Lambert on Development

I consider myself something of an amateur photographer (yes, in case you’re wondering, the photos are mine, be they ever so humble).  By amateur, I mean in part that I’ve learned enough to know where I stand against the ranks of really good photographers.  Among other things, I’ve come to understand that there’s a lot to learn about photography before you can really hope to be good, but I also understand how people come to believe that they can be pro photographers just going out and snapping up the latest and greatest hardware.

The advent of digital cameras made photography accessible to a lot more people by making photography cheaper and easier by a pretty huge increment relative to film photography.  Once you’ve bought a camera, it now costs next to nothing to go out and shoot a couple hundred pictures in a day.  Since you can see your results immediately, you can also make changes to settings or composition in real time, which massively increases a new photographer’s learning curve.  Bottom line: you can go from zero to decent in a very short time.

“And what,” you might be asking, “does this have to do with software?”

One of the problems facing both photographers and software professionals, it turns out, is that it’s pretty difficult for an uneducated consumer to tell the difference between “passable” and “really good”.  This morning, I read a really interesting article by Scott Bourne: And You Call Yourself a Professional? In this article, Scott bemoans the fact that there are budget photography “pro’s” who are dramatically undercutting really good photographers, producing mediocre results for the client and, in Scott’s words, these proto-pro’s are “dragging down an entire industry.”

My first reaction, of course, was that this is one of the fundamental problems in our industry, too.  Good developers can spot bad developers a mile away, but customers and employers can’t do this — at least, not until they’ve become somewhat educated in the intricacies of software development.  This is one of the key ideas in another one of my recent posts:  Fixed bid isn’t nirvanna.

Is it really reasonable to expect that bad photographers or software developers are going to take themselves out of the market?  Not really.  In a well-functioning market, they’re either going to improve or be driven out of the market, but they’re certainly not going to experience a crisis of conscience and change their ways if customers are buying this stuff.

Instead, Scott’s “We fix $500 wedding photography” idea is probably a lot more effective.  Customers need to understand how they’re affected when they bite on low-ball services, but this is no small feat.  Think about it: if a customer is shopping for a deal, you’re going to have a hard time explaining to them exactly what can go wrong by taking short cuts.

In photography, there’s a misconception that since cameras can set exposure, aperture, and focus automatically, it’s impossible to take a bad picture, but it’s less clear how photography is elevated to art.  In software, a customer can see an application that appears to work, and have no idea that the system is riddled with technical debt that will make future maintenance and extension a nightmare.

I’d love to think that we could educate customers on a massive scale, and in the process, drive out bad development practices because no customer would ever tolerate them, but I’m coming to understand that sometimes, a customer just may not be experienced enough to understand why you’re a better value than the “cheap” service.

How are you educating your customers?

Tweet This Post

January 25th, 2010 | Tags: business of software, customers, Photography, professionalism, quality | Category: The Business of Software | Comments

It’s CodeMash time again, and once again, I’m taking notes on my Adesso tablet, and uploading them with Evernote to a CodeMash public folder.  You can see all of my scribblings there as I sync and once again, I’ll have some posts to follow based on what I’m seeing here.  There have already been some really fantastic sessions.
Update:  If you look at these notes, you’ll immediately see two of the most troublesome issues (for me, at least) with the Adesso pad.  First, this pad uses a regular 8×11 pad of paper that’s clipped onto the Adesso pad.  This part is actually pretty great, because I don’t need special paper to record notes.  In fact, I almost ran out of paper during the conference.  With other pads, I might have been done at that point, but with the Adesso, I could (in a pinch), just flip the paper over and write on the back, or grab a flyer or whatever other standard paper might be laying around.

So what’s the problem?  The pad can slip.  If there’s any play in the pad on the Adesso tablet, the writing becomes pretty illegible – especially on the bottom of pages.  This is pretty apparent in a few spots in these notes.

The other big problem is that it’s really easy to record right over the top of a page that’s already got notes on it.  I’ve now gotten into the habit of advancing the “electronic” page when I flip the paper page – this bit me regularly for a while after I bought the tablet.  Last week, though, I fell victim to another variation on this theme — the “page forward” and “page back” buttons are located on the left edge of the tablet, and being a lefty, I bumped them accidentally a couple times.  Without realizing it, then, I moved the “electronic” page back to one that I’d already recorded, and just kept right on taking notes, resulting in a double-exposed page or two.

Tweet This Post

January 14th, 2010 | Tags: Addesso, CodeMash, Evernote | Category: The Business of Software | Comments

A while back, a friend asked me some questions about getting started with Linux.  He wanted to know specifically whether he should pick up a copy of RedHat at the local retailer — for  something on the order of $80.

I sent him back some notes about choosing a Linux install (distribution, or “distro”), and thought there might be some information here worth repeating.  Incidentally, you might find it worth trying a Linux Live CD (see below) even if you don’t think you’re a Linux person just to see how your hardware performs with another operating system – it can be eye-opening.

Don’t install yet…

Before you install anything at all, you can play with a one or two versions of Linux to see what you like about each of them.  The easiest way for most people to do this is with a Live CD.  A Live CD (or DVD) is a bootable image of an operating system.  Just download the Live CD image (this will most likely be an ISO file), then burn the ISO file to a disc.  Leave the disc in your optical drive, reboot your computer, and make sure your computer is set to boot off the optical drive before it boots off your hard drive.

If you followed along to this point, you should see Linux booting off the disc you just created.  It’ll start up, detect most of your attached devices, acquire a network address via DHCP, and you should end up with a working Linux desktop in just a few minutes without making any permanent changes at all to your machine.  When you’re done, just eject the CD and reboot back into Windows.

… or don’t install at all

The other way to evaluate Linux distros is with a Virtual Machine.  Both Virtual PC from Microsoft and VMWare (Player or Server) are free, and both can be incredibly valuable for testing, development, and so on.  Between the two, I’d pick VMWare — it’s fast, stable, and widely supported.  Plus, if you choose VMWare, you can download pre-built images from their Appliances site.  This can be even faster than using a Live CD once you’ve got VMWare installed.

The family tree

There are probably thousands of Linux distributions, or distros.  For some sense of scale, see this list or http://distrowatch.com/.  Despite these numbers, there are relatively few popular distros, and almost all of them have been formed by “forking” an existing distribution.  Thus, any distro you pick will come from a small number of “root” distros.  Take a quick look at this diagram to see what I’m talking about.

Although the specific lineage you pick shouldn’t matter much, you’ll usually see support articles refer to instructions for one or more of these roots, so it’s helpful to know if you’re running a Suse-based distro, or a Gentoo-based distro, and so on.

For what it’s worth, the most popular general-purpose distro right now is probably Ubuntu, so if you’re absolutely flummoxed right now about where to start, that would be a fine one to begin with.

But what about RedHat?

If you’ve made it as far as firing up one or two distros, you’ll realize that you’re not going to get much in the RedHat box that you don’t get for free somewhere else – after all, that’s the Linux way.  If you still see something on their feature list that you want to pay for, go ahead, though – at least you’re an informed buyer now.  Of course, if you insist on buying a distro, Suse’s enterprise distro is probably worth a look, too.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to choose a Linux distribution flow chart (ghacks.net)
• 10+ free, fast-booting Linux distros that aren’t Chrome OS (downloadsquad.com)
• Ubuntu 10.04 to Include Beginner’s Manual [Ubuntu] (lifehacker.com)

Tweet This Post

January 8th, 2010 | Tags: Linux, Live CD, Operating System, Suse, Ubuntu, virtual machine, VMWare | Category: Open Source | Comments

When a business wants a custom software deliverable, there’s a basic decision to be made about how this software is sourced, or procured.  Like a buy-vs.-lease decision when you go to the car dealership, the business has to decide first if they can and/or will develop the software with internal resources, and if not, they need to solicit bids and pick a vendor to do the work.

For many years, the only way to obtain software development expertise from outside your company was to contract that expertise on an hourly basis.  In fact, this is still the bedrock upon which most “consulting” firms are based.  It’s not sexy, but it pays the bills.  For customers, however, this can be an unrewarding experience because they still must provide most of the infrastructure of a software development shop, and in many cases, this just isn’t feasible.

In order for consulting companies to meet this need, these firms began to sell “solutions.”  In a broad sense, this is simply an arrangement to bundle all the work for a deliverable and charge per software deliverable, rather than per hour.

Solutions, then, are sold either on a fixed-bid basis, or on a time-and-materials (T&M) basis.  I’ll forgo a full examination of either of these models here, because most people are familiar with these models.  Suffice it to say that “fixed-bid” remains by far the sexier option, because it promises predictable budget-to-expense performance for the business, and predictable forecast-to-revenue performance for the solution provider – both of which make management look great.

In actual practice, however, fixed-bid projects don’t always turn out to be quite that tidy.  Requirements change, bids are supplemented by change controls, staff turns over, and any number of other minor catastrophes combine to make one or more parties in these transactions wish they’d done things very differently.

Over the last five years, then, any number of IT services companies have swung from 100% staff-aug work to take on a fair number of fixed-bid projects, and many have now started to swing back the other direction because of the pain they’ve experienced.  Fixed-bid is still a sexy sell, but it’s now recognized as a tough delivery.

Customers have also had a chance to experience this pain.  When you fix the price of an IT deliverable, you’re going to experience pain with each and every change you need to make.  In many cases, this will even include changes that you don’t perceive to be changes at all, merely because requirements weren’t spelled out clearly enough in the beginning.  Customers who aren’t really good at analysis and requirements definition will very likely feel like they’ve be run through the wringer.

The bottom line for fixed-bid projects:  Customers who understand what they want, and can specify this in writing, will do fine in a fixed-bid scenario.  These customers are more likely to get the software they want, and their vendors are more likely to deliver this software with a minimum of drama.  If a customer doesn’t understand what they want, fixed-bid probably isn’t the right answer.  Instead, concentrate on prototyping or agile development to derive the right answer, but understand that the delivery schedule has to be subject to change as requirements become better understood.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Process Rarely Fixes The Problem (regulargeek.com)
• Software Development Consulting (slideshare.net)
• Survey: Speed (to Market) Kills (devx.com)

Tweet This Post

December 31st, 2009 | Tags: agile, consulting, fixed-bid, project management, software development | Category: The Business of Software | Comments