Tagged: Productivity

My Personal Work Style

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,...

Is Personal Knowledge Management Becoming Popular Again?

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...

Maximising Impact, Minimising Hours

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,...

Maximum Productivity

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...

My Working Life, Insights and Tips

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...

More Eating Your Own Dog Food And Daily Builds

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:

  1. First it’s pretty key on all projects to put the basic platform elements in place first. These are the foundation elements upon which everything is built; they need to be the most reliable and therefore tested for the longest period.  They are also needed normally before any realistic dogfood environment can be created.  In my desktop example this basic building block would be a stable system image, with a core set of applications.

  2. From that point onwards you are into the features management game.  Using …

Daily Builds Applied To Systems Integration Projects.

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:

 

  1. A standard system image that needs to be deployed tens of thousands of times to many different types of hardware

  2. The need to deploy thousands of applications on top of this standard system image, and to deploy these applications hundreds or thousands of times

  3. The need to access seamlessly thousands of file, print, authentication, management and application servers

  4. An environment that tens of thousands of users will use for perhaps 2-3 hours a day on average, this means hundreds of millions of pounds of deliverables depend on its usability and reliability

 

So let’s look at the daily, (or perhaps regular), build process and …

Eating Your Own Dog Food.

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 …

The future of search on the web

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...

My new home office

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...