I heard about a big software project that took a couple of dozen developers a few years to build. The project had difficult security requirements that ended up having a login take over an hour to accomplish due to all of the verification between systems that had to occur.
The team went into a client review cycle knowing this was a big problem. The client sat through the entire presentation and demonstration without a question. Always a bad sign.
As the meeting was closing and everyone was gathering up their things one of the developers asked if the login time was a high priority or not. (Duh!)
The client lead, while still gathering their things and not even looking up, said, “No. We have a contract. We will pay you for the software. But, we are going to use something else anyway.”
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Business Practice, Clients
Another contractor I know has been having a hard time. Lots of experience in a team with very little experience. Ok. Project lead has little experience and gets annoyed at the developer for proposing solutions or changes. Not Ok.
I know there are lots of openings where he is working so suggested moving to another project.
He took the advice, waited for a milestone, and said something like “We are at a good breaking point. I don’t think my contributions have been inline with the team. Maybe it’s time for me to move on?”. They said thank you for your idea. Get back to work (not really).
Next day, team management calls him in and says “We would like you to take over architecture for the product. This will entail much detailed interaction with the team lead.”
WTF?
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Business Practice
We are in the midst of a Critical Design Review. This is where we tell the client what we have done during detailed design. All presentations are done in PowerPoint, no exceptions. Whatever graphic, list, details, wording, etc… that you want to convey must fit on a PowerPoint slide.
We used UML during detailed design. It is difficult to portray any meaningful sequence diagrams or complex class diagrams in a PowerPoint. Other problems occur attempting to show a database design. How to portray the 100+ tables in use in a slide?
Secondary problem is the level of detail provided needs to be discussed at a business case level. This means talking about why this function/feature is of any interest to an end user, what is the benefit, etc… BUT be prepared to drop down to an absolute bare bones detail discussion on any relevant area of the design.
One of the long-term employees (that really doesn’t narrow things down much, most employees have been there at least 5 if not 10 years) showed me some presentations for previous projects. Yes, they all fit nicely onto slides. Yes, they are ugly. Yes, they remind you of 1950’s billboards ‘New’, ‘Improved’, ‘Zap’, ‘Zoom’, lightning bolts, you get the idea.
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Business Practice
Another nugget from the contracting world: automation is expensive.
Automation is hardware and/or software that performs a human task. It is usually expensive if done well. Since it is hw/sw it is a capital investment of the contractor. This investment is expected to be re-used across clients over time. You can not allocate capital expenses against a contract.
On the other hand having humans perform a task is direct labor which can be applied towards a specific contract.
In the commercial software world a big automation impact (on team performance) is usually regression testing tools. Such a tool can run through hundreds of regression tests in the time it may take a human to do one regression test. The software developers usually have little qualm over the cost once they look at the ROI.
However, in the software contracting world, you can’t. The customer foots the bill at all points. The only reason you exist is for the contract. The idea of investing for beyond a contract gets a glazed look in the accountant’s eyes (versus it usually being the other way around.
Seems like we need a new way of looking at micro-economics in the software contract world.
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Business Practice
I have been going through the process of building a Joomla web site for a client. I don’t think they had outrageous demands for the UI design. Lots of fonts, colors, a few popups.
First off, tinyMCE by default “cleans up” your edited content. This might mean stripping HTML tags, changing HTML tags or even better adding in a few extra HTML tags. Really quite a feature. So, now your very elaborate content ‘article’ has been manipulated badly by the article editor, it needs to be displayed.
A typical Joomla installation might have 10 CSS sheets, all of which are in play and possibly touching each other on a given page. This makes it real fun to figure out really simple things, like how to set the width of the page.
Now, we add in the editor manipulated content that needs to be displayed with several bogus style references and you end up with total c _ _ _. You have close to zero chance of figuring out why your content changed line height, font, indent, color, you name it - right in the middle of a paragraph.
I blame all of this on the cute idea of using table-less layouts via CSS. That ideal means that people have gone to the next step and are using CSS everywhere. It kind of reminds me of the first round of C++ programmers in the 80’s. Everyone was doing it with no grasp of the underlying object oriented concepts needed. So, we ended up with very hard to determine memory leaks in all kinds of programs (from simple apps to MS Windows). I think the same thing is going on now, everyone is using CSS without any idea of the fundamental style concepts involved in the base HTML entities. And we end up with the same mangled set of code which has very little hope of being displayed correctly.
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Business Practice