Real Men Don't Sleep

There’s a new MSDN show called Striking Pixels that is a “goofy” look at Microsoft’s designer offerings such as Silverlight. There was one excerpt that just cracked me up. Its shown below. The two hosts are playing two sets of characters. The first set of characters are the customers who have a very dodgy set of accents (and dodgy moustaches). The second set of characters are the designers that are providing design services to the customers. I found it so funny because earlier in the week I had a similar experience. A business partner sent over a rough set of functionality requirements for a product extension. It was only on my second pass at reading the documents that I realized the expectation was to have something ready by October 1^st which was just 6 working days away at the time. So I totally get the exasperation and stunned silence shown by the designer characters in the following excerpt:

 

 

Now often as developers we can pull out all stops and do some amazing things in a short time. The problem is that this makes a rod for your own back. In other words, if the client or business partner doesn’t understand the intricacies and details of what goes on to achieve the results, their expectations are then set higher than is realistic. Bottom line: we are going to do whatever we can to meet the business needs of the business partner for their deadlines, but… I’m going to need to successfully communicate the compromises and development follow up that will be needed in the following month.

 

Inside the Agility Cube Excerpt

I was listening to the Javapolis Inside the Agility Cube session and snorted at the following excerpt:

I know of a project that went into a kind of death march chaos and all kinds of other things. The project that I guess you could have.. probably take twenty to twenty five people to develop. At the last count there was something like seventy people involved. So.. slightly off the objective there. And they had originally instituted a two week cycle. And what happened.. eventually the management decided to shut down the agile process pump and one of the reasons was they said they didn’t like hearing bad news every two weeks.

I have a four year old boy who is just learning the trick of putting his fingers in his ears and saying I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you. He hasn’t learned it too well but that is very much what went on at this company. “I don’t want to hear your feedback. Your feedback is not good. I thought that you guys said you would do Agile development and give us this feedback that it was always going to be good news”. No news is good news. This is not what it is about. The whole point of an agile process. The whole point of an iterative and incremental – or in their case decremental – development is you fail fast. If you’re going to get it wrong you may as well find out sooner rather than later. And you have to be prepared for that.

Its tough working with a business partner or customer that expects to hear “good news” all the time. Its just not workable. To guarantee “good news” all the time, the performance bar needs to be set really low – and that’s not in anyone’s best interest.

MacroView Excel Addin V1.3.0

We’ve released V1.3.0 of the MacroView Excel Add-in software product just this week. Its a package that we’ve developed for Sentient Computing who are one of our business partners. Sentient sell the software as part of their suite of MacroView SCADA products. It allows an end user to get access to both current historical information from their manufacturing, process control or other such industrial plant from within the Excel spreadsheet environment. Being “head-down bum-up” (i.e. really busy) most of the time developing software I don’t talk about our successes or what we can do for business partners enough. Its something thats on the cards to rectify in the coming months.

Back to the Excel addin release. The updated documentation can be found over here. The main feature addition in this release is native support for the Excel 2007 ribbon. Check it out below. I personally find the ribbon approach in the Office 2007 product range to be a huge improvement for the most part. It is frustrating occasionally when a feature you remember from Office V-Previous just “can’t be found” in the ribbon UI. Fortunately the command needs for the MacroView ribbon tab are manageable in number and fit easily within a single ribbon tab:

I particularly like the Value and Table buttons. By default, mouse clicks on these will initiate the most common Value and Table data query respectively (an entity value and a historical trend data table). Its only if the advanced query types are needed does the user need to click on the drop down arrow and select from all the different query types available for that category:

The value queries allow you to associate a MacroView value with a cell and then update the value from the “real world” on demand or in a continuous update mode. You can use these live values in other calculations or as inputs to a graphic visualization such as a pie chart:

The product user can also access MacroView historical data and similarly perform calculations and display charts using that data. Sentient sell the Excel addin as part of the product range. If your business is interested in developing a software product that extends any of the Microsoft Office software then contact me to discuss the possibilities. Similarly if your business would benefit from automating part of your workflow with custom software its worth us talking.