Networking
It turns out that the best networking venue for me are the SBA classes that I’m talking. Most people there have the same goal of selling to the government and all want to talk. I am going to hang out in SBA more going forward.
RFP
In one day I have two people independently telling me not to bid on the RFP that I’m looking at. Alright alright. But I’m still not giving up, I will just try to write it up as if I’m bidding as I know it takes 20 RFPs to win one.
Insider help
People say if you have no insider help. Submitting a proposal is a waste of time. Well, I am still going to try it. Because I know I won’t win until I submit the 100th proposal. Got to start some where.
Using Excel as your business development platform
I have been promoting this idea to our clients a lot. I have always know that there are cheap Excel conversion programs out there but they don’t do the job of creating buiness components. Well, recently I came across a company that have created the exact same concept 6 years ago. When I found it, I thought, great, that company must be doing really really good (As I believe 80% of all business applications are in some shape or form Excel based). To my suprise, they are actually smaller than my little tiny consulting business.
What does it mean? Does it mean my concept of using Excel to develop business component is wrong?
Upon further research, here is what I think. The concept is not wrong. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so many companies trying to create some kind of Excel conversion tools (I found more than 10). The reason none of these solutions become big, I think, is that they all trying to charge for the tool. In order to charge for usage, some of them end up creating locked binary code that the users cannot see and have to use their runtime engne to execute. Being an architect myself, I understand how much people fear about vendor locked-in. So my guess is that when IT sees that the solution is a potential vendor locked-in, they rather code it themselves.
Therefore, in my opinion, in order for this idea to go mainstream, the solution has to be open, portable, and free.
Hoop Jumping
So I finally understand what I’m doing. I am a full-time hoop jumping professional.
Huh? You may say.
Yes, my job is to jump hoops. When you start, they say, “Go register yourself in the system so that buyers will be able to find you”. As if the’buyers’ will actually use the system to search for vendors. Well, anyway, fine. We spend the time to register. Then they say, “Oh, you need to be a certified small business in order to compete”. Certify to be small? How are we not small enough. Anyway, we practice and practice and finally jump through that big hoop. “Well, you need to be certified in both Federal and the States”. “After that you go attend the outreach program which you will learn what to do next”. “And after that ….” Yes, Master. I am now well trained to stop asking questions.
When they say “Jump”, I ask, “How many?”. As in how many hoops do I need to jump through.
How to survive this downturn economy. Part 1.
This topic has been in my mind for a while now. I think I want to start a series and write down thoughts from different angles on how to due with this issue. First thought that came to mind.
DON’T DO ANYTHING DRASTIC.
That’s it. Just slow down and think again. That’s why we stopped our home buying plan until later this year. Don’t sell all your stocks, don’t move all your money to Aisa, don’t buy a lot of gold, etc. I’m not an investment expert, but experts will tell you that currently there is no safe heaven for investment. So just keep your portfolio balance.
Some friends are saying, “This is the perfect time to buy a house, prices are low, interest is low, and…..” Well, the key here is how much risk do I want to take and is the risk worth it. Sure, I don’t think the housing market is going to crash 50% downward, but I did a study last night, pulling about 30 properties that I would consider. I check their asking price against the 2007 tax assessed value. The result is that all but 2 are marketed over their 2007 assessed value. To me, that’s over priced because we all know that their 2008 value is suppose to go down. So why am I paying a premium? Now, on the other hand, if you have a reason to buy, like you need another bed room, your lease contract ends, then go ahead, this is perhaps the bottom. Just be sure to offer at most the 2007 assessed value and you should be fine. For me, I will wait till after Q2.
Sze
Hosted Application, Works for me.
I was telling one of my friends how our company is basically all online. Our accounting is hosted, payroll is hosted, email is hosted, documents are hosted, so even if all of our laptops all burnt down on the same day, our business goes on as usual (Mostly). So his first reaction is that I should be worried that our internal data is in someone else’s server. My answer to that is we don’t have super secrete, plus I really trust all these companies. The true answer is that I think by having everything hosted, it saves me money, a lot of money. If I need to store all my important data locally, I need to invest in good servers, good backup solutions, and perhaps having an IT department. Now the cost of having everything hosted, plus online backup for every machine we have, it way way less than hiring even just one person to manage all the data. It just works for me.
Oracle buying BEA, good for you.
Sure, I sure think it’s good for me. For us, every since we left the IBM camp almost 5 years ago, we were either doing Oracle/BEA, or Open-source. So Oracle and BEA becoming one company is just going to make things easier for us, actually making it more ‘IBM’ like.
While some people afraid that having one vendor controls the entire vertical is dangerous and defeats the purpose of using J2EE (or JavaEE, just can’t change old habits), I think that concept (or that selling point) is dead a while ago. True, a few years ago we were all saying that big corporations like to use J2EE because in J2EE they got to choose which web server, app server, database, etc. That turns out to be a sells strategy more than anything. Think about it, if an enterprise like GE invest millions in creating an infrastructure using one set of tools, would they care if they can ‘switch’ to another vendor in 2-3 years? No, the fact is even if the J2EE interoperability is true, no body will care once they committed. As a result, IBM’s stack of solution was selling very well, so is the Oracle/BEA combination.
As an architect, an integrator or a developer, this buyout is going to help you out. Going forward, you will have 4 options when building enterprise apps, Oracle, IBM, Open-source, or Microsoft. Less choices means quickly decision making. Good for you.
J-RAT in GUI Centric Testing
So the question is, can we apply J-RAT to GUI Centric Testing? By now we all agree that having all different functional area in the same room during testing increases productivity big time when testing process centric code. Can the same be done for GUI Centric testing? The problem is that during GUI testing, a lot of time is spend in ‘clicking’ through the app and finding bugs. The argument is that having Business Analysts and Developers in the same room doesn’t help this type of testing.
Well, of course that’s not true. J-RAT applies here and J-RAT still rocks.
See my pervious post about the 4 stages in System Test. J-RAT should be apply during the end of stage 1 onward.
What we are doing now is once the tester feels like their bug finding rate is slowing down (meaning they are getting into stage 2), they will start pairing up with developers. One tester and one developer becomes a bug fixing team. They start addressing issues together. There will be multiple ‘bug fixing units’ to address different part of the system.
What is Code-Review?
Found this in my email and fee like I should repost to my blog
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I’ve been an Architect for many years and code review is always
something that is difficult to do right. I have tried from formal code
review meetings to reviewing CVS check-ins daily, to my latest ‘pair
and monitor’ approach. Basically as many have pointed out, this is a
necessary process to ensure the right design, coding partice are in
place. Code reveiw is supposed to make the team more aware of what one
another is doing and improve code quality as a whole.
Anyway, I’m always for light process. And that is what right now I’m
heavily relying on ‘pair and montior’. By pairing developers, you have
a higher chance of having better documented code. We then have one of
two team members who’s sole responsibility is to monitor everything
that goes into CVS and flag anything that disagree with our
development handbook. So far this is a low impact approach that seem
to be working.
Sze Wong
Zerion Consulting
http://www.zerionconsulting.com
See my blog at: http://szewong.com
