Steve's Seaside Life

Author: Steve Richards

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Who should work with whom? building effective software project teams

Managing a team is always a challenge, but often great fun.

Peopleware is the best book I know of that talks about managing IT team and individual productivity.  This article provides a fairly detailed analysis of the importance of personality types on team composition.  If you are building a team for a really important task, I suggest you take a look. 

The report is in 3 sections:
1: Poor Performance
2: Effective Personality Attributes
3: The Optimal Team

Here is the conclusion:

  • Software managers should be aware that the optimal personality allocations in small project teams are somewhat different than those in large teams.

  • IS managers should consider selecting personnel so there is personality heterogeneity between the team leader and other team members in the social-interaction and information-gathering dimensions. Thus, the project leader and members should be selected such that all the four of these personality categories are represented: extrovert-intuitive, extrovert-sensing, introvert-intuitive, and introvert-sensing.

  • It is unnecessary to have diversity of personalities among team members (excluding team leader) due to the fact that members need to perform multiple tasks of the SDLC and heterogeneity is not good for all phases [11]. This should give IS managers the flexibility …

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Portal Success Stories

My company currently uses Plumtree and I must confess that I have not been a great fan of its portal.  However I did like this posting which described the most successful application types that have been built using their Portal, and probably any other as well. Expert location/knowledge management workspaces...

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Corporate blogging

Greg has just written one of the few posts that starts to discuss RSS and its impact behind the firewall.  That is in a corporate environment. greg hughes – dot – net – More on RSS and how it can change the way we work and live I wrote extensively...

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Year of Wonders

A book about the plague in England is not the most tempting of subjects.  However this book pulls it off.  Its loosley based on a true story about a village that isolates itself to protect surrounding villages from an outbreak of the plague.  There is plenty of death and misery...

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So what will be included in Longhorn?

In an email message to all full-time employees on, Microsoft group vice president Jim Allchin said that the company’s customers “love our vision” but just wanted parts of it to be delivered sooner. He said that Microsoft will deliver the following in 2006:

 

  • The highest quality OS we have ever shipped

  • New information management tools to improve productivity, including fast desktop search and new, intuitive ways to organize files

  • Major security advances that build on Windows XP SP2, such as new technologies to make clients more resilient to attack, viruses and malware

  • Flexible and powerful tools to reduce deployment costs for enterprise customers, including technologies for image creation, editing and installation; and much simpler upgrades for consumers

  • Significant improvements in reliability, including a robust diagnostic infrastructure to detect, analyze and fix problems quickly, and new backup tools to keep data safe

  • A platform that creates Developer excitement with the availability of rich APIs [application programming interfaces]

 

“Our commitment to broad availability of the Longhorn client in 2006 and broadening the API set underscores our long-term vision for the Windows platform, and our desire to deliver high-quality innovations that our customers and developers are asking for in a timely …

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So you want to understand what the changes to Longhorn mean?

Summary: The reaction to the news on Longhorn seems mainly positive

 

There is an enormous amount of debate on Microsoft’s decision to change the content and timing of Longhorn.  I discussed it in brief yesterday.  Since then there has been some very well informed discussions and links to these can be found on Robert Scobles blog.  However Robert just provides a very long list with little opinion so here is my take. In a bit more detail.

 

By far the best place to start in understanding this debate is this interview with Bill Gates by CNet.  It’s a fascinating piece with lots of snippets, a few of which I quote below:

 

We realized that we could do a lot of rich search capabilities in the OS without the full database, taking some of our text technology that’s been used by Office, and actually, MSN is doing some nearer-term local-search things, building on that same technology.  So that’s why MS bought LookOut!

 

Then we have other groups, like WinFS, where we’re way out in front, and there’s nobody to compare ourselves to. Making sure that they see how we’re committed …

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Richard gives his view on the Longorn roadmap changes

Richard draws simillar conclusions to me

Myself I am ecstatic that Avalon and Indigo are going to be available to both Windows XP and Longhorn clients. Why? Because this might signify the resurgence of the thick client applications and also make the deployment of those applications simpler with the subsequent release of one click deployment. No longer will I be shackled to the confines of a web browser but rather I will be freed to create a rich user experience like the “good old days” and thereby increase the number of available features to each application I create. The fact that Avalon is going to be released to a wider audience means applications that were once awkward to deploy over the web will now be easy. Forget the marketing hype this is a great leap forward for the smart client developers

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New roadmap for Longhorn

I was really disappointed when I heard that Microsoft were dropping WinFS from the initial release of Longhorn.  Then I read a bit more and listened to Jim Allchin, (the Group Vice President for Platforms at Microsoft), talk about the logic and sort of started to get excited.

 

Exited! That may seem a bit strange, until you realise that this indicates that Microsoft is actually starting to think responsibly about the needs to real businesses.  

 

“We’ve heard loud and clear from customers that they want improved productivity, easier deployment, increased reliability and enhanced security, as well as the many innovations we’ve been working on. We’ve had to make some trade-offs to deliver the features corporate customers, consumers and OEMs are asking for in a reasonable time frame,” said Jim Allchin, group vice president of the Platforms Group at Microsoft. “Our long-term vision for the Windows platform remains the same.”

Let’s take a look at what was really announced:

 

  1. Microsoft are going to ship Longhorn in 2006.  This gives corporates, developers and ISV’s something to plan around

  2. Microsoft are going to ship Indigo, (web services infrastructure), and Avalon, (Under experience), on XP and Windows …

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The Secrets of Great Architects

having just posted an Article on the topic of too much abstraction, (too conceptual in my article), its quite a conincidence that the next article I read is The Secrets of Great Architects posted on MSDN, about the extact same topic.  Here is a short extract: All great architects have mastered...

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Architecture Astronauts

As an Architect myself I found Joel’s thought provoking article titled “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” very interesting.  The article is all about the tendency of some architects to abstract problem to such an extent that it’s no longer useful.  This is how he gets started:   When great...