ITGumbo: spicing IT up

Hello to the developers that also implement system integration,

Hello to all my faithful readers,

I guess you all know what maintainability means.

In my words, this is the level of effort that you spend to keep your application running despite the relentless effort from your users to fail it.

But this is not a theoretical idea, because I met Mr. Maintainability himself.

He is a man. After you finish reading you will understand why it cannot be a woman.
He has a bachelor degree in computer science and master degree in over-innovation.
His colleagues would tell you that he is kind of a genius.
Every time they have a problem he has an original solution.
When he designs the solution, everything is possible.
He is never satisfied with industry standards or popular technologies.
There is always another framework to invent or an engine to design.
The average developer would have trouble to understand the solution.
Mr. Maintainability must work closely with the development teams to insure the successful finish of development. Naturally, there are always some bugs found during the testing phase.

The first release of the product is also the signal for Mr. Maintainability to move to the next challenge, leaving the poor developer to maintain what he complicated in a most imaginative manner.

So now, how would you increase or improve maintainability?

At your service,

Noam

Hello to my readers,

You all know what TCO is and if you don't, quickly go and read about. Because I have a surprise for you.

Yesterday, I met with the TCO. It was a one hour meeting, but I did manage to characterize for myself.

It is a man, in my case he was European. He has a degree in over-engineering from a well known establishment.

From what he told me, he had many years of experience in high-end applications, mainly in the maintenance of infrastructure.

He spoke gently about the importance of responsibility, accountability and management.

When I explained my wishes, he talked about good process, control, security and procedure.

He did not know much about WEB 2.0, SaaS, Agile and other fancy words in the software world.

In other words, he is a plumber of bytes, and we all need a plumber.

By the way, he earns more than all the memory and disk you could think of for your application.

Now, how to reduce the TCO?

Hope you sleep well at night.

Yours truly,

Noam

Hello to the brave developers,

So, did you wait long? I hope the anticipation was not too hard.

Following my last post I would like to fulfill my promise.

Last time I stopped the flow of writing with the idea of looking for somebody in the organization that is not the application user.

Also, try to find what in the application, would interest this somebody or even better, assist them to do their work.

I will jump directly to a real life example.

Imagine yourself as a truck driver. You work in an independent logistics firm and sometimes you deliver goods for some company's warehouse.
Let's call it SCW. Now, imagine a hot day and you arrive with your truck to SCW. At the gate, the gatekeeper checks your papers and tells you that this delivery is totally unexpected and you cannot unload or even get in because of new security regulations.

Now what? You could park your truck, try to walk into SCW and raise hell until they found out what went wrong.
Another alternative for the less aggressive would be to call your office and they will try to get hold of the purchasing guy or the SCW manager and sort it out.
Both alternative will take a lot of time and the day is hot.

Now back to your reality as a developer. What would the truck driver need out of your application? It is simple, the person that can help and solve the problem.
How would he get it? simple, he got a paper with a Delivery number, this paper was issued from the application. Someone created it, probably it has a reference to a Purchase order or Sales order. There must be some contacts there.

If you, the developer, could expose this information to the driver via extranet, that would be great and by doing one phone call the problem is solved.

Now the only task is, how to expose this data. I think you already know how. After all, you developed the application.

One last request from my side: You are welcome to add your comments and ideas in the comments section.

See you next time,

Noam

Hello all,

Most enterprise applications, ERP, CRM and others are charged by the number of users.

So, the main challenge of these software vendors is how to increase the number of users.

Even in the cases that the customer is charged by usage, the purpose is to increase the number of transactions that users are doing.

There are traditionally two ways:

1. Add more functionality that will appeal to more users
2. Wait until the customer organization will grow and increase the number of users.

I would guess that the latter is realistic but requires too much endurance.

So, what is the functionality to add? again there are two alternatives:

1. Add to the application modules that will cover new areas of business
2. Offer new services on top of the existing data and functionality

Personally, I would prefer the latter. This alternative is requires less effort and more creative thinking.

I have one idea that I will share in another posts. But in the meanwhile, I would start with the following direction:

How many employees in an organizations are also users of ERP, CRM etc? I would guess that no more than 50% in any given organization for any given application.

It could be that most employees are using some application, but you, my dear, are concerned only with one application. Your own!!.

So the direction is to find who are the employees that are not using your application and what would they need out of it. Simple daa!!!

See you in the next post,

Noam

Hello,

Today I would like to discuss the modeling trend.

You all heard about modeling that will replace coding. Or maybe you didn't?

So, quick explanation. Modeling creates metadata. The metadata is interpreted by some framework or engine. The framework or engine run something according to the metadata thus, according to the modeling.

Nice, no coding for the one who model, very sophisticated coding for the one who writes the engine.

But is it true, is this really the next step in world of software development?

First, what does it mean to model?

You start with a modeling environment, hopefully, a graphic one. You start to draw some model. After the easy graphic phase of drawing some shapes and name them, you start with the details.

The details are never easy. You think about the relationship between the shapes you just draw, you think about the process that these shapes are part of.

Congratulations, you are programming!!!

It is not code, it is partially graphical, but it is coding in a new language.

So, what would you prefer?

Coding or Modeling?

Please leave your answer in the comments below.

Thanks,

Noam

Just before farewell: UI design is a different discussion.

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