I lost access to my work email account yesterday afternoon, and it has yet to be restored (IT has been working on it since then, but they haven't figured it out yet). I always laughed at the idea of email addiction, but it really is painful to try to operate in a modern business environment without that trusty "send" button. I'm up to four calls today where people have assumed that I have already read something that they sent me. When they say this, I have to sheepishly reply that "I can't get into my email today, so I haven't seen that yet." When I go on vacation, I happily ignore all of my email accounts, but this is like walking around a cave without a light.

Cloud Hosting - What's missing to make it Enterprise Ready?

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:17:00 +0000

There's been a ton of commotion recently with everyone getting excited about Google's App Engine and Amazon's EC2. Rackspace has been getting into the mix as well with Mosso. It's pretty exciting stuff, and has the potential to take a significant market share from the more traditional hosting models (shared, dedicated, managed, etc...).

Lew Moorman (from Rackspace) argues that there will always be a place for the other models. I actually think that he's right in the short to medium term, but fundamentally, computing power has become a commodity. It's getting to the point where individuals and forward thinking organizations are abstracting the details of hosting their applications away from themselves, in effect reducing the level of system administration knowledge that they will have to keep on staff. Like it or not, that's not going to stop.

Programming language evolution is a perfect example of how this abstraction moves certain technical knowledge domains out of the mainstream and back into being a speciality. How many programmers do you know that actually use any sort of assembly language programming in their work today? I'll assume not many. Instead, programming has been abstracted away from the hardware and into the domain of solving user problems.

Looking at the hosting market as it stands today, we are going to see some serious change over the next decade (if not sooner). Today, many companies are outsourcing the server and network administration work to an ever decreasing number of service providers (isn't consolidation fun?). This is the same principle as the programming example: companies are abstracting the detailed infrastructure work away from their staff. But in many ways, it isn't really abstract as much as the executive suite would like to think. Most enterprises still outsource in "server units" or "network device units", ensuring that they have to think in terms of physical or logical servers.

Now look at "cloud hosting". It's another abstraction layer for application infrastructure, outsourcing most of the challenges of the physical systems completely to the providers.

So here's where it's going... if cloud hosting providers can solve a couple of key problems, then they are in a position to help enterprise buyers move to this new model. Issue number 1? Security. In this world of industry competition, government regulation and consumer data protection concerns, this is of paramount concern to enterprise buyers - which is why it should matter to cloud hosting companies. These hosting companies should start to have a dialog with their various technology partners and potential customers about the following topics: Data Privacy, Authentication, Authorization, Logical "Tier-ed" Separation of Application Layers, Private Network Transport. The sooner this conversation starts, the sooner the problems can be solved.

NOTE: This posting talks about the hosting business... which my employer is actively involved in. The ideas expressed above are my own, and have absolutely nothing to do with the company I work for.

NYC and Apple Battle Over Logos

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:45:00 +0000

Apple is apparently picking a fight with New York City's GreeNYC campaign over logos (see the Wired article). This is just silly. I think that apples have been represented in art before.

Do these logos look the same to you?

Version Control for Multiple Teams

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:23:00 +0000

Looking around for a good way to illustrate our team's branch / tag model more clearly, I ran across a recent article by Henrik Kniberg titled Agile version control with multiple teams (PDF) (he also published it as HTML on InfoQ here).

Henrik has done an outstanding job of describing and visualizing the thought process around concurrent team development within the same repository. I'm particularly impressed with his simple explanation on how to think about your release mainline's relationship with multiple development code lines.

IBM's "Ideating" Commercial

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:47:00 +0000

Recent events reminded some of us about the IBM commercial on "ideating". This cracks me up every time I watch it.

Google Wake Up Kit

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:04:00 +0000

One of Google's April Fools jokes for 2008 is the Google Wake Up Kit. It's definately not as funny as Google Paper.

For something actually useful, check out the Google Docs "Offline" capabilities.

Thin Server Architecture Working Group

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:03:00 +0000

There's a working group that just started up called the Thin Server Architecture Working Group (ok, it's just three folks that are getting together to discuss things, but it's a start). It looks like it's going to be a higher level discussion than related W3C activities (which are more focused on standards discussions). InfoQ has a good one page summary of what's out there for the working group today (which isn't much).

Here's my issue though... my current role is all about the delivery of a Rich Internet Application (RIA), and I have some fundamental issues with the standards and implementations today:

Storage of the "View" - The Thin Server Architecture Working Group is all about the idea of pushing the interface logic to the client. That's very good... but something needs to provide that logic to the client (hint: the server). They need to be sure to consider that part of the architectural models in their work.

Current Client Rendering Performance - HTML clients have some serious performance limitations today. DOM manipulation seems to have been considered a secondary performance goal until recently. Flash and Silverlight are certainly able to handle the visual aspects of the presentation effeciently, and they both offer opportunities for fairly effecient display logic to be imbedded, but I'd like to see the browsers step up their DOM handling efforts.

Developer Optimization - I know that many, many developers and architects look at the MVC model as being superior to the "everything in one block of code" model (I made that one up, but you know what I mean). That's absolutely true, but one belefit of the "everything in one block of code" model is initial development (not maintenance development) can be performed as a stream of thought. Because of this, many younger or less experienced developers will start to learn some very bad habits as soon as they start coding for the web. Tools for RIA development need to help with the seperation of logic layers (not necessarily the MVC model), and at the same time feel natural to code.

Standards and working groups are very important, but the most important part of any architecture, specification or design pattern is how they get implemented in the real world.

AT&T is trying to push the browser forward with Pogo

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:43:00 +0000

AT&T has decided to take on a browser project called Pogo. Take a look at the demo over on the pogo site, and you can seen an interview with AT&T's David Grantz that Rob Scoble recorded. Rob's posting talks about AT&T entering the browser wars, but, according to TechCrunch, it's really based on Mozilla.

Erick, over at TechCrunch has a pretty good review, but one thing that he doesn't mention is the similarity to the visualizations in Windows Vista. I'm in agreement with Erick, it looks pretty... but why do I need that over my current interface. Again, do we really need another Mozilla flavored browser?

Starting the "real" home improvement work.

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:26:00 +0000

2nd Floor Middle - Chip
Originally uploaded by chipchilders

Back in August, we bought an old house in West Philly. Our best guess is that the house was constructed sometime between 1910 and 1915. It's a great old house, but has been abused over its life. While I'm sure that the original occupants were quite caring for the building, it seems like there has been a whole line of owners that did things "just good enough" to suit their needs. Over the years, that's become the biggest issue for us to deal with.

The house is three stories, with a basement and an attic. Since there's only two of us in the house (not counting the two cats), we think we have plenty of room to move around as we work.

Our first "full" renovation is the second floor middle bedroom. While the demolition work has been in progress for a few months now, I took two solid days this weekend to complete the “gut job” of the room.

You can see some great shots of the work here: Home Improvement Photos on Flickr

Floor Middle - above the bathroom
Originally uploaded by chipchilders

"Remodeled" rooms aren't always what they seem.

I thought that some special attention was worth while for this photo. A recent remodel of the bathroom led to some interesting results. As you can see in the photo, the new ceiling of the bathroom is attached to a new framing structure that sits about a foot and a half below the original ceiling. I guess it would make sense if you needed a cavity for electrical, mechanical or plumbing access, but it looks like it was just done that way in an attempt to be lazy. They set the new framing up about 8 feet from the floor, which you would expect to make the drywall process easier. The problem is that they didn't bother leveling the new ceiling, so it's visibly uneven from the inside of the bathroom. Even better? The work they did to make the drywall installation easier was negated by the fact that it wasn't leveled... they had to cut drywall to fit into a gap between the top of the 8 foot boards and the ceiling board.

I know there's going to be a ton of interesting decisions to laugh at as we go through the house, but this one may survive to be in the top 10.

Confluence Wiki Case Study - National Constitution Center

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:46:00 +0000

So I'm a little behind in my reading apparently, because I just ran into a case study about my friend Tom and his work at the National Constitution Center. The case study is a description of a Confluence Wiki integrated into their 2006 National Constitution Day website. The implementation is very neat, and it's nice to see Tom and his work highlighted. To me, the most interesting part of the case study is the number of partner organizations that they were able to get involved.

When a SCRUM 30 Day Sprint is Too Slow

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:21:00 +0000

We have really short iterations in my organization… which is a blessing and a major hurdle. We try to be "agile" in our development cycles, but sometimes "agile" gets awful close to "chaotic". The problem that we have is that we are part of a "Service Delivery Organization", or an organization that is dedicated to supporting the customer's production environments. This makes it really hard to separate someone's legitimate production issue from something that is a legitimate problem, but has to be resolved through a new feature enhancement to the system.

The distinction between a "problem" and a feature request that needs to be added to our backlog is an interesting one. If we were able to follow the SCRUM methodology correctly (really at all), we would always be asking that these requests go through a "product owner" for each part of the system. My counterpart on the Analysis side of the team has done a wonderful job of trying to make this happen, and he has had some measure of success. However things still slip through the cracks and derail the team. I recently dedicated one developer a week, on a rotating basis, to the role of "maintenance" in order to try and deal with the need for quick turn-around additions to our software. Just like the attempt at moving all requests through a "product owner", this has had a little success and a little failure. We're constantly tuning how we react to "production needs", and we hope that we will eventually figure it out.

In the meantime, we find ourselves in a situation where the majority of our work (something like 70%) is broken up into projects that are one week of development and one week of testing. This is an interesting pace to keep up, as we are expected to be able to do a release once every two weeks. It doesn't mean that we are releasing major changes that often, but it does mean that there is almost always something going out to production on those cycles.

I mentioned the SCRUM Sprint because we have a very interesting model of one to two person projects constantly working in mini-sprints. I would be interested to know if any organization has found a methodology that can support turnaround times that are shorter than a month for mission critical systems… all the while maintaining a constant backlog of about 6 months of work (that's after dividing the effort by the number of resources that we can dedicate to it at any point in time).

New Look and Some Excuses

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:40:00 +0000

So I've got a new look and feel for the site, thanks to my wonderful wife (who's doing the same on her site right now). She made a shiny new logo (seen on the right) and a nice clean look and feel for everything.

Unfortunately, I've been totally quiet over the last year or so... basically work won in the battle for my "computer time". And since I refuse to spend too much of my day outside of work staring at a computer screen, it limits me in how much I can write.

My role at work makes it difficult to focus on the more architectural and technical things that I enjoy working on (and which would provide fodder for a blog), yet it certainly has it's moments of challenge, inspiration and frustrations. I guess it's allot like a pure development job in that respect, I just have different things to think about.

I wanted to try and spend the time that I used to spend on architecture and instead spend it on development process types of topics, however it's hard to seperate the generalities from the specifics at work... which is something that is very important to me. I believe that what we do and how we do it is an evolutionary answer (as in, it changes almost every week), however the topic of what we learned tends to include things that are personal to the individuals involved.

There are some very interesting challenges that we deal with in each project we work on and each day we support our production environments. I'll try to give a gist of the information here in the future though...

Don't Try to "Save the Internet"... Please!

noreply@blogger.com (Chip Childers) — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:44:00 +0000

The following is in response to the MoveOn.org PAC's recent Save the Internet campaign:

Dear MoveOn.org,

I am a MoveOn.org supporter that has financially supported the PAC, openly shared the information that you provide via your email notifications and maintain a circle of friends that do the same (including volunteer work during election cycles).

That being said, I wanted to share my thoughts on your "Save the Internet" campaign. I agree with many of the points about how openness and neutrality towards Internet services and content should be key goals for everyone.

However, I do NOT agree that the pending legislation is even a remotely good idea.

The Internet is hugely successful – as witnessed by your organization’s very existence. Why is that? Basically, it is because it is open and flexible to “market” pressures. I placed quotes around the word “market”, because not all innovations and successes are actually capitalistic endeavors, but each idea’s success is predicated on the ability of the initiator to try something new.

My issue with the “net neutrality” approach is that it requires regulation and enforcement to work. A different approach, one that I argue takes a more holistic view of the problem, would be to continue focusing on the removal of monopolistic “ownership” of last mile” connectivity. Once that monopoly is destroyed, you have an open market that will allow customers to decide which service they want to subscribe to.

If the monopoly is broken, ISP’s that decided to manipulate, limit or control the types of content that travel over their network will be sufficiently rewarded or punished by virtue of consumer choice. From the technical perspective, we would see technology itself innovate around any ISP’s efforts to limit a user’s options. This is the best option for all parties involved.

Sincerely,

Chip Childers