Software Maintenance

Logical Deduction Flaws

2012-01-27T01:48:00.003-05:00

My team got some trouble tickets from the customer. The team lead assigned a high priority problem to me. I studied the error messages. Then I took a look at the code. I deduced that if all was set up correctly, there was only one way these errors could occur. I sent directions to the customer on how to reconfigure to avoid the error. Then I got tasked with helping out another team.

My recommendations were met with a lot of resistance from the customer. They questioned my logic. And they were not happy with my recommendations. The top manager from the customer organization asked me to investigate further. Then the top manager from my company told me to get busy on this.

Luckily I had finished helping that other team. I decided to not take on any other work while I worked this top priority problem. I looked deeply at the examples from the customer. I traced each SQL statement with the data from the production database. That's when I spotted some bed setup data.

My failure was that I assumed all the setup data was correct. Incorrect assumption. I also did not spend enough time on analysis because I was busy. Error number two. Now armed with the full picture, I can address the customer problem. Although they were unhappy with my first attempt, I am sure they will be relieved when I correct the underlying problems.

Trouble with Changes

2012-01-26T02:16:00.002-05:00

Today our customer reported a few high priority problems with our apps. My team lead had me look at one of them. Based on some business knowledge, alone with some screen shots of the error, I figured it out. After that I thought I deserved a lunch.

After I picked up some take out, I found that a meeting was called to talk about the trouble ticket assignments. I thought I was safe because I knocked out a problem in record time. Nope. A guy on another team was having a hard time and needed help. I wanted to talk with him. But he was stuck in meetings all afternoon. I went with the one email he was able to send out.

I tracked down the processing that had occurred on the data. There was a lot of processing that looked missing. That was a good data point. I traced back the properties of the data and found out we were not supposed to do any processing due to some initial requirements. After I talked with the developer needing help, I found there were more examples of the problems.

I analyzed the data and confirmed we erroneously skipped some processing. At first my findings matched those of the developer. There was no way the code was going to skip this stuff. Then I recalled helping another developer on this team. He had some code that was loading variables in the wrong order. He fixed the code, but not clean up the data. The fix was also late to make it into production. Ouch.

Once I explained the history of the code changes, the light came on in the developer's mind. He said this explanation matched some other weird errors that got logged. I am thankful I knew about the work of the other developer (who has since left the company). Sometimes a little knowledge of past work goes a long way in bug tracking.

Virtual Desktop Conundrum

2012-01-24T22:08:00.003-05:00

Last year I needed an upgrade of my Rational Tools Suite. The system administrator who did the upgrade was unable to complete the task. I asked him to try again. He could not get the new software installed. I then asked him to escalate the problem to IBM. No dice.

My virtual desktop was without Rational Tools. Ouch. The system administrator recommended he redo the whole virtual desktop from scratch. Seeing how I just lost my Rational Tools, I decided against that. I did have one other virtual desktop that had the right version of the Rational Tool Suite. With the two virtual desktops, I am still able to do my job.

The plan from my manager was to get a new virtual desktop with all the software installed. A member of the customer organization was to get me the new desktop. Well eventually I got it. But nobody was scheduled to install all the software. Eventually somebody called to see if the trouble ticket to get my new desktop could be closed. No way. I don't have a working machine. Now my team lead has to sort through this mess. Oh boy.

Salary Survey

2011-12-29T20:40:00.003-05:00

I just read the survey results of Stanford grads. The outlook appears very positive. Average salary for bacherlor's degree was $80k. Master's average was $94k. And PhD average was $132k. In addition to the salary, most were offered goodies like stock options and signing bonuses.

This seems in line with the average Carnegie Mellon bachelor's degree starting pay of $85k. Note that most of Standford's grads work in the San Francisco Bay area. So the salaries might be higher due to the cost of living there. Stanford is also not your run of the mill university.

I visited a small college not known for its computer science program. The department chair said that grads with bachelor's degrees made aruond $60k. And master's degrees commanded over $80k. Not bad at all.

Hot Skills in Software Development

2011-12-29T15:45:00.004-05:00

One of the recruiting companies listed some top paying jobs in the NYC. Here are some development positions from the Top 10:

PHP Developer $96k

Python Developer $103k

Java Developer $104k

Ruby Developer $106k

Strangely enough, another recruiting firms said that top skills for the upcoming year are HTML5, MongoDB (No SQL), iOS, Android, and Mobile. A lot of these fall under the mobile development umbrella. They do not correspond to the NYC top paid positions.

I guess the take away is that it is hard to quantify what is hot. But you can take some of these skills and learn them. There is hardly any downside. You might help yourself to a better job with higher pay.

Ruby on Rails Training Outcry

2011-12-28T20:55:00.002-05:00

There is a six week Ruby on Rails training class starting up in NYC. Developers are getting salty because it costs a whopping $2800. I guess if you are a starving developer, $2800 is way over your training budget. But wouldn't you want to get your employer to foot the bill.

The cost does not sound that bad based on what you are doing. I have gone to numerous one week classes that cost $2000++. Compared to those, the six week Ruby class seems like a steal. Then again, I got my employer to eat the full cost. Sure it got counted against my training budget at work. But no money flowed out of my wallet for the class.

The pricing model itself almost classifies the course as employer funded training. I am really glad my employer provides me with a guaranteed benefit of paid training each year. The funny thing is that my employer is loose with the money, but never wants me to be away from my day job. Weird.

These days I usually spend the training budget on college classes that meet in the evening. So it turns out to be a win win. However I pay a whole lot less for my college classes than the Ruby course. It does not matter. I can't get off from work for a week, let alone the duration of the six week Ruby course.

Assume Nothing

2011-12-23T14:43:00.002-05:00

Next year we are getting some data from a new source. I was tasked with making sure that programs which depend on this data use the new source. No problem. I knew where the old data got stored. I pointed the code to this previoius position. And I shipped the code.

Our customer has an acceptance team which tries to test everything. They told me my code was not working as expected. I checked it out and found that they were right. So I traced the problem back to the database. It looks like the new data was getting put into a new place. That couldn't be right.

I asked around and found that the new source named the data a little different. Therefore new elements were created in the database. I was referencing the old elements. But I told them that it was just a new way to get the same data. It should go in the same tables and columns.

Then I realized the error of my ways. You should trust nothing. Even the obvious will not be obvious to all. I spent about a week going over options on how to fix this. We needed buy in from the customer since it was late in the development cycle. Luckily the command decision was for those upstream guys would put the data in the expected columns. Whew.

The decision by the stakeholders meant I did not have to change my code. Next time I will validate all my assumptions, even the silly ones.

Help Wanted

2011-12-15T13:13:00.002-05:00

We have an Extracts, Transform, and Loads (ETL) team on our project. They take care of a lot of backend stuff. Basically if our system communicates with some other systems, this team handles the communication. The subject matter expert from this team left the company this year. He was looking for some stability. Good for him.

Last week the team lead of the ETL Team left the company. He had been planning this for about 6 months. There are still some developers left on the team. But they are of the variety that need a lot of direction. I came to this understanding recently when interacting with one of them.

The customer acceptance team found what seemed to be a bug in the system. I got volunteered to do some leg work on the issue. I had the tester run some queries. Then I tested the app in a development environment. Finally I came to the conclusion that the loads were not populating a required database table. Then I referred the problem to the ETL Team.

I got a call from one of the ETL guys. He asked if I had any ideas on how to proceed. What? I walked him through my findings, which I had provided him along the way. Then I gave him some ideas. He started on them. But he got confused and asked if I could help interpret some of the results. Oh oh. I feel a trap coming on.

On Hiring

2011-12-13T12:55:00.003-05:00

I am frequently taking community college classes to brush up on technical topics. Although I could learn the material on my own, I like the pace that the classes help me keep. It is also an opportunity to network with the leaders of tomorrow.

I keep my eyes out for exceptional talent in my classes. When I find it, I try to make a connection. It is not easy. But I am working it. There was one web development I had with a crazy teacher. He seemed to like to fail people in his class. His assignments would trip you up. Then he would give you a zero. Did I mention he was crazy?

There was one student who excelled in this biazrro web development class. I knew right away she was one of the shining stars. So I kept in touch with her. Recently she has gotten tired of fooling around in her down time. Therefore she is looking for a job. I jumped at the opportunity to get my company to hire her. Unfortunately we don't hire people from community colleges.

What? Okay I get it. We get a lot of applicants for very little openings. And we use the college you went to as a filter. That's fine. But I keep getting emails from recruiting asking whether I know anyone good to refer for a job. Referrals are the best way to attract top talent. It doesn't matter though. I suspect we lost the chance to hire this to performer.

Help Needed

2011-12-09T17:48:00.002-05:00

I got a call for help from a member of another team on our project. He was a newer guy assigned to research a trouble ticket. He found some code that was supposedly not working correctly. I asked him what his concerns were. He told me he could not compile the code. Oh oh.

Now this code is an Oracle PL/SQL pacakge. It is a bit tricky. The code is written against a bunch of synonyms. The synonyms normally point to tables created by the loading application. The tables go away when the code is done. So I guess I could see why this might be a problem to compile. But if you can't compile, you can get anywhere with the problem.

I pointed the new developer to another script which creates a bunch of dummy tables with the correct structure. The script also generates the synonyms and points them to the dummy tables. That way you can at least compile the PL/SQL package. Then I get a call from this guy's boss. Apparently they spent a few days on the problem and were getting nowhere.

I eventually looked over their data and identified a problem with the record definition and SQL population. That's a story for another blog though.

More on Google

2011-11-30T01:14:00.004-05:00

Previously I had mentioned that lead software engineers at Google make over $200k per year. That alone is a significant statistic. However there is more to the story than that. These lead lead engineers make more money than other positions at Google such as managers and directors. Bamm.

In normal companies, managers usually make more money than the people they manage. And directors definitely are near the top of the food chain. But not at Google. Perhaps that is because they are very selective of who they hire for lead software engineer. Or perhaps it is because the company was founded by engineers.

Whatever the case, Google will make it worth your while to be the top developer at the place where only top developers get hired.

Lead Software Engineer

2011-10-13T11:51:00.002-04:00

I just learned that the top lead software engineers at Google make between $220k and $240k per year. Oh snap. That is about $100k more than what I consider the going rate for lead software engineers is. I wonder if these engineers are also getting stock options that could be worth more.

Maybe a bit of the high wages is the location. I figure it is probably expensive to own a house out by Google headquarters. And we all know that Google is very selective in its hiring. They hire superstars. You know. The get guys like James Gosling, who invented the Java programming language.

If you can't beat them, join them. It might be time to get a top job at Google. The only problem is that I can't see myself moving out there, even if the rewards are outstanding. Heck. I bet these lead software engineers get to spend the 20% of their time on special projects. What a life.

Requirements Presentation Format

2011-10-04T11:53:00.002-04:00

I am scheduled this month to do all the work for one of the new software changes we have. This seemed like a compressed schedule. I had three days to do the design. On day one, I dug into the requirements. Every single piece of the functionality seemed to be affected by the change. And the details of the change were vague. I tried my best to figure out how these changes were going to work. I was started to sweat the schedule.

The problem was that I was looking only at the new changes. This was a confusing view of the requirements. Luckily I widened my view and saw the old and new requirements side by side. It was only then when I saw what was being replaced by the change. That allowed me to hone in to exactly what was going on.

I essentially understood the spirit of the changes at that point. All the rest of the changes made sense at that point. Now I find that I am way ahead of schedule for my tasks. All of this traction is due to the side by side presentation of the requirements. Good job requirements team.

Late Again

2011-09-22T14:32:00.002-04:00

The customer alerted us to a multi part problem they needed fixed. The project manager asked our team to estimate how long it would take to correct each piece. We procided a high fidelity estimate. That resulted in a schedule of release for each part of the fix.

On the day when the first part of the fix was supposed to be delivered, the customer asked the project manager if we were sending out the fix. That resulted in him asking the developer assigned whether this thing was ready to go out. I came in to work and had a call from that developer asking what exactly the customer problem was. Fail!

Luckily the first part of the fix was a well known issue. I walked the developer through the steps to reproduce the problem. Then I showed the developer the database table that controlled the erroneous config info. The developer proceeded to generate a fix. However the fix was not ready until late at night. The test team was surprised that they were asked to do the fix late in the evening. Thus it did not get done.

The project manager warned this developer to make sure the second part of the fix was going to be on schedule. Let's hope the developer takes this lesson to heart.

Saved by the New Girl

2011-09-08T13:03:00.002-04:00

Last week there was a high priority problem from the customer. Initially I was not involved. However the problem was not getting solved. One of the customers mentioned my name. That was because I had dealt with this part of the system before. I was trapped.

I did my best to walk my team lead through the duplication of the problem in his development environment. It took a while. But we got it duplicated. I feared that I would have to implement the fix. But my plate is full with new development. Luckily the work got assigned to a new developer we have. Nice.

Then another problem kept coming up week after week. I asked the big boss if I should work on the problem. He told me the customer needed to submit a trouble ticket. I went to the customer, and she had no trouble opening a ticket. Once again the actual work got assigned to the new girl. I like how this is going.

Problem Child

2011-08-30T09:58:00.002-04:00

I was asked to help out another team around a year or so ago. It seems I did too good of a job. Now I am responsible for this piece of their system. I would not mind if I could maintain these piece full time. But I already have a full time job. I am supposed to work this additional piece in my "free time".

Just this past week I got an email from our customer. Apparently they did not see the results from last week's run of the software. I checked the audits in the database. Found no evidence of the job being run. Then I logged into the operating system. The logs on the file system also show the job did not run. What the heck is going on here?

The particular job is run as a cron job. It has been running successfully for some time. Now I need to debug this anomaly. My first task is to ensure the job is still in the crontab. Unfortunately I do not have access to the production crontab. Furthermore, there is some type of procedure I need to go through to get assistance from the system administrators of the production system.

This issue is going to take some time to resolve. Previously I had hoped to pass this task on to the actual team responsible for this system. Unfortunately they are in upheaval as some key members of the team recently resigned. I guess I am stuck with this puppy for the time being. It is time to make lemonade out of this lemon.

Versioning

2011-08-02T22:22:00.002-04:00

I am responsible for designing some new features in the next big release of our software. The project manager told me I would be handing my design over to the new guys for implementation. Therefore I wanted my design to be as clear as possible. I waited until the other developers were finished with adding their designs to our one design document. Then I grabbed the latest version and started making some changes.

I had some trouble with Rational Rose. The latest version on my system was broken. I tried to get a sys admin to fix it. Turns out he broke more than he fixed. I finally got access to a virtual machine that has Rational Rose on it. I drew some crucial sequence diagrams, as well as a class diagram of all the important clasees.

Today I was getting ready to check in my design document changes, when I found that somebody else had usurped me. My boss created a new version of the design doc. That means my changes were made to an out of date version of the document. Ouch. We use Sharepoint for the documentation. You are supposed to coordinate with the rest of the team. Who knew the boss would be making changes as well?

Coding by Email

2011-07-27T10:34:00.002-04:00

We finally got some new developers on our team. Unfortunately they do not have the computers they need to do any work. So now they are doing a lot of reading. Initially we thought their computers would be in quickly. Now it looks like that is not going to happen. The new plan is for these new developers to code by email.

Here is how this is supposed to work. An existing developer with a computer will email them the code to a non-development computer they have. Then coding changes will be done "in the blind". They then email the code changes back to developers who do have access to the correct computers. The theory is that this will allow them to do development. In reality, this is most likely a big fail.

There might be some good to come out of this. The new developer I am working with is longing to look at some real code on our project. This will enable that ability. However it seems to be a waste of time to have a newbie do some coding where they cannot even do a compile or run the application.

The optimist in me says that this is an interesting problem for me to do some coding in. I can perhaps code up a program that monitors for emails from the new guys, takes the code they send, tries to compile it, then returns the build results to them by email. If I can automate all that, I will be king. We can think of this as a sort of email virtual machine.

UNIX Developer

2011-07-20T14:54:00.003-04:00

I am responsible for one of the subsystems on our project. This is just one of my side duties. Another team was overburdened a year or two ago. I was asked to step in and give them a hand. Turns out I inherited a subsystem for life.

The big boss said I could hand this duty off to another developer. I took that at face value. There are some changes that need to be made to this subsystem next year. Recently I noticed that some tasks for this subsystem were overdue in the schedule. That sounded like a perfect time to hand the whole thing off to the other developer.

Oooops. That other developer is out on vacation for a month or so. Looks like I am stuck with some extra work again. This is my own fault. As soon as the big boss mentioned that it could be offloaded, I should have jumped at the opportunity to pass it on.

Here is how I know I am not right for this project. It runs mostly on UNIX. Today I did not know how to copy a directory and its contents using the UNIX command prompt. Sure I was able to google the answer. But a developer for this specific project should already know how to do this.

The Power of Debug

2011-07-18T14:33:00.003-04:00

A developer on my team got assigned a problem that was supposed to be fixed a long time ago. This developer could not determine the cause of the problem. He told our managers that his system was corrupt. He could not run Visual Studio in debug mode. Thus he could not identify the code that was causing the problem.

This announcement caused all kinds of excitement. Our team lead told the developer to report to our offices (he works in a remote location). He showed up and could not find the rest of our team. So he found an office and started working. Luckily another guy in a remote location informed me the developer had arrived. I grabbed him and we met with our team lead.

Team leader was a bit frazzled. The management team must have beat him up a bit. He kept grilling me and the developer about when this bug could be fixed. I asked him why he was talking to me about it. He said that I was now going to be responsible for helping the developer get the bug fixed.

Luckily I had did the initial analysis on the issue. I knew exactly how long it would take. The team lead kept trying to dissect the analysis to figure out how we could ship it out quicker. I stuck to my guns. That there were two people involved did not cut the estimate in half. One guy could not debug the app. Luckily when we got to my desk, built a debug version of the application, it was a short while before we found exactly where the problem was occurring.

You need to be able to run the application in debug mode. There is no substitute for this. If you cannot debug the main applicaiton, you must treat this as an emergency and get it fixed. Otherwise you will be of little use to a maintenance team. Even the managers can see that.

Design Test

2011-07-12T23:33:00.004-04:00

This year I got assigned one of the main changes to our system. The hard part was nailing down the exact requirements for what I needed to change. Once that was done, I went to town documenting a design for the changes.

The big boss told me I would do the design. But a new developer would code the changes. With that in mind, I made sure I explained a lot of details in the design.

Today I reviewed the requirements with a new developer. Then I provided him with my design document. The test was to see whether the design gave him enough info to allow him to write the code. He only had one or two questions after going over the design.

The next step is to design some of the changes the customer wanted but were not approved on the first time around. I know they are going to want everything they asked for. We just got a break in that all the changes are not due immediately. The rest of the changes will be in a staggered roll out.

New Hires

2011-07-10T12:55:00.002-04:00

Our team is finally getting some new members added. We have been struggling with a limited staff for what seems like a whole year. Now we got some new blood. The challenge is to get them up to speed as soon as possible.

In my opinion, we should throw some bugs their way. You learn a lot about our system when you fix the bugs. That's how I learned most of my domain knowledge. You really don't learn as much when you add a new feature here or there. The only problem with this is that we don't have laptops for the new folk to use yet. So fixing bugs is out of the question.

The current plan is for the new peeps to pair program with experienced developers. This has worked well in the past. One of our bright stars spent the first few weeks shadowing me on some new development. He says he learned more during those few weeks than he has his entire time being here.

I got one guy shawoing me at the moment. So far I have gone through development of one of my scripts with him. I also reviewed some requirement changes with him so we could help another developer on the team. The only difficult part of this arrangement is that my new guy lives far away. He has a massive commute to get to my office. We worked out a deal where he spends two days a week at my office. Let's hope he learn a lot.

Case of the Missing Data

2011-07-01T14:10:00.003-04:00

Our customer has been reporting that some of their screens are coming up empty. However they perform a SQL query and find that there is data there. This was quite a mystery that we could not recreate in development. I took a look at the code involved. Somebody suggested that I inspect the databsae table that gets populated by a stored proedure and used by the application.

I found the database table name. But I needed more info. Which schema is this table contained in? I found out it was in the main schema that holds most of our tables. Then I found some strange code that seemed to delete all records out of the table every time somebody logged in. What kind of race condition did they set up here? Before jumping to conclusions, I decided to test out the use of the table with my app.

When I ran the app, I saw data in the application. However I could not find any data in the table when I ran a query. That was strange. This was my own private schema. Nobody else would be working in it. Then another developer thought that the app might be deleting the data. That was a possibility. I decided to remove the app from the picture completely.

I just used some SQL to insert data in the table. I could immediately see the data. However when I tried to query it from another tool (connected in a different session), the data was not there. Aha. I determined the behavior of the table. It turns out it was an Oracle global temporary table. The data was private per session, and removed after session end.

Sometimes you got to test things out for yourself to gain understanding. This was one of those cases. I was not up to speed on how Oracle global temporary tables work. But I knew how to run specific tests to determine what was going on.

Separate Operations Support

2011-06-16T03:23:00.003-04:00

I have spent the last week and a half researching and resolving high priority customer problems. This meant that my normal work was put on the shelf. Now I am slowly trying to get back to my prior tasks. This is a tough way to run things.

Today the big boss said we are splitting out our teams into new development and sustaining operations. We had a meeting scheduled with the big boss to go over the new changes for the next year. He declared that I would be free to design the good stuff for the next delivery. Yeah. I can live with that.

Some other poor chap got stuck with the maintenance duties. I hope he is ready for a lot of phone calls. That how I used to live my life in the maintenance world. There is some other good news. We are hiring a couple new people on my team. The big boss told me I could design away the changes, and let the new folks do the coding. Again this works for me.

The Big Time

2011-05-30T19:20:00.003-04:00

I was reading this techical magazine on the weekend. There was an advertisement in the back for a Goldman Sachs associate. The pay was between $225k and $400k a year. And this was for a 9 to 5 job. What the heck? Who makes $225k a year in development? Nobody I know.

The position required experience with derrivatives software. Perhaps this is the niche you need to enter to make the big bucks. Now I do know that living expenses in New York are high. But $225k a year should cover that and then some.

How does one get any experience in this field? Maybe you need to start off as a junior associate making minimal cash. Or you could write some hot code in your free time and try to impress someone at Goldman. There is one other explanation for this job. It might be a fake.

There were many abbreviations in this long article. Almost every sentence had multiple abbriviations. That does not sound like Goldman Sachs recruiting. It could have been put together by a recruiter. However the address to send applications/resumes was Goldman Sachs. I tell you what. I would like to make $225k a year for a 40 hour a week job. But if something sounds too good to be true, then you know what that means.

Visual Studio 2010 Aborts

2011-05-24T11:22:00.003-04:00

I have been working on a new project using Visual Studio 2010 Professional. And I wanted to see how I could deploy the finished product. In the past, I had used an old copy of Installshield. My Visual Studio has an InstallShield plugin that is free.

I downloaded Installshield LE and set it up to deploy my project. The resulting self-extracting executable worked pretty good. There were some features disabled in the free Installshield. But that did not hold me back.

All of a sudden, Visual Studio kept crashing when I tried to edit the C++ header files in my project. I removed and readded the files. It still crashed. After a while I realized that the addition of an Installshield LE project in my solution caused Visual Studio to crash.

What a fail. The work around is to create a separate solution to prevent the abort. This does not bode well for me to purchase Installshield.

Coordination

2011-05-06T19:49:00.002-04:00

Last year I helped out a struggling team on my project. I volunteered for a piece the team knew nothing about. As usual, I did a good job delivering and supporting the product. It was a bit tough because I had my normal duties to do in addition to the new work. But I made it happen.

This year I got loaded up on all kinds of work for my team. But I looked ahead and knew the other team was hurting again. I did not hear anything about the piece I had done for them before. So I asked whether I was still on the hook to do the work. The answer was yes. My team is not happy to lose some of my time. They were most upset that nobody took this into account when setting up our schedule.

So far I have not worked on this additional piece of the system. Today I found the time to work on testing some bug fixes that are going out in the next release. However at the end of testing, I found my tests deopended on some other fixes being made. Doh! Nobody determined there would be a dependency. I tell you. We are one uncoordinated team.

Java to the Rescue

2011-05-02T10:20:00.002-04:00

The customer has been encountering performance problems with our system. Some screens are so slow they don't even come up. The customer has since reverted to doing some work manually. Now they need to get the system updated with their work.

All of the customer data has been collected into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Essentially each row in the spreadsheet is going to be an update in the database. The updates will be controlled by a stand alone script. How should developer go about creating this script?

In the old days, I would write a C/C++ program to read in the data and generate the script. However the security team is cracking down on "rogue" programs such as this. I think I figured out the solution. Write the script generator in Java. That way the security people think we are running "java.exe", which is on the list of approved apps.

Some other people are looking into the script generation. However I think I will develop and have my Java program ready to roll.

Talkers and Workers

2011-04-18T22:59:00.002-04:00

A higher priority problem from the customer came in. We were in the middle of fixing other high priority problems as well. I decided to take the new problem myself. I hate working on these.

Here is the normal pattern. Some manager wants a conference call. A lot of people join. They all try very hard to suond intelligent. However they ask a lot of questions. The only person who can usually answer those questions are people like me who do the actual work.

That means I have two jobs. I got to answer questions of clueless people trying to sound smart. Then I also have to determine the right questions to get to the solution. This is just a total fail.

Luckily with this latest problem, I was able to take the initiative. I dove in and said I had some ideas and was investigating them. I finished the total solution before any conference calls got started. Winning.

Who to Hire

2011-04-13T13:31:00.002-04:00

I just read an article that says you should hire for the person and not their specific skills. For my project, I don't know whether I agree. We have very specific technical needs on our project. We don't have time for you to learn on the job. Techn skills are king here.

But what if you had the lineup shown in the picture here? At first glance, you might want to hire the female because she looks good. Those who look good usually get the advantage. The other two guys look not quite right.

However you need some hackers to get the job done on your project. Maybe you do want someone who looks like a hacker. Along this thinking, I might have to choose the guy in the middle. He is squinting like he stayed up all night writing code in the dark. That is my kind of guy.

Visual Studio Debacle

2011-04-10T05:12:00.002-04:00

We are upgrading to a newer version of Visual Studio for our next big software release. There was an event in the schedule where we were supposed to get the new software. That milestone day came and went.

After a few weeks, I heard some managers talking about the schedule. I mentioned that the scheduled was wack because we did not have the software. I explained that without the software, no progress would be made. Furthermore we were losing weeks that could not be made up later.

Suddenly the Visual Studio software became a hot item. Why does it take an emergency for me to get the tools I need? The customer arranged for somebody to install the software on my system. The big boss told me I was going to be getting a call from the installer. It never happened.

Instead I found out that somebody installed the software on my system. They put it in the wrong place. I let them know the install was wrong. This simple software upgrade is turning into a nightmare. Now the real work can begin. Let's upgrade our projects to use the new compiler and IDE.

Just in Time Departure

2011-04-05T11:02:00.002-04:00

I had a rough weekend. Had to work on a high priority problem for the customer. So when I came to work on Monday, I was tired. I was on a mission. There were some set tasks I needed to accomplish. There were also some risks I needed to mitigate in order ot meet the schedule I proposed.

As soon as my tasks were done, I hit the road to go home. My team lead delayed me a bit because he needed some info. But after that conversation I was out the door. It turns out that was the best move of the day.

Right after I left, a couple more high priority problems came in. Now I would not have been able to do much on these new problems if I stuck around. I was already burning out. Plus I needed to concentrate on the problem I was working on first.

I came in early the next day. A lot of developers were already busy working early in the morning. That sounded strange. They were working on the new problems that came in. This is a good thing. Me not being there forced management to get other developers involved. There is only one question. Should I bolt early today too? We shall see.

Tricked Again

2011-04-04T12:54:00.003-04:00

There was another high priority problem reported by our customers. I thought I was safe. The problem was obviously in a part of the system I don't work on. The team had a conference call to talk about this problem.

I should have know I was getting set up when the team lead responsible for the problematic part of the system started saying this was not his problem. I fell for the bait. That's when I did some research to prove it was in that part of the system.

Next I alerted management to the fact that the developer who manned this specific program actually left the company. I advised them to appoint a new developer to be responsible. Next thing I know, I am in another conference call to work out how we were going to fix this problem.

Initially they were talking crazy about the fix being done in a day or two. I told them no way. Next thing I know, I got signed up to set up the data and do the testing for the fix. They actually somehow got the guy who left the company to develop the fix. Dang. The testing is the hard part of this problem. I should have volunteered to do the fix. Ok. I helped shape the rollout schedule for the fix.

Now to meet the schedule I was going to have to do some weekend work. That was not optimal for me, but I was going to do it. Then I get a call from a manager saying the customer wants the fix even earlier. That's when I knew I had it all wrong and I was being set up. After some heated debate, my original schedule was accepted. In the future, I got to do Dilbert style and pad the heck out of my estimates.

Getting Agile

2011-03-31T09:43:00.005-04:00

I just finished reading an eBook on agile development. There were some key insights in there that I want to share. To start with, you need to identify the backlog of work to do. This includes both new features and bugs to fix.

When you estimate the time needed to complete the work, focus on user stories instead of requirements. Count developers for only 6 hours of productive work at the max. I personally would only schedule based on 4 actual productive programming hours per day.

Development is split up into sprints. It is wise to have a Sprint Zero to get your team organized. Some sprints should harden your system by focusing on bug fixes alone. We do this on my current project.

Require progress updates once per day. When you finish any given sprint, review all the tests. Hopefully your tests are automated for optimal test team performance. Waste is defined as any activities that do not add value to the final product. You are going to want to trim waste with a vengeance.

Finally there are only two values for percent complete that matter. They are 0% and 100% done. Anything in between is best thought of as 0% complete. Radical.

Skills Required

2011-03-25T10:21:00.002-04:00

I recently met up with an old friend that is a developer. He has been looking for work for a while. The challenge is often that employers want developers with experience in 8 to 10 technologies. Who has that type of skill set?

Yesterday I read an article that seems to confirm this phenomenon. Developers need to know a lot of different things. This includes SOA, OOP, and UI development.

It makes sense that a developer might need to know more than one programming language. That gives you additional insight. I don't know whether it makes sense to know a little bit about 10 different technologies. That is a generalist that specializes in nothing.

Code School

2011-03-22T13:46:00.002-04:00

The people at Envy Labs have opened up their Code School. It is an online learning site. The goal is to "learn by doing". They have short videos, along with hands on exercises. You got to pass some sort of challenge before moving on to the next section.

Right now they have a course on Ruby on Rails. It costs $45, a discount from the normal price of $75. Some other courses that are coming soon include jQuery, HTML 5, and CSS.

I am not sure whether this is a good deal. If their hands on technique can teach me stuff in just an hour, I might buy in. It helps that my employer foots the bill for my technical training. If it was my own money, I don't think I would be buying though.

The Software Architect

2011-03-16T10:39:00.002-04:00

A lot of developers aspire to become a software architect. The title sounds impressive. And you figure an architect is going to be making a lot of money. I found it humorous that one team on my project decided to declare itself as the architects. Even though such antics are humorous, I think there is some validity to moving ahead by becoming an architect.

I read an article on how real life people advanced to the software architect position. One factor was getting involved with new technology early on. Another is doing publishing or public speaking. You must have top notch communication skills.

Business Objects

2011-03-14T14:57:00.003-04:00

I have a coworker that is in training for Business Objects this week. It might be a good time to be learning. SAP just did a major upgrade to Business Objects 4 recently. SAP bought Business Objects 4 years ago. Now they are moving forward with the product.

There have been some job postings recently that require Business Objects Universes experience. Well that term is obsolete in the new version. That functionality has been grouped in with other functions into the Business Layer.

My coworker previously attended some training on Crystal Reports. She got a bit of Business Objects training back then as well. What's the difference between Crystal Reports and Business Objects you might ask. Crystal Reports, like Dashboarding, is one of the interfaces to Business Objects. It is a simple one at that.

I hear the new Business Objects has event processing down pat. Perhaps I shall quiz my coworker when she returns and find out the real inside story. Let's hope she learned some of the new Business Objects 4 features.

Getting the Build Working

2011-03-08T15:08:00.002-05:00

My team lead asked me to assist a junior developer with their compile problems. The team lead tried to help previously. But our software would not build on one developer's new machine.

I took a look at some of the errors. There were calls to bitmap functions, passing in literals like OBM_CHECKBOXES. I searched around and found these were defined in "winuser.h". That file should be getting included I thought.

So I went and traced how "winuser.h" gets included. I found that it all starts with "stdafx.h", and eventually get included from "windows.h". Then I saw that these header files were present and included on the new machine. They were.

Upon closer inspection of "winuser.h", the literals are only defined if you have already defined OEMRESOURCES. I went through the exercise again finding how OEMRESOURCES gets defined on my machine. It is part of the project. Turns out the new machine had a project file which failed to define OEMRESOURCES for the debug build. Getting a correct project file solved this problem.

The details of the debugging are not important. The process is important. I did most of the investigation along side our junior developer. Hopefully some of this is rubbing off. Next step is to debug why another project fails to build on the machine due to missing DLL dependencies. Fun stuff.

Tips on Getting That Raise

2011-02-14T13:49:00.003-05:00

You want a raise at your company. The biggest obstacle to overcome is that you need to actually go ask for one. Now there are some other factors that may increase success.

Work on some challenging tasks. It is best if they bring in a bunch of revenue. Make sure you take credit for the results. Emphasize the benefit to the company (this is easy if the benefit is that the company made a boatload of cash).

When you ask for more money, don't tie the request for the great job you already did. Talk about what further great deeds you will do. Couple this with a plan to increase your duties.

Before you head in for that raise, have a plan for what you will do if you get denied. Read up on a lot of books on successful negotiation. They will tell you about this. Finally be prepared to switch companies, and maybe even move to a new city.

Use the Logs

2011-02-08T10:36:00.004-05:00

I am helping out my old team, researching bugs reported by the customer. Recently one was opened that was going to be a big deal unless it got fixed pronto. The customer put this fact in the bug description. I worked with my team lead on this problem since he had some access issues on his computer.

First thing I did was get an agreement on how the application was supposed to act in the normal flow. Then I reviewed some abnormal flows. Finally we looked at the production data for the examples provided by the customer. I have been doing this for many years. So I knew how to mine our audit tables for the history of how objects flowed through the system.

My team lead was amazed by this. He apparently had never queried the database to get this information. We got a bunch of triggers which store off state changes of interest. This comes in really handy when you are debugging tough problems. I spotted the pattern. The software was actually behaving as designed. These were just some boundary cases which do not behave like the normal flow. As soon as I briefed the main customers on our findings, the trouble ticket was closed with a reason of no trouble found.

How to Get a Job

2011-02-05T13:01:00.000-05:00

Just skimmed a book on how to get a programming job. It was packed full of info. Here are some highlights.

You need to possess some key traits such a being smart, able to get things done, and being passionate. Learn on your own.

Don't wait for your company to send you to training. You should especially research technology that you know your company is moving towards. To be efficient, get in the habit of writing the minimal set of code to get the job done.

Hit up the normal suspects on the web for your job search. This includes Dice, Monster, and Career Builder. You should also check out USA Jobs if you are willing to work for the government. Forget about the freelance sites unless you are willing to work on projects that pay fifty bucks for the entire project.

Sending resumes if a low probability game. You are lucky if 10% of the resumes you send out even get read. You can up your success if you also email the resume to the person you will actually be working for.

Bring multiple copies of your resume to any interviews you go to. Do not seem desperate for a job. Know test driven development (TDD). And if you are going for a JavaScript job, make sure you know the DOM, events, JSON, and jQuery.

SharePoint Development is Hard

2011-02-04T11:16:00.002-05:00

SharePoint is not like other development platforms. You need to learn many skills to be proficient at SharePoint. Unit testing is very difficult on this platform. You must know your markup languages such as XML. To deploy you need to know something like PowerShell.

That is not all. You had better know web services to be a good SharePoint developer. Let's face it. You might be learning all your life to be a good SharePoint developer. That might not be a bad thing.

I don't know. This sounds too complex for me. Maybe if I got in early I would be interested in SharePoint development.

Programming Languages

2011-02-03T11:11:00.001-05:00

What are the hot programmings languages developers need to know? The real question should be what will be the hot programming languages in the future. Web programming has involved Ruby, Python, and PHP. However they are being eclipsed by JavaScript.

The enterprise uses Java. You don't see your main apps being rewritten with Ruby. Ruby is used for some smaller non-critical apps. Yet Ruby developers are currently commanding the big bucks.

So Ruby has some gas. But in the end it will probably be JavaScript that rules. Python, Perl, and PHP will most likely fade. You got to invest in the right language to pay off in the future.

Stack Overflow

2011-02-02T10:42:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I read a rant about Stack Overflow. The author explained how things actually work with Stack Overflow. You start with a reputation score of 1. If you get downvoted, you lose rep. You get more rep by answering questions.

Unfortunately most questions have 10 or more answers. You need to try to answer new questions quickly. But everyone else is doing this too. It is hard to get an answer in there quickly enough.

One thing the author did not take into account is that you can also gain rep by asking questions. There are some techniques to game the system. For example, you can find new questions and put a placeholder answer in there. Later you can go back and edit your answer with a solid one.

Personally I don't support Stack Overflow. I used to like the Joel on Software discussion boards. However Joel seems to have let these languish. Instead he is concentrating on his new Stack Overflow startup. So I am on a sort of boycott of that system. There might be good information on there. But I figure the Internet has answers our there as well.

Developers Need Production Access

2011-01-27T14:20:00.003-05:00

My old development team is hurting for resources. I got assigned to give them a hand. There were some production problems they could not replicate. They searched the source code, but could not come up with any definitive answers.

I spent the morning scanning the source code as well. However I have access to the production database. This allowed me to ensure the applications were behaving correctly. The other developers on the team did not have production access.

Now I can understand you don't want everybody looking at production data. But if you want your developers to be able to solve problems fast, give them read only access to production data. If can be the difference between solving a problem in a few hours, versus floundering around for a few weeks or a few months.

Going to UNIX

2011-01-24T14:40:00.002-05:00

The big boss told me he wanted to me join another team on the project. They just lost a member and are hurting for help. There is just one problem with this plan. This team does C/UNIX programming. I am a C++/Windows developer.

Sure I guess I can figure things out. But it will be a slow process. I got my configuration management set up on my UNIX account. However I did not know the command to do a "find in files". I normally let my Visual Studio tool do that for me. Now I need to know the command line to accomplish that task.

Ok. I figured out how to search for a file. But now I cannot build a UNIX program. They even got a make file and I cannot get the darn thing to build. Must be some config settings that are missing in my environment. I don't want to waste the other team members' time. So I am slugging through it on my own. This is going to be painful.

Running Around in Circles

2011-01-21T14:52:00.003-05:00

My boss told me to address a customer problem ASAP. I could not figure what was wrong. So I called the customer up directly. She said that they were following a manual work around process to load some configuration data. However the system administrator was running into some errors.

I investigated and found that the code required was commented out of the package. The fix seemed simple. I enable the code and gave it to my DBA. He had some trouble promoting the fix to other database schemas. I looked into those problems, made some code adjustments to the stored procedures, and again I thought we were good to go.

Another customer piped in and said that the whole manual work around was obsolete. Some new features in one of the applications had been made to take over the functionality. Doh! I had been running around for the last couple days to get this back end process running. But it turns out they did not really need that. Ouch. It even hurt more when I had to back out my changes. Let's hope the new functionality in the application takes care of our customer needs.

Programming Wisdom

2011-01-03T14:48:00.004-05:00

I skimmed through a compendium of 100 things programmers need to know. There was some good stuff in there. I will summarize the top 10 or so right here.

The first is that technical debt may be inevitable in the short term. Sometimes you just got to ship. Be quick to remove it though.

Automatically format code. Do it as part of the build. I like the sound of that. We have some nasty formatting in most of our code. We normally try to fix this manually. Ouch.

The best methods are about 10 lines of code each. You should also limit the number of parameters passed in to a max of 4.

Good programmers care about the code they produce. Great ones care about the entire team's code. I am not sure I am ready to be one of the great ones. Honestly.

The best programmers are great because of hard work. There are normally not any shortcuts. No pain, no gain here. Once again I doubt I am ready for any more pain that I am already enduring.

Here is a tip I like. If you try to be productive doing code for more than 30 hours a week, you are working too hard. Try telling that one to the management team. Hehe.

Thou shalt learn to use the command line version of your tools. Period. All great UNIX hackers already know this. Time for the Microsoft crowd to catch up.

Testing should be done on the weekend. That is, you should automate your testing. If it takes too long to run, run it overnight. The weekend is a great opportunity to run the full suite of tests.

Too much logging is no good. We suffer from this ailment on our project. I try to cut back on the logging. However I find programmers just go in behind me and want to add the massive logging back in. You know we are in trouble when the database blows up due to massive logging.

Finally you should test your unit tests by injecting an error and seeing if it is caught. I tried pitching this idea once before. Management was actually receptive. Then I got real busy and dropped the ball. Time to reintroduce this one to the project.

Last Minute Changes

2010-12-15T14:56:00.002-05:00

Today there was a meeting scheduled with the customer to review some last minute requirement changes. I went to lunch early so I would not miss the meeting. I dial in to the conference, but all I get is elevator music. After a while, the requirements team calls me up. I find out that I dialed the wrong number. This was a bad omen.

We get into the meeting. The requirements team drives the discussion. But they always go to me for all customer questions. This time around I had them document exactly what the code does. The danger is that this opens up all kinds of discussion. Now is not the time to discuss. We are at the end of testing. However it is better to get the bad news now than later after the code is running in production.

I get banged up a bit. There are some surprise requirements. I take it in stride. Right after the meeting I am banging out code. Luckily I have a huge unit test code library that helps me test out the changes. But guess what? I found a bug in my unit test data generation routine that is affecting the latest changes. I debug that and then test out all the new stuff. Oh boy this is so last minute. Luckily I am going on vacation next week. People on the team are scrambling to figure out who will be backing me up next week. Rant off.

LOL

2010-12-14T14:58:00.003-05:00

I had a ton of messages on my phone when I got in this morning. Nice. One of them was from my team lead. He usually does not call me. So I got in tough with him right away.

A project manager had asked him to get me to check up on a customer problem in the production environment. Apparently he thought this would take me all of 10 minutes. It actually took longer than 10 minutes for me to even understand what the heck they were asking.

Here is what I gathered. The customer testing group had some concerns over some processing. Our manager wanted me to mine the production data, figure out from the data whether the customer concerns were valid, and provide the hard evidence either way.

All I can say is LOL. If I were given a few days, I could knock out this work. But 10 minutes? Please. Each of the many queries I need to run against our huge production data set might take 10 minutes. Right now I don't even know how to compose the queries without doing analysis up front. My team lead is a true diplomat. He said that he would respond by saying that my hands are full, and that I would try to help if I got any free time.

Muhahaha. You got to love my team lead. He is a politician in the making. I actually work directly for a different manager. He directed my to spend my time working on some new customer requirements that need to go out ASAP. I was told that I can direct all my time on that task. I am going to follow my direct manager's orders for now. Still laughing at the 10 minute estimate though.

Small Changes Take Long Time

2010-12-13T11:22:00.003-05:00

Some testers discovered some differences between our written requirements and they way our software was working. We decided to change the requirements to match the software. This really was a documentation problem. You would think this would be the end of the issue. No chance.

The customer inspected the requirements. They realized some other things were missing as well. Those other things were not in the software. Essentially the customer wanted some more last minute changes. They said this was important. Oh oh.

Now of course these changes were to be done by me. I was asked how long the changes would take. I conservatively estimated a few days minimum. My boss translated that into a 32 to 40 hour job. Why does such a small change take so long? There are many reasons. We got to make sure we get the requirements right. That job should go to an analyst. However you know a developer needs to be involved.

Then you need to code the change. That does not take much time at all. Next you need to do your testing. It is difficult to set up just the right set of unit test data. You also need to document all your tests. Guess what else needs to be documented? Changes to the design. This goes in the design document. Then we need to roll out the change to all the environments that need it. There is internal test, customer test, then production. Now 40 hours does not sound all that long.

Easy as SendMail

2010-11-18T14:44:00.003-05:00

We have a data correction script scheduled to go out to Production. The results are supposed to be emailed to the customer. A DBA got assigned to help with getting the email produced automatically.

Being a developer, I thought it would be as easy as getting an API from the DBA on how to make the call to send an email. Nope. The DBA wanted to take the script and implement it himself. Bad sign #1.

My boss wanted me to ensure the email was being scheduled at the right time. Turns out the DBA was confused over when to do the work. Great. Then it turns out that the DBA did not know how to actually send the mail.

Another DBA asked if we had SendMail capability on the UNIX box. How do you test this? Easy. Run /user/lib/sendmail, passing an email address on the command line. Then enter in some text for the body of the email. Finally type a period followed by the Enter key.

Email will either be sent or not. For the record, it works on my UNIX development box.

Dreamspark to the Rescue

2010-11-15T11:45:00.003-05:00

I own a personal copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 6. It was purchased with my own money. When I first arrived at my company, they handed me a laptop. I was told I would get an additional laptop to do the development for our customer. It would just be a big wait.

What did I do? I installed my own personal copy of Visual Studio 6 on my company laptop. The main reason I did this was that I use Visual Studio as my text editor. I am very familiar with it.

Just the other day, Visual Studio 6 started aborting on my when I tried to open a file. The problem happened again today. My solution is to unintall and reinstall the darn thing. However after uninstalling, I looked around to see if I could install an upgrade instead. I have not purchased a new copy of Visual Studio yet.

Luckily I am a student in the local community college. Through Microsoft's Dreamspark program, they provide free access to all the professional versions of Visual Studio. Why should I not go to the most recent Visual Studio 2010 install. The install is 2G large. I hope it will be worth the wait. Thanks Microsoft.

Dreaded Screen Shots

2010-11-10T14:57:00.001-05:00

I am on loan to my old team to take care of some high priority problems for them. At first I protested. But the boss said they needed help. So I am finishing up the development of a fix. Then I needed to help the quality assurance team test out my changes. Fair enough.

Now I got some bad news. The quality assurance team is too busy to do any testing. So I got to do the testing. That by itself is fine by me. I unit test my stuff. I even produce a unit test plan complete with the results from testing.

However I got word that the tests required a big document that showed exactly what was tested and how. That means there needs to be a massive Microsoft Word document with all kinds of screen shots. What? Come on now. Don't make me join the insanity. I am all for doing tasks that add value. But this seems ridiculous. Nobody is going to be looking at this massive document.

Perhaps I should just paste in some random pictures and forget about fighting the system. What do you think?

All About Timing

2010-11-08T11:11:00.003-05:00

I am working on a high priority problem our customer has. They told me the behavior of the applications is unacceptable. No problem. I am the Maintenance Man after all. So I coded up the app changes that will takes care of their problems. You would think that I am done. No chance. There is much more to it than that.

Next I ran through all my unit testing. Then I need to get my changes over to our quality assurance team. You would think we could just click a button and I could get them a build. It is never quite that simple. There are all kinds of manual processes to get a build to test. Now I need to go through them.

The end goal is to provide the fix to the customers. However the powers that be in the customer organization want to limit any changes we send them. Therefore I need to clear my release with the big dogs. Next I find out that it takes 72 hours for the customer organization to receive my app and install it everywhere. Luckily I know all these things. All this overhead is baked into my delivery estimates. And you wonder why it takes a few weeks to push out 20 lines of code changes. Now you know.

Going to Sleep

2010-10-29T15:02:00.003-04:00

I got the fun assignment of implementing some object locking mechanisms. That is some good stuff. Me and another developer debated the design. When we were done, I was off to the races to code.

Now the general idea was to check whether there were other locks, and if so, wait a while before checking again. A little while made me think of sleeping and giving up my thread until a certain duration had passed.

My instinct told me to call the sleep() function, passing it the number of milliseconds I wanted to wait. The compiler did not recognize sleep(). Okay. I just need to find the correct header file to include. Was is ? No. that one is only valid for UNIX. I am on Windows XP. Then I figured out the error of my ways. I already included . However that header file has you call Sleep() instead. Notice the capital S.

Now I am unit test the basics of my implementation. My virtual machine is super slow. Perhaps it is time to call it a day (and a week).

Angry Customers

2010-10-28T22:37:00.002-04:00

My boss told me to go help out my old team. They were down on resources but were getting a lot of work. These guys were overworked. I protested a bit because I am busy with my new team. However the manager makes the final resource allocation decisions around here.

I wanted to take care of one of their problems that relates to my new team. My manager threw me on a high priority problem their customers were having. I gathered some logs and screen shots. Then I found some problems in the code immediately. My manager set up a conference call with a lot of the customers.

On the call I presented my findings. Then I walked the customer through some of the causes in their production environment. I heard a few things loud and clear in our conversation. The customer repeatedly said that the application behavior was unacceptable. Luckily my manager had prepped me with the info that these customers were livid. I tried to keep my cool. Then I presented some options on how we could fix their problems. Their answer was to just fix the damn thing, and let them know when it was done. Damn.

Developers Locked Up

2010-10-25T15:54:00.003-04:00

I got a call from some developers on my old team. The customer was having a problem with the applications. The devs traced it back to some home grown locking code. They were confused about some Pro*C code that executed what looked to be an EXEC SQL AT followed by a table name.

Luckily I had traced through this very code about a year and a half ago. In fact, I blogged about it on my Oracle Development Blog. We did not need to consult my blog. I remembered enough about it to explain it to the boys.

This is a construct in Pro*C to execute a SQL statement under a different database connection (session). One usage of this is to do some SQL and commit the changes without affecting any of the ongoing SQL in your current session. That might be needed for some logging, or in the case of my old dev team, if you want to do your own locking.

Previously I had thought that the lack of such knowledge could be fixed by some training. But one of the devs on my old team had gone through Pro*C study and training. When I explained what the SQL did, he seemed to recall a bit of it. I guess training might help you out sometimes. However there is nothing more valuable than hands-on experience.

Unit Test to the Rescue

2010-10-12T18:45:00.002-04:00

I inherited a subsystem to maintain. Made some changes for the next major release. This code is a pain to test. You have to have very specific data to excite all the cases. At first I was manually updating data using SQL commands. However I found it way too tedious.

Luckily I decided to put a bunch of code into a database package that generates test data at will. I spent a lot of time creating that test data generation code. Then I had to debug the test generation code. However now I am benefiting big time.

I had to do a last minute move of some setup data from one script to another. Then I was able to generate unit test data with one call to a stored procedure. Check. Later I removed a bunch of debug code from the main database package. Does the code still work? I used the test generation code to set up some more test data in about a minute. We are good. Now before moving on to the next job, I am going to make this unit test generation program even more flexible. Good stuff.

End of the Pattern Club

2010-10-02T23:51:00.002-04:00

I remember a new application our team needed to implement a long time ago. There was a young group of developers eager to do well. They were also led by a young guy. These dudes had a number of ideas about how to solve the problems for the customer. One of their main techniques was the use of design patterns.

Now I am all for using a pattern when the situation calls for it. However these guys were pattern crazy. Everything was going to be implemented as part of a pattern, whether it fit or not. They had a tough time coming up with the need for the singleton pattern. They ended up trying to force it in two places in the application. What a sorry state.

Recently I heard that patterns have become vogue. This is because they have essentially been a failure. Developers really don't know patterns well. Sure they can name a few. But they cannot spot the right place to use one of the many patterns out there. This is a generalization. However I think it holds true. The only reason to know patterns now is to pass an interview where they ask you about some pattern basics.

Tough Job Market

2010-10-01T23:30:00.003-04:00

Saying the current job market is tough would be an understatement. People stay unemployed for a long time when they lose their jobs. That makes them desperate for anything. We interviewed a dude that had a lot of experience in the specifics we were looking for. The guy seemed like somebody I wanted on my team. I told my boss point blank that we needed to hire this guy.

Turns out the poor dude was looking for work during the last nine months. How can a guy like that stay unemployed for so long. We got lucky and hired him before anybody else realized that this man would be a producer. In fact I think we did not pay him the going rate. I am concerned that if the economy improves, somebody else will steal him away. Now my recommendation to my boss is to give him the big bump up in compensation during his next review.

This story is not uncommon. I have heard that people with great skills and outstanding resumes are having trouble finding jobs. It does not seem to help even if people provide you with great references. I guess the old school method of getting jobs will work best. Get in contact with the people you know. Have them help you out. It is rough out there. You need every edge you can get. And if you have a job right now, hang on to it. I know I am.

Had a Bad Day

2010-09-26T22:36:00.002-04:00

I was reading this software trade rag. There were a lot of ads in the magazine. I guess that's how they give me the thing for free. One ad in particular stood out. It was irreverent. It was fun. The thing had me hooked. So I went to the company's web site. I read a few blogs on there. Left some comments.

A few days later I got an email from a blogger that works for the company. He offered me some free copies of some software from the site. Here was their proposition. They make it easy to produce reports using their add-in to Microsoft Word. Now we got some complicated reports that took a lot of programming on our project. However the blogger asked me to give their products a try and let him know what troubles I had.

I had some troubles figuring out their product lineup. There were some reporting engines. And there was the add in. Should I install them all? Tried to go read up some docs on the company web site. Trouble is the links on the site did not work. Damn. Well I decided to install the Word add-in and see how it worked. Setting up a database source was not intuitive at all. I struggled through it and got it to work.

After running the template provided with the install, I got the Word document to pull in some data. It was not the data I wanted to see. So I logged into the database, made some updates, and committed the changes. Then I ran the report again. However it did not show the new data. Ooops. I reported back my troubles to the blogger. This piece of software sounded interesting. But it was too much trouble for me. We probably don't need the thing on our project anyway.

ORACLE_HOME

2010-09-22T11:32:00.002-04:00

I am unit testing a bunch of scripts that normally run off the UNIX cron. Luckily they output their status to a log file. However the log keeps saying I have an SP2-0750 error. The text of this error is "You may need to set ORACLE_HOME to your Oracle Software directory."

Well I set my ORACLE_HOME. I can run SQL*Plus fine from the command line. Then I thought maybe the process I am spawning to run the scripts is not inheriting my environment variables. Nope. That can't be right.

Finally I try running the script in a different way. I make sure any changes the scripts make get reflected in my own parent environment. Wouldn't you know it? Somebody is resetting my ORACLE_HOME to an invalid directory. Further investigation shows that the scripts initially source a profile that has the wrong ORACLE_HOME.

I knew a little bit about what was going on. However all signs were pointing in the wrong direction. It took a high level of debugging skills, coupled with a lot of test time to figure this one out. I get the feeling that I am going to be having a great challenge testing out these scripts.

Archos 7 Home Tablet

2010-09-10T10:52:00.005-04:00

Dont you hate that the cool iPad costs at least $500? I know I am. Luckily there is a cheaper alternative. The Archos 7 Home Tablet has a retail price of $199. In fact, you can get it for $189 from Amazon including shipping. That's the same price of an iPod Touch, not an iPad. Let's look at this economical device.

The Archos 7 has a 7 inch screen, is 5 millimeters thick, and weighs less than a pound. It has a kickstand to prop it up. There are no buttons on the thing. It has a resistive touch screen for user input. The thing is similar to the smaller Archos 5 Internet Tablet.

Inside the Archos 7 has 128MB of RAM and 2GB disk space. An 8GB model runs for $240 retail. The display has a 800 x 480 pixel resolution. Built in speakers are very powerful. It supports 80211b and 802.11g Wifi. The battery let's you watch video for 7 hours before needing a recharge.

Loaded on the Archos 7 is version 1.5 of the Android operating system. It is good that they have an open operating system. But the version is an old and outdated one. There are 5 apps preloaded on the system. You do not have access to all apps written to Android. But you can get apps from the AppsLib store which boasts about a thousand apps.

The Archos 7 comes from a French company. It supports many video formats, including High Definition ones. There is no Flash support, just like the iPad. It is good for reading eBooks. You've got to love the free Android apps that are out there waiting to be downloaded by you. I think I just may have to go out and get myself one.

Communication and Leadership

2010-09-07T23:04:00.004-04:00

I was packing up my bag to get ready to leave work today. The guy who leads my old team dropped by and had some bad news. He said I needed to attend a long meeting later this week to work through some bugs with the customer. Then he said I needed to stick around today to help the team prepare for this meeting.

When asked to do some work that is not my official role on the project, I always start making calls. I immediately called up my manager. I reminded him that I moved to another team over a month ago. I also said that I had a schedule to keep with my new team. I asked why my schedule was getting loaded up with work from my old team.

I ended up conferencing a bunch of developer from my old team. I spent an hour walking developers through the problem resolution process. Now I do not normally care about incompetence. But I do care when it means I have to do somebody else's job. Don't try that mess with me.

Lack of Review

2010-09-03T14:01:00.003-04:00

I have recently taken over the maintenance of a back end job. It communicates with another system. Most of the business is written in Oracle PL/SQL. There is also a mixture of Korn and Perl scripts involved. My first task was to implement a new change the customer wanted.

Luckily I inherited a pretty detailed design document. So I updated the thing with the new changes that the customer wanted. I asked my boss what I needed to do with the document. He said to give our internal team a day to review the thing. Then publish it and schedule a walk through with the customer.

Got no comment back from the internal review. Nobody read the thing I guess. My boss asked a few questions. That led to some changes. Then the document went out and I headed to my meeting to go over my design changes. The meeting was held at our customer's building. I knew a guy who worked at the building. He signed me in. I got dropped off in the room where the meeting was to be held. I practiced my intro a couple times so that it would be smooth. Also jotted down some notes on the sections I wanted to hit. Nobody was showing up at the meeting though. My boss said all types of big shots would be there. I guess my design passed. Wrong. More on this next time.

Dream Tools

2010-08-23T14:17:00.002-04:00

Last night I read a rant about the state of development tools today. The guy had a good point. We got powerful hardware out there to run programs. Why can't we have powerful software development tools to make use of that hardware?

IDEs take a while to get your project started. Let's have an IDE that let's you start writing code immediately. Debuggers let you step through code with easy. How about we have debuggers that let you step backward in code execution, undoing the most recent operations?

Speaking of debuggers, let's get one that handles mutlithreaded apps with ease. Take it even further. Let's see if debuggers can trace through communication with other systems.

Finally here is a request that hits close to home. Recently we tried to build the first version of our next release. The thing was just not putting the files in the installation media. We have a manual process of inspecting the build output to ensure all went well. Why can't our build do that itself? It knows what's supposed to be in there. Let it automatically check what the heck actually went into the installable output.

Scrum Tips

2010-08-22T14:09:00.002-04:00

I have mentioned before that Scrum is a framework to set up your development process. It is supposed to be easy. This technique is better used on projects that are difficult, high risk, and uncertain. There are good and bad ways to implement Scrum. Let's look at some good ways.

You need to go all in with Scrum. A little Scrum is a quick way to fail. Factor in time to learn the framework. Your developers got to want to do Scrum. Make sure everyone knows what they are supposed to do. Sounds simple but can be very difficult.

The team needs to be trained in the framework. It helps if a pilot team tackles a smaller challenge first and succeeds. Your team should be located physically together to start. Don't tailor the Scrum process too soon. Do vanilla Scrum until you got it down pat. I am still looking for my first Scrum project. Or more specifically I want to be part of a successful Scrum development project.

The Scrum Way

2010-08-21T14:00:00.003-04:00

Our team was working on a replacement for our current production system a few years ago. The development manager had a brilliant idea. We would have a stand up meeting every morning. There were multiple problems with that idea. We were so busy due to being behind schedule. The meetings lasted a long time. That put us even further behind. Eventually the manager was fired, the project was canceled, and we lost our client. Ouch.

I suspect this manager was trying to implement a part of Scrum. That left a bad Scrum taste in my mouth. This does not mean that Scrum itself is bad. Just my particular experience with it. Scrum itself is a framework to create your development process. There are 4 core principles which emphasize individuals, completed functionality, customer collaboration, and responding to change.

There are a number of roles in the Scrum framework. A product owner manages the business. A ScrumMaster manages the team. And the team determines what to do by itself. Yeah. From the outside that seems problem prone. The Scrum activities are to prioritize all work, meet every day, demonstrate success, and search for improvement.

One artifact I find useful in Scrum is backlog. This contains a list of features that have been prioritized. At any given time you know what high priority items need to go in an interaction. I am still not sold on the rest of the Scrum framework. That will require me being part of a Scrum success story.

Open Source Checker

2010-08-20T13:41:00.002-04:00

Last year we changed how the reports in our system were handled. Initially we wanted to use an open source library to generate PDFs. However there was a lot of concern over the license. We ended up using a licensed copy of Adobe to do the work. I wonder what other open source code is lurking in our code base?

Protecode has a new version of their System 4 tool out. It searches your project for uses of open source code. Then it identifies the licensing for that code. Talk about solving a problem in one fell swoop.

System 4 does this by having a repository of hundreds of thousands of open source projects. It also has some AI to make sure it does not get confused over code that looks similar to the open source projects. I'd would love to run the source code for all our apps through this thing. I wonder what that would reveal about our code base.

Documentum

2010-08-19T10:48:00.002-04:00

Our project has always done some sort of configuration management. It used to be that we threw everything into Rational Clearcase. However there came a time when the customer mandated that we move all documents into a product called Documentum.

Now I did not like Clearcase that much. However Clearcase was great compared to this new Documentum. We hired a person to help us organize all our documents into Documentum. We also hired a Documentum consultant. The documents were moved over. Success was declared. The only difference I found was that it was now hard to access our documents. Years later we moved to SharePoint for document storage and sharing. At least it has a clean web interface.

The current system is scheduled to be replaced by a new system to be developed. One of the tools that the customer requires us to use in the new system is Documentum. That gives me the shivers. Documentatum, in case you did not know, is a content management system from EMC. You check files in and our like source code control. There is access control provided by the product. The latest version hosts the product in a web environment.

Documentum has many APIs which can be accessed from web servers, using Java, by FTP, and a whole lot more. The core feature of the product is its repository. The system is a three tier one, with the repository being a fancy type of database. There is a way to search the repository using their Documentum Query Language (DQL). There is also a Documentum certification. Who knows? Maybe I will try to study up and pass the darn thing. I still suspect this product to add pain to the system.

The Blaze Advisor

2010-08-18T10:35:00.003-04:00

Our customer wants a new system to be developed. It is going to replace the system I work on. For reasons unknown, the customer wants all kinds of new technologies to be used in the development of the new system. One of these hot techs is Blaze Advisor.

To tell the truth, I had never heard of the product before. It is more formally known as the FICO Blaze Advisor. It is a business rules management system (BRMS). The marketing says it is for high volume operations. And you can change the rules quickly.

A selling point for this tool is a fast time to market. That would be good to stand up a new system. It also does its own version control of the rules changes. That sounds sweet. The product is brought to you by Fair Issac Corporation. Digging a little deeper, I read that this is a Java based rules engine. The rules go into an internal rules database.

The software was created by Blaze Software. Eventually it was sold to Fair Issac. The most common use of it is by Java programs. This software might be of some use if it lives up to its marketing hype.

Future of Development

2010-08-17T10:27:00.002-04:00

Our company is trying to win the work for the project that shall replace the current one. I asked our manager what technologies we thought we might use to implement the new system if we won. There was a long list. And there did not seem to be many traditional coding tasks. One product we were going to use was Business Objects.

To tell the truth, I thought Business Objects were some API using by Crystal Reports. I have since come to find out that Business Objects was a company that got bought out by SAP a few years ago. The premier product of this company is Business Objects XI. This is a big package that includes business intelligence tools.

SAP offers a bunch of instructions ebooks on Business Objects for $19.99 each. Great. I know the company will spring for such training material. But do I really want to get out there and be a Business Objects developer? It is funny. While searching for technical information on Business Objects, I found a job offer for a senior Business Objects developer. It paid $45 per hour. That's not chump change. But it is a lot lower than I thought a SAP developer would make. Oh wait, this is Business Objects. The jury is still out whether I shall even crack a book to learn this stuff. There are also other new technologies in the stack to be used to build the next generation system. More on those products later.

Back to UNIX

2010-08-10T15:17:00.004-04:00

My team has been relegated to true maintenance tasks. All we are to do is investigate bug reports. When we figure out what is going on, we come up with an estimate as to how long they will take to fix. We don't even go through with the fix until somebody in charge approves the change. This is none too exciting work.

There is another team on our project which has a massive amount of development going on. They just lost a guy who went to another company. My boss asked me to go join that team with the heavy development load. He did not need to ask me twice.

One of the drawbacks of the new team is that they do all their work in UNIX. Their subsystem loads data given to us mostly by mainframe programs. The code is pretty much C programs running on UNIX. I did spy on a piece of their system that was more Oracle PL/SQL. So I jumped at the opportunity to work on that piece. My request was granted.

Today I just got access to the UNIX development system. Nothing worked out of the box. When I pressed the backspace key, some weird symbol appeared on the screen. I tried to run Oracle SQL*Plus. The program could not be found. Great. Now I got to set up my profile to get the path and other environment variables set. This may be a bit painful. Oh yeah. Did I mention that my text editor is now vi?

Deep Analysis

2010-07-27T18:42:00.002-04:00

Yesterday my project manager told me to attend a meeting with another group. These people are planning to write the next generation of our system. I was concerned that I would be talking to the developers that are trying to code me out of a job.

Luckily I went to the meeting and found they are in the beginning phase of analysis. They wanted me to let them know where we get all the data from our system. They also were very interested in how we store internal state of the applications in the database. I had to take an action item on those tasks.

I made sure I did a pretty good job analyzing our system. These people might be my new bosses in a few years. It was a challenging task. Shouldn't there be some database tool that tells you what database tables is a schema are actually being accessed? I don't know of a specific one. Do you?

Agile Success

2010-07-26T23:37:00.002-04:00

A whole host of agile technologies have become mainstream over the past few years. These include refactoring, unit test, test driven development, and even Scrum. However pair programming is stuck in the mud.

One problem is that pair programming is expensive. On the surface, it takes twice as much to do pair programming. It is also not liked much by developers. It might be one of the agile methods that never pan out.

However it is the end results that matter. You want to know immediately when the build breaks. That might mean you have unit tests that automatically get applied. Or a build job checks for errors and emails the right people. We don't have that at our work. We used to. But the build scripts got rewritten, and are not as good any more.

Client Connections

2010-07-25T23:32:00.003-04:00

You need to understand that every time you meet your client, it impacts the relationship. Clients want an emotional connection with you. You need to understand their expectations to be able to meet them.

The experience the client has must be positive and special. How do you ensure that? Show passion. Be committed. So how do you make sure your employees have passion and are committed? Put them in the right roles.

Be sure to put in that quality time with your clients. Otherwise another company will get a better relationship with your client. Then you lose clients.

Developer Coverage

2010-07-19T17:22:00.003-04:00

The managers have a policy on taking vacations. You need to make sure you have somebody covering for you. A developer on our team was taking a massive one month vacation this past month. Then she needed an extra week to care for a sick family member. She was supposed to arrange coverage for her tasks.

She ended up letting our team lead figure out the work coverage. That was a bad move. Our team lead asked two members on our team get familiar with some code changes the vacationing developer was going to make. These members just got familiar with the code changes. In effect, they made sure they could check in code changes on the vacationing developer's behalf. This happened and the software was released to test.

Then the testers needed help figuring out how to do the testing. That was a problem. One ghost developer had checked the code changes in. However knowing what the fix was fixing was beyond comprehension. I got the players involved on a conference call to clear up who was supposed to do what. Apparently the job of the two developers was to gain a better understanding of the actual problem that was being fixed. That makes sense. But you need to be explicit about this if you are giving out directions. That did not happen. This all could have been avoided if the original developer going on vacation had arranged and trained up someone who could provide coverage. That means somebody can do everything the vacationing developer would do if they were in the office. Sometimes the manager policies are actually there for a good reason.

Improving Requirements

2010-07-14T23:01:00.003-04:00

Previously I had pondered about techniques to improve requirements analysis. That's why I read a recent Doctor Dobb's Report article on this very topic. To start you need analysts that have skill. This is a tall order to fill. Then you need to make sure you have the right tools. Well we have IBM Rational ReqPro. So we should be good.

The analysts need to identify the business objectives. I know this is sorely lacking for many of our requirements. Often time nobody on the team understands why we are implementing the changes. We also must determine who can speak for the customer. This gets difficult when we have multiple customers that we work for. There is a sponsor, some executives, system acceptance, and different business divisions.

Use cases are a good tool. But they do not solve everything. The analysts need to get down into the functional requirements. Often times our analysts struggle with the business requirements. In that scenarios, there is no chance to do functional requirements well if you are stuck at the business level. You should also do some testing of the requirements themselves to see if there are any holes.

I think I should pass this article to our requirements analysis team. The problem might be the normal one. They are too busy to do anything other than write stuff down that the customer is saying.

Power of Documentation

2010-07-13T00:46:00.004-04:00

We have a requirements analysis team. I think they are supposed to work with the customer to figure out what they want. That is a daunting task. It turns out that this team frequently comes to development to ask us what the requirements are. There is something very backwards about this arrangement.

These requirements are then verified with the customer. They are also used by our internal testers, as well as the customer's acceptance test team. It is crucial that these requirements are clear and correct. Lack of clarity means someone is going to get confused. This confusion is a source of trouble. Customers will think they are getting something else. Testers will think the implementation is not correct.

One thing is for sure. It is best to have the requirements correctly documented during the requirements analysis phase. Unfortunately this is not an easy task. And therefore it is not always the way work gets done. We must still strive for this optimal setup for design and development.

Work Assignments

2010-07-10T00:15:00.002-04:00

Today was the last day at work before my week of training. I actually completed my tasks in the morning. However I did not want to get bogged down with any new jobs prior to my training. So I stayed low for the afternoon. Luckily nothing popped up.

I have found that this is becoming a pattern with developers on my team. There is never a reward of leaving early if you work hard and get your tasks done. Your reward will be more work. More often than not, that new work will be something that keeps you late into the night.

There is no specific reward for getting done early and taking on new tasks. This is a bad setup. Developers are smart and will make sure to minimize such "rewards" for hard work. I don't have the answer on how to fix this problem. Because I am one of those who does not volunteer for extra tasks that much. Why do it? It just does not make sense. Just saying.

Screaming to Refactor

2010-07-06T22:40:00.004-04:00

I am in the middle of coding some change for our next incremental release of the software. After implementing some changes in a stored procedure, I ran my tests. Something was still not right. I traced it down to a trigger calling a stored procedure. It was undoing my changes on the fly. I needed to make another change.

When I got into the other stored procedure, I was lost. The procedure was 850+ lines of code. There were nested IFs that were six, seven, and even eight levels deep. I was around when this procedure was changed over the years. And I still was getting confused over the thing. I decided to print out the code, and line up the IF and ELSEs.

My goal was to refactor this massive procedure. The plan was to break down this monster proc into many subroutines. In the end, the main procedure got down to 150 lines of code. It was much easier to follow. Of course all the lines of code went to small subroutines. I needed to do a bit of regression testing to make sure I did not break anything. With a change of this magnitude, there are going to be some bugs introduced. My unit tests helped flush them out. I am leaving this procedure is much better shape. I am proud.

Forced Management

2010-06-24T23:44:00.003-04:00

We have a quick turn around release coming up next month. The project manager provided the high level schedule to everybody. That was a good move. I am looking out for myself. The scheduled time for development is coming up quickly. But I had not seen any preparation done for this task.

The work had not been divided and assigned to developers. The plan for configuration management of the changes had not been hashed out yet. I gave my team lead some time. But nothing was going down. So at a manager's tech meeting, I started asking some questions.

I asked one of the leads how the configuration management was going to be done. We figured that out during the meeting. Then I asked my team lead when he was going to do the assignments. He said it was already done. I told him that nobody on the team knew what their assignments were. Essentially I informed him and the group that nothing was done. We also hashed out the assignments during this meeting. The meeting ran an hour longer than normal. But we got the essential decisions for the next release done.

Should I have waited until the last minute, allowing none of these things to get done? No way. Then me and the team would have been working nights and weekends. Should I have taken the team leads aside individually and told them they needed to get their act together? Perhaps. I could have made the decisions get done. But then I would end up having to do this for every release. I figure I can embarrass the guys a bit by calling them out in a meeting. Perhaps the next time they will be proactive without prodding from me. Maybe not. But if the next release comes around and this work has not been done, I will have to get even more forceful. I will have to call my own special meeting with the big bosses and inform them that some people are not doing their jobs.

Yes I might be a pain. But this is pain with a purpose. I want to make sure planning is done before it is too late and I suffer. The rank and file developers love me because I am looking out for myself and them. The responsible team leads don't like getting called out. But I make it easy. Do your job and I won't bother you.

Grunt Work

2010-06-21T18:15:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a manager in my company. He wanted to know the status of a printer he bought for our office. I heard the thing was dead. So that is what I reported to the manager. This seems to infuriate him as he thought the thing had been in use during the past year. Now it was my job to get the thing running.

Here is the problem. I am the senior guy on my project. That means I deal with a lot of emergencies from the customer. This keep me at work for long hours every day. How can I make time to get a broke down printer working? I like to apply balance to everything. And I also count the costs of choosing different tasks over each other. After a while I was spending too much time explaining why the printer was still not working to the manager. Thus I made it a priority to fix it.

I went to the local computer store to get some parts. Then I found some documentation online on how to setup and debug the printer. Doing these chores meant that I had to skip some meetings where I normally provide all the information. Let's just say those meetings did not go well today. I had a good excuse though. A high level manager wanted his this printer up and running. Finding the printers drivers was not that hard. It was tricky to figure out which things I needed to rip out of the printer to ensure prints went through fine. This is just part of the drudgery of being a developer. People assume you can do sys admin or help desk work. Since I am technical, at least I can. The printer is printing fine now.

Career Programmer

2010-06-13T23:45:00.002-04:00

Got a gift card from Barnes and Nobles book store. So I decided to buy at least one technical book. It was The Career Programmer by Christopher Duncan. This one is not technically a technical book. It tries to help you navigate the politics and such of software development.

I must confess that after reading the first 4 chapters of this book, I was bored as hell. But I invested the cash to buy the book. I needed to get something out of it. Then it hit me. I would start reading the chapters from the end of the book toward the beginning. And this is working for me now. It might get boring again when I get to the middle of the book.

The themes I have read so far are simple. Understand that companies are about business. If you can arrange to make your boss look good, and further your goals as well, you win. I will fill you in when I complete reading of this beast. Right now I cannot recommend that you purchase this book. There has to be better material out there.

True Understanding

2010-06-06T00:04:00.003-04:00

Recently the customers informed us that their most important problem had not been fixed. My manager called me to appease the customer. I took a peek in the production environment. Yes the data was messed up. I guess the last fix did not do the job.

My boss was worried that the customer was going to continually think that the problem was unresolved. So he had me meet with the customer to define and document exactly what they wanted. I speak their language. So it was clear to me. I just wrote down all the unwritten and unsaid assumptions that I comprehended.

In the end, I came up with a 4 page document. We met to ensure this document was correct and complete. My boss asked that the customer and I agree on any unusual boundary cases. So I discussed and documented what my data correction script would do if it ran into unexpected scenarios. The result was still 4 pages of documentation.

Now most of this documentation was just regurgitating the basic information that I and the customer know. The reason for this document was that none of the managers or executives know the basics. The testers for the most part do not have a strong understanding of the basics either. I was reminded of this as we entered testing of my script. However they did get a solid tester on the scene. He just needed to learn some of the business rules before he could make heads or tails of the testing required. Our team loaned him a developer to assist him, but this guy needed more help to get through all his tests. Luckily this was a high priority task. So I was directed to make time for it.

Good Estimates

2010-05-27T17:34:00.002-04:00

Producing accurate software development estimates is an art. These days they mostly seem to be wrong. How can we correct this pattern? Start by defining your project scope. Without that you are doomed to fail. Period. When the requirements change, so does the scope. You then need to estimate again.

Once you have the documented requirements, locate all the unknowns. Overestimate these items. Put together a list of deliverables to manage expectations. Remember to cost in security the first time around. There may also need to be time factored in for developer training.

This might be obvious, but you need a lot of time for testing. The current fix I am doing requires double the amount of time testing as it does coding. This should be the norm and not the exception. Get your developers to agree to the estimate, and more importantly the deadlines.

Add some slack in, no matter how well you think your estimate is. The estimation phase is the toughest one. Don't cave in to pressure to reduce the estimate. That will only lead to disaster.

H1-B Visa Pay

2010-05-26T17:17:00.002-04:00

People brought into the company under an H1-B visa make less money than US citizens, right? This is another ploy like outsourcing to bring the salary of US citizens down lower. Here is something interesting. Recent research from the University of Maryland shows that the opposite may be true. H1-B visa workers make more money than their US citizen counterparts in the IT industry.

The study took education and experience into account. It found that H1-B visa holders made about 9% more in pay than US citizens. This is the inverse of the situation with green card holders making 13% less than US citizens. The UMD findings contradict other studies and information previously available. Back in the early 2000's, they found H1-B visa holders making $75k average salaries.

Why is this so? One theory is that companies are getting specialized skills from outside the country, and they need to pay to attract the talent. The H1-B visa holders are also temporary workers. Temp workers in general make more than long term employees. More than half of all H1-B visas are for IT work. Maybe their presence is not all that bad for the locals.

More on Jobs

2010-05-26T12:37:00.002-04:00

Software development is a field that is easy to get started in. You can download some free tools. And most of them will work on a normal PC. Get busy working on a product. If you don't think you are ready for that, try helping out on an open source project.

You don't even need to start out coding. I would recommend it. However you can do some testing or documentation work first. There are some technical tasks that are not hard core coding. For example, you could develop a web site.

Learn to program to an API. Become proficient at developing mobile applications. These are good skills to have. If you cannot get a first job as a developer, try working for a non-profit organization or a small business. Alternatively you can get a regular job, then look for ways to move into your company's tech side.

Doing some hand-on work can help make your resume stand out. This is crucial for getting that first real development job. I wish somebody had told me about this when I was in school. Luckily I did end up at an internship which gave me a great resume upon graduation from college. These days you need all the help you can get to enter the job market.

Getting a Job

2010-05-25T16:57:00.002-04:00

So you want to be a computer programmer. How do you go about doing this? The job market right now is tough. You got to stand out somehow. I just read this blog entry on how one guy successfully got hired.

You need to have a goal of becoming a great programmer. Go to college. However don't have a goal to get good grades. Get good skills instead. Make sure you do go to college. It can be a community college. But don't cop out and go to some institute like Devry. You will end up doing documentation or help desk work.

Here is another surprising misconception. Your major does not matter that much. Choose a technical degree. But it does not have to be computer science or computer engineering. Do join user groups and attend conferences. Get your social media on. When you apply for jobs, have a personalized cover letter. It would also help to customize the resume to address the job requirements as well. Good luck

Software as a Service

2010-05-24T15:24:00.001-04:00

Software as a service is a hot topic these days. The main selling point is that you can quickly get high quality products developed. The only problem is that it is hard to find developers with the necessary skill sets to do the work. Such developers need integration skills.

Outsourcing in general is a difficult task. Like many software development efforts, IT often fails in their outsourcing implementation. Know that software as a service is a kind of outsourcing in itself. Security is important in the software as a service world. Normal DoD security audits may not be sufficient to ensure your security is tight. You must test the security of the vendors you choose.

Software as a service depends on the Internet. So by definition there will be downtime. You need to prepare for this in advance. Make sure incoming mail also gets routed to an alternate system. And the outgoing mail backup should always be ready to go. Test your data recovery plans. And it would be best if you were in control of your own DNS entries.

Code Done Right

2010-05-19T14:51:00.002-04:00

I have this task to complete. The goal is to correct a lot of data corrupted in production by some bugs. The actual SQL is not too difficult. Understanding the business logic is most tricky. We had a meeting with the customer to confirm the requirements. Based on the first meeting I banged out a script in no time.

Now I made sure I did my script right. The main routine just makes a lot of calls to other functions. Those functions are ones that I wrote myself. They are in the script as well. However the main routine just implements the logic calling other routines. All the routines trap exceptions and deal with them to ensure the script will run on.

Later we found out that there were some additional requirements for the script. Now the tough business logic became even tougher. However the way I set up the script helped make these new changes a breeze. There was a need for a new function or two. But the main script just needed a line or two tweaked. I had set myself up for success. With the time saved I assisted some other developers who were swamped with their full work loads. That's smart.

Dedicated Administrators

2010-05-18T11:23:00.003-04:00

For the past 10 years or so, we have had a dedicated system administrator at our computing center. They were responsible for our specific system. It was easy. If we needed something done on the back end, we would contact this person.

I got a disturbing email from the person today. They are now being taken off the job. It is part of a enterprise wide shift in how work gets done. Instead of specific people being responsible for each system, the whole system administration staff if going to be responsible for all the systems.

This means staff unfamiliar with our system will be matrixed in to do the work. While this might work for stable systems with straight forward standard operating procedures, I bet this will not work well with our system. There is a lot that the administrators pick up over the years. And it is hard to train this instinct. I think we are going to have to suffer for a while until they realize that the new plan is not working. Great.

A Work of Beauty

2010-05-17T10:35:00.003-04:00

The customer wanted some data in our system fixed. A prior bug fix did not resolve the underlying data corruption caused by the bug. They were demanding this be resolve as our top priority.

I got called in because I know the system well. We had a meeting where the customer told us the requirements. People get nervous when things like this are just rattled off. So a manager recommended we document the requirements as we heard them.

After a while I called up the manager to ask who was going to write up that documentation, and whether it was going to be a team effort. Good thing I called. He said he wanted me to do it. Better to hear about this when I called than as a surprise at the last minute.

Luckily I was fully engaged with the customer when we went through the requirements clarification. I put together the flow of how our data correction script would run. I added all the details so that somebody familiar with the system would know exactly what we were doing. Got a tech guy to peer review the work. Then a manager added section titles. This document was becoming a good looking thing.

Today we had our first set of meetings with the customer. This one was only with our sponsor to get the game plan for discussing the document with the end user. Our sponsor was very pleased with the document. It read easily. And it captured all the details of what we talked about during our requirements gathering. I was very proud of this document.

Happy Camper

2010-05-16T16:10:00.000-04:00

It is Friday afternoon, and I am loving life. Sure it is nice that the weekend is upon us. However I am smiling for a different reason. I got assigned to a high priority problem. No. That alone is not cause for joy. However the fix involves some interesting logic. And I get to code the whole thing myself.

I started with an empty text file. Well I actually started with a small template. But it had no functionality in it. Then I started coding away at the requirements. Yes. I actually had documented requirements. I wrote them. Spoke to the customer. Got assigned to document what I heard. Now I can code to spec.

Here I am, writing nice tight routines. They call subroutines. And guess what? I get to code the subroutines as well. There is actually enough time in the schedule to get all the work done. There is time to adequately test the functionality. I think they got a sense of the complexity when I spoke to the customer about their requirements. I kept going through significant scenarios until I understood what they wanted. There are a lot of combinations, and therefore many scenarios. Those will all be turned into unit test cases.

I just like writing code. It is nice if it is new development. It also helps that the customer desperately needs this code to be correct for them to do their jobs. People are counting on me to deliver. I actually have a reasonable schedule to do my work. You bet I am happy. This is such an unusual situation for most software maintenance work. So I am here on a Friday afternoon. I am writing code and not looking at the clock. Why go anywhere else when I am having so much fun?

Conference Call

2010-05-15T15:29:00.001-04:00

I saw a new high priority customer trouble ticket come in. It got assigned to a junior developer. Our team lead said he would help out as well. Then the test team shared some of their findings. I was hoping all was going well. Then I got the dreaded invite to the conference call.

Reluctantly I dialed in. The boss asked whether this problem was related to any other fixes we recently deployed. I tried to stay out of this. People were trying to recall what changes went in to fix what problems. They were also trying to determine whether any of those changes were incomplete.

Finally I could not take it any more. I said we really needed to get back on track. Somebody should find out whether what the customer is reporting is actually happening. Then they should find out why and fix it. After all that we can then investigate how such a problem slipped by. Eventually the boss and the team lead agreed. Then all the developers started saying they were unable to work this weekend. That's when I knew our conference call had become broke down again. Luckily I was able to switch to a higher priority task before conference call number 2 started up on this problem.

Maintenance is not really that hard. You talk with users to find out what they are experiencing. Then find out what they are expecting. Determine if their expectations are valid. See if you can make the problem happen. Then code a fix to make the problem go away. If you are mature, go a little further to find out how the problem can be resolved. Anything beyond these simple steps are going to be a waste of time. Seriously.

Middle of the Function

2010-05-14T15:23:00.003-04:00

A coworker has been struggling to resolve a bug in our system for about 5 days. Part of the problem is that he keeps getting distracted by other work. However he made a goal of knocking this thing out by the end of the week.

Three were strange things happening. Perusing the code made it look like those things should never happen. So this developer put a bunch of breakpoints in the code. Actually he inserted a bunch of message boxes to slow things down and alert him to what was happening.

He traced the code down into one particular call to a funciton. The function looked simple. It was supposed to retrieve a string from the registry. However it was coming back with the wrong string. So he traced in with the debugger. That's when he saw what was going on. In the middle of the function, somebody put some code to return a constant string. All the other code below it was not getting executed.

You would think that the compiler would warn you about the unreachable code. It probably was. However that was getting lost in the million other warnings that race by in the build. Your eyes can deceive you when you trace code. However the debugger does not lie, not usually at least.

Desktop Environment

2010-05-12T13:56:00.001-04:00

I have been working on a high priority problem for the customer. The behavior is strange. The software just does not work on some workstation. It generates an unknown exception. My boss told me to look into the version of Microsoft Office.

We use Office to run the reports. Everybody has Office 2003. I drilled down to the DLL from Office that we use. Everybody has the exact same version. But some people's stuff works, others does not.

After a while the customer got frustrated. Luckily they wanted us to stop researching this problem. They have other teams that manage the configuration of all workstations. Now I am only going to assist the workstation folks to figure out the delta between the workstations.

We got to have a stable workstation. Our documentation lists the required software and versions that we expect be configured on the workstation. It is tough when the customer manages the workstations. That means there is a variable outside of our control. But I guess that is life.

More Build Woes

2010-05-11T13:56:00.003-04:00

Our team is about to release a new version of our system to the customer. Another developer is leading that effort. He found the latest version of our code had a lot of bugs. Not sure how it got this way. But the developer went in and fixed them. He then wanted another developer to go in and verify that his changes work.

Here is the problem. Nobody on the development team seems capable of building the whole system. That's a big problem. I know some of the people are newer. But come on people. I was not ready to help because I had been assigned a high priority problem the production users are encountering.

My team lead gave me a call. He said he tried to help verify the code changes. But he too could not build. Criminal. The he was "out of the office sick" today. Figure. He asked me to step in and assist. I told him I would need a reprieve from my current task. When he gave me the go ahead, I jumped on the verification.

This is when I saw what the pain was about. One of our apps refused to build. Our C: drives are out of space. So developers build from the D: drive now. But this one app was not having it. I modified the environment to build from D:. Then I ran into additional problems. I hacked through that. The next two apps were easy to build. The hard part was writing a custom script that would set up the Windows registry for these apps to run. Something is just not right here. I was able to do the verification, but there should not be this much pain. Time to solve this problem.