Companies like mine would like to think that there are only a handful of work styles that they need to support and that they can easily categorise the way people work. Normally this is achieved using a classification that is focused on the type of work that a person does,...
I’ve always been a huge advocate of the need for enterprises to focus on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) before they even consider enterprise knowledge management. Enterprise Knowledge Management just being a thin skim of services that enable discovery of information that’s promoted from PKM. That promotion can be very light...
This post is the third in a series about my working life I minimise the hours I work because that allows me to maximise the time I spend moving around, and done right it reduces stress and provides me with enough motivation to invest in maintaining a healthy diet, stretching,...
This post is the fourth in a series about my working life I’ve worked with people to improve their productivity for over 20 years and some of that has hopefully rubbed off on my own working practice. There’s no universal productivity practice though, what’s best for one person will be...
Each day this week while on Holiday with Steph in Filey I’m planning to write a post covering a different element of my working life. I’ve carefully designed this life so as to maximise my impact and productivity with the lowest levels of stress and minimal working hours. Whilst some...
I have just been reading an article on the importance of scheduling and bug and feature tracking in software projects. Its a good article and worth a read, but its basic stuff really. However its often the basic stuff that gets neglected so don’t dismiss it on that basis. Anyway the article prompted me to think a bit more on the benefits of eating your own dogfood and regular/daily builds.
The key thing I missed in the previous article was the importance of the process to managing compromise, and often that compromise takes the form of cutting or dropping features in order to deliver to time and budget. The daily build/dogfood approach helps with this as follows:
The last post has got me thinking more about the whole concept of daily builds. I mentioned in passing that the concept is not just applicable to software development but I did not explain the comment. I went out for a walk and started to think through how the concept could be applied to a systems integration project. The one I chose is quite topical for me at the moment, a Windows XP desktop refresh and desktop management project.
So first let’s look at some characteristics of this sort of project:
So let’s look at the daily, (or perhaps regular), build process and …
Joel, writes up an interesting example of NOT eating your own dog food, (ie using the IT solutions you are developing yourself), until it was almost too late:
Eating your own dog food is the quaint name that we in the computer industry give to the process of actually using your own product. I had forgotten how well it worked, until a month ago, I took home a build of CityDesk (thinking it was about 3 weeks from shipping) and tried to build a site with it.
Phew! There were a few bugs that literally made it impossible for me to proceed, so I had to fix those before I could even continue. All the testing we did, meticulously pulling down every menu and seeing if it worked right, didn’t uncover the showstoppers that made it impossible to do what the product was intended to allow. Trying to use the product, as a customer would, found these showstoppers in a minute.And not just those. As I worked, not even exercising the features, just quietly trying to build a simple site, I found 45 bugs on one Sunday afternoon. And I am a lazy man, I couldn’t have spent more …
Every year or so I hear Microsoft talking about Internet Search and implying that Google Search is nothing compared to what Microsoft has in store for us. Unfortunately what seems to be delivered is useful, but incremental. I heard about Wolfram Alpha today, and it the first time for years...
Sam asked me a couple of weeks ago to blog about my new Office. I’ve been resisting because I wanted to spend at least a month working in it before I felt ready to really comment on how it’s changed my life. Seems a bit of a bold statement “changed...