Please Note: I am NOT a social media guru, or any of the other meaningless titles the no-hopers give themselves on Twitter. I’m just a geek who can spot the obvious, especially when it’s pointed out.
At 07:53 PDT this morning the site was hit with an abnormal number of SSH connections. The script that runs after an SSH connection is accepted makes an RPC call to the backend to check for the existence of the repository so that we can display a nice error message if it is not present…
This is the a post from the GitHub team about a recent problem that affected many of their customers (of whom I am one).
As you can see from the comments attached to the above post, GitHub’s strategy of open communication pays dividends in providing
Positive customer feedback, even when there is a problem
Customer loyalty — everywhere on the web (just do a Google search) GitHub customers, including me, are happy to recommend them
Now obviously GitHub offer a great product as well, but the point I want to make is that social media is all about transparency and authenticity. It’s not rocket science but I shudder to think about the number of organisations wasting money and falling at this basic level.
Incidentally, GitHub’s message content is appropriate for their customer base — who are a right bunch of geeks. Yours should be appropriator as well.
The analysts and tools vendors have been talking about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for many years now and I think they have (of course) been somewhat self serving in their definitions. ALM seems to include whatever product category they have in the current price list and then promising their integrations’ would be managements answer to cost and governance issues. I hope to say more about integrations in the future, but I’d like to look at the scope of ALM for now.
If you ask vendors and consultants (including me) about ALM scope you’ll get answers such:
Requirements engineering
Software Configuration management
Dependency Tracking
Change control and work tracking
Test management
Software development tools and process
Software building and processes
Deployment
Process Governance
Depending on the vendor you might even get more traditional: Project and Program Management; Project and Application Portfolio Management/Analysis; and Service Management activities thrown in as well.
The usual sales pitch is that everything is managed via a common tooling and provides a common repository. The major, and often single, selling point of this approach is improved governance and business oversight of the SDLC.
However I think it’s useful and important to look at the definition of ALM from a customers perspective rather than as analysts or vendors.
It seems that a more pragmatic approach is to describe ALM as the methods, processes and tools that support the management of change for software systems — with particular, but not exclusive, emphasise on the SDLC. In this context it does not matter if we are using Agile or Waterfall approaches, we chose the best tools and processes for our particular situation. This of course implies that in eighteen months time we may need to re-tool.
Furthermore the methods tools and processes of project management (PM) are much more mature and there is no real need to include them in this evolving segment — they have their own. Obviously PM will have an influence and impact on ALM and we need to design our ALM approach to dovetail with it. I realise that most vendors will not agree with this.
I have come to the conclusion in order to ’sell’ ALM into the teams that will use it we need to ensure, front and centre, that ALM provides a ‘better/faster/more’ improvement in daily productivity. That should be the primary focus of what is delivered.
Governance, audit etc should be secondary attributes and natural site affects of using ALM (important though they are of course and usually the primary sales message).
So at a practical level we need to be able to provide teams and their specialists with the best tools they need to do their job. Additionally we need to provide a supporting layer of data flows, events and data repositories to
Assist teams with traceability
Provide the tracking and management visibility to effectively steer the ship
So the point of this post is to plead with vendors to stop selling a one size fits all tool suite with deep integrations and start enabling shallow API and effective integrations to allow a truly best of breed approach for customers software purchases. It’s a shame that ALF project is shuting down.
Forgetting that some individuals won’t network with you on a “personal” space like Facebook without knowing who you are, even with the proper introduction. If you’re looking to establish a professional relationship with someone, consider LinkedIn. Otherwise, consider building up a rapport with an individual before randomly adding them as your friend. Some people require face-to-face meetings before they invite you into their private lives. After all, Facebook was a tool that college students were using before it was open to the public, and some still use it as a purely personal and not a professional tool. LinkedIn is still seen as the more professional of the two.
I am one of these strange people, so please don’t try and initiate a business relationship with me on facebook. However I’d be delighted to consider a professional connection on LinkedIn
Open Source Industry Australia were kind enough to invite me to present last week on pre-sales demonstrations techniques. My main message was about delivering a Value based message — which is explained rather well by the following
It’s actually more than a year since I first blogged about social networking and the world of web 2.0. The web, and the practices that surround it, have moved on so I thought I update my thoughts as well. By a strange coincidence, just as I was starting this post I came across crazeegeekchick’s thoughts on how to use social networking — well worth reading before you carry on.
Generally social networking has been a huge consumer of my attention and time; and to be honest I don’t think the medium given me a very good return on my investment, except as a learning exercise.
LinkedIn has become an online list of business contacts. But of limited use because I can’t add my own notes to profiles. I have had some networking activity — but to be honest it has not made a huge amount of difference to my working life. I think now the number of people on the service is becoming so large anyway that it’s becoming less useful, but I hope I’m wrong
Updated 13/Nov/08 — You can now add notes to your LinkedIn contacts
Facebook has become pretty pointless. I don’t have time to become a zombie and most of the other stuff I do use is not terribly useful. e.g. I just became a facebook fan of Gordon Ramsay — but so what? Nothing happens much.
Blogging gives me a certain amount of satisfaction and I often refer back to my old blog posts for information. I also know that a few people have found help from ramblings so I count the blog as a success. However it’s rare for me to get over 100 readers a day so it’s not a huge success
Lifestream (twitter, jaiku,identi.ca). This is very distracting and I need to find some way to stop keep looking at my friendfeed stream. However on the positive side it does provide me some of the support that I miss being a solo worker. It’s probably a good idea to whittle down my ‘posse’ to as few as 10 people to reduce the noise; question is which 10 — I’m generally pretty choosy who I “friend”. Problogger has a site introducing Twitter, and by extension most of the other micro blogging site, and Silkcharm also posted some suggestions
Geo Location (e.g. brightkite, dopplr). I am just so over that. In Australia it’s hard to use anyway because we have limited network coverage and I don’t have an iPhone. I keep thinking they a potentially huge personal security issue as well
I have accounts on delicious and flickr which I find useful. Delicious in particular has proved very useful professionally and personally.
As I mentioned earlier the major upside is that I now think know a lot more than the general population about this stuff — perhaps I can become a media pundit? Easier than doing real work, talking of which…
If you cannot see E2 helping your organisation directly with those basic things then why bother?
Just in case everyone things I’m a grumpy old fart all the time, I thought I follow up on my dismissive put down of the all the hoopla around Enterprise 2.0 by talking about customers in this “brave new world” of Enterprise and Web 2.0.
Customers are the reason we get out of bed in the morning and they kindly pay our bills for us — so we’d better keep them happy! However, even through we may deal with them directly every day, it can be hard to understand what they want or when they are unhappy. Even worse, when they do communicate problems we often label them awkward and unreasonable.
Web 2.0 can help us overcome some of these problems:
Providing a varity of channels to make it easier for customers to communicate
Separating the consumer and supplier of the message (in time) so that customers and vendors can view the messages without letting emotional baggage get in the way
A larger volume of feedback should help organisations spot genuine problems and trends
In addition forums and blogs give organisations an new opportunity to engage customers with what they do and the future direction — however such new channels of open communication do not sit well with many enterprise cultures, so be prepared for some painful learning…
A increasingly amount of words, and now money, is being expended on Enterprise 2.0 (E2)
E2 is an extension of some of the ideas from Web 2.0 (W2)— the concept of a network of connected people making a self sustaining community that generates ideas, information and value. In addition the ever present threat of Gen Y and Gen C employees unable to contribute to the business except in a connected web of goodness that provides inclusion, exploits the power of the group, … and all the other nice warm fuzzy words
However at the end of the day organisations need to survive by fulfilling customers needs and wants effectively. It’s often hard to see how the totally immersive nature of the W2 experience translates into value for E2.
Let’s look on the positive side first:
An E2 enabled organisation may be able to attract and retain better quality individuals in the gen Y workforce
E2 may provide better mechanisms for a team generating new ideas and hence business improvement
Team work may become faster and more effective because of improved communication
However reality could be a little different:
All that high quality talent spends all day communicating in a E2 connected world they actually don’t get much work done. Capable people are only as valuable as their deliverables and at some point rubber has to hit the road, so can they please stop twittering and do some work?
Everyone, both as individuals and as a team, can spend so much time navel gazing that no improvement of any value can be implemented.
Communication paralysis can stop decisions being made. Everyone is so busy communicating it becomes unclear what needs to be done and no one is able to cut through the chaff. It’s a great way of avoiding responsibility.
In certain organisations the tools of W2 may present a significant security risk.
So what is the bottom line on E2? I suspect it’s probably just a big waste of time… Remember that business value comes from three things:
Doing it better and faster
Managing the business more effectively
Saving costs
If you cannot see E2 helping your organisation directly with those basic things then why bother?
The company [Microsoft] wants to lure those developers back. Its open source play is aimed squarely at them, and at independent software vendors (ISV). They mean potential sales, and Microsoft has embraced the open source development model in order to tempt them away from the open source platform and over to the Windows platform.
A fairly insightful article on why MS turned up at PDX for OSCON last month. Given the huge market developers could have for any applications they develop using the MS ‘Open Source’ model this has to something that is taken seriously. The pleasing thing is that MS now sees OSS as such a threat — however now that the communities have Redmond’s attention it is going to be a tough battle for mind share.
Now that there is an AppStore with applications in iTunes, why wouldn’t Apple move next to distribute all applications through iTunes
A very cogent comment from ionix5891 on /. warning us no to sleep walk into the arms of another monopoly power. As I said before, Steve Jobs can be a very scary guy!
Personally, now that Ubuntu 8.04 (or Spiny Norman as I call it) is so polished I’m not feeling such an urgent need to rush back into the arms of Cupertino. Mr Shuttleworth may have made life a lot less exciting, but now it all ‘just works’. Well, except for some proprietary media formats still.
Having said that, the family is still happy plugging away on the iMac (except when my son wants to run games)
Fortune Magazine reports on Bill Gate’s supposed four core beliefs that Microsoft lives by, you can read them at the above link. However, as an outsider, I think there may be a little self delusion going on.
“Think of software as a utopian tool” — unfortunately it’s very hard to understand what this rule means in terms of the companies behaviour and sounds a lot like hand waving. Are MS telling themselves they need to keep looking for new markets? How does an employee use this rule to guide what they do?
“Let the engineers rule” — given some of the buggy software has been shipped all too frequently by the Redmond giant it often feels to me that it’s the accountants and product managers who actually make the decisions with little regard to the reality the engineers are facing. If that is not the case then the suggestion would be that the engineers more focused on the value of their share options they should be, hence software going out the door before it’s ready.
“Institutionalize paranoia” — Given the pressure that MS has faced over the last few years from legislators, the Internet, Apple and Open Source software then this has to be a clarion call for survival, as it should be in any commercial organisation. File this under “Motherhood and Apple Pie”
“Invest for the long term” — makes good sense for any organsation that can afford it, but Sharepoint is still a piece of crap even after all that long term investment. Being cash rich helps of course, but the investment needs to be nimble; long term; and contantly reviewed. Does Microsoft meet those objectives?
Elsewhere Fortune reports that MS will ’soon’ be starting a campaign to fight against the highly successful Apple Mac ads. However the Apple ads have been running for two years now — this is hardly the ‘agile’ business response of an alert, “paranoid’, organisation. Thirty years ago I suggested the fall of IBM and the idea was considered risible; well I believe, and have for some time, that the same thing is happening again. Just wait a little…
[Updated July 2008 after internal Oracle articles implied this was a less than professional piece. Many thanks]
I often enjoy watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and I’ve wondered if his approach could be used to illustrate common problems with software development.
It doesn’t matter how good a consultant you are or the advice you give — the customer is always free to ignore you
I was catching up with an school friend over Skype last night and discussed her work on the psychology of workplace recruitment and how effective personality tests are in the recruitment process. I’ve never been happy with such tests for a variety of reasons:
The state of the art is not sufficiently advanced to understand the complexities of the human personality
The testing I am familiar with attempts to reduce what complexity it can measure to a few simple axis for comprehension by an untrained recruiter (i.e. people like me)
There seems to be no published consensus on the quality of testing
The tests I have seen are culturally biased as they demand a good understating of the nuance of English language. In the last set of interviews I did I interviewed over 15 candidates, only two of whom had English as a first language
The tests are expensive to purchase and administer
So in my next post I’ll look at what I do instead of personality testing to try and create some rigour in my recruitment process.
Microsoft will covenant not to sue open source developers for development and non-commercial distribution of implementations of these Open Protocols.
FLOSS developers and users used to be communists in the eyes of the Redmond giant, but now we are all one big happy family.
I notice that the list of products to which these principles apply it fairly limited (“Windows Vista including the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007″)
Let’s also see what ‘non-commercial distribution’ means…
Updated 25/Feb/08 — Groklaw is not impressed either.
The wave of early adopter interest is moving – to video … perhaps
I hate to sound like a Grumpy Old Fart, but how about the early adopter interest moved back to something that is a little more traditional and productive? This is starting to feel like another nasty Web bubble about to burst and we’ll all end up with egg on our faces (again). Too much money being thrown at applications with no solid business plan/model
An presentation from Bob Worrall, CIO at Sun, on the the future of the IT dept predicts that significant in house application development and hosting is finished as we all integrate Software as a Service (Saas) offerings from various 3rd party vendors.
However, whilst we are seeing traction in this area, I have yet to see any significant architectural solution to handling the security and integrity of corporate and private data. Until that happens I can see that any significant adoption of SaaS across large enterprises will be a train wreck.
Wait for the first scandals as organisations and individuals lost control of their data.
…describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard-to-find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes
I’m probabtly really behnd the times here compared to all you network savvy marketeers, but I was really enlightened by this Wikipedia article explaining one of the big web buzz phrases of the last few years. Whilst I had kinda guessed what it meant it was nice to have my understanding refined and thinking prodded in a new direction.
It’s just a pity that a lot of these e-tailers have not yet discovered the business opportunities outside the US (we have no NetFlix in Austrailia, many e-bay vendors will not ship out of US, etc etc). I have enjoyed using Amazon for books I could not get locally though.
Rogue Wave® HydraAgent, part of the Rogue Wave® Hydra Suite, is uniquely designed to address your performance challenges in order to facilitate business growth, decreased time to market, and improved customer experience.
For undersandable reasons todays product vendors are very concerned to present a business justification for what they sell rather than flogging “toys for the boys”.
However I think this example takes it too far — I couldn’t actually work out what this vendor was offering. Very tempting to click ‘next’ on the browser? I’m guessing that marketing droid did Commerce rather than IT…
(This was the total extend of vendor’s information on the Sun web page)
the rise of web apps that are flexible, platform-neutral and accessible from anywhere I have a net connection has made my life almost pain-free
Darren Waters of the BBC explains why Web OS is his killer technology for 2008. He gives a brief personnel and lucid explanation of why he thinks they are important. Whilst the idea is not new I thought it was a nice outline of what it’s about from a user perspective.
