Musings on IT and programming

This is an interesting trip to memory lane on 2002 era of software development in Mexico. In retrospective this particular environment molded my mind towards always finding ways to improve developer productivity. Memories from 2002

  Learn your everyday tools, they will free you up a lot of time and will give you an edge to become faster and better with time. For example Integrated Development Environments (IDE) have lots of quick keys for everyday use and most blogs reccomend memorizing the most used ones. I'll go on a different route for my suggestion with a little of backstory. At my first job near 2002 most developers were using very crude tools as the workstations available to us were not powerhouses and most of us were pretty new to the industry so we didn't know better.  The workflow mostly involved using a plain text editor on local Windows NT, upload source code to a Unix server, compile and possibly restart a server in order to load new code. As you can imagine this was brittle and there were multiple places for collissions either by overwriting somebody else's code, restarting in the middle of another developer test or plain corruption of compiled binaries. The first thing that we started t...

I've found some things that I simply refuse to work without. Public, Centralized requirements visible to all parties involved. I is ridiculous that we still don't have such repository of information available,  there is not a sane way to assign an identifier to the requirements. Then we go with the 'it is all on Microsoft Office documents' hell which are not kept up to date and which prompts my next entry. Version control. When we arrived here quite a lot of groups were working on windows shared folders... now it is a combination of tools but heck at least there is now version control. Controlled environments and infrastructure. Boy... did I tell you that we are using APIs and tools that are out of support? Continuous deployment. First time here, to assemble a deliverable artifact took 1-2 human days... when it should have been 20 minutes of machine time. And it took 1 week to install said artifact on a previously working environment. And some other things that ...

Projects exceed their estimates both in cost and time. Why? Bad estimation would be an initial thought. If you know your estimates will be off by a wide margin is it possible to minimize the range? Common practice dictates to get better estimates which means get the problem broken down to smaller measurable units, estimate each of them, aggregate results and add a magic number to the total estimate. What if instead of trying to get more accurate estimates we focused on getting more predictable work outcomes? What are the common causes of estimation failure: Difficult problem to solve / Too big problem to solve Problems in comunication Late detection of inconsistencies Underqualified staff Unknown. I'd wager that having underqualified staff is perhaps the most underestimated cause of projects going the way of the dodo. If a problem is too complicated why tackle it with 30 interns and just one senior developer? If it is not complicated but big enough why try to dumb it down a...

I'm not against of leaving a trace log of everything that happens on a project what I'm completely against is filling documents for the sake of filling documents. Some software houses that are on the CMMI trail insist that in order to keep or to re validate their current level they need all their artifacts in order but what is missing from that picture is that sometimes it becomes quite a time waster just filling a 5 page word document or an spreadsheet which is just not adequate for the task needed. Perhaps those artifacts cover required aspects at a high degree but they stop being usable after a while either by being hard to fill on a quick and easy manner by someone with required skills and knowledge or they completely miss the target audience of the artifact. Other possibility is that each artifact needs to be reworked every few days apart to get some kind of report or to get current project status and those tasks are currently done by a human instead of being automated. ...