Monday, October 4, 2010

Against Value Stream Mapping

Have a look at this post . Having studied hermeneutics in a past life, I thought this post quite interesting. Please, read it keeping in mind this approach as a contrast.

H.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Total Business Value

Dean Leffingwell has a great post on Prioritizing Features in  Scaling Software Agility. He argues that, since value delivering is a key economic driver, basing prioritization on Cost of Delay, thought not all that different from prior models, might be a very efficient way of working the backlog.

The article is very well researched and makes a compelling argument. So much so that I will make some proof of concept using the suggested method. We work wih stories and so far, we have "enhanced'' the business value of our stories by adding Hidden Business Values and R&D values. That way, we don't expect our PO to prioritized the stories with a heavy "back end" value (we call "hidden such as logging, parallelizing, etc) or corporate concerns (in our case, R&D because we have strong R&D programs in Quebec). By adding the Bv, HBv and R&Dv, we end up with a Total Business Value, which we use with the estimated Effort Value (Ev) for prioritizing stories.

I wanted to use a metric regarding risks. It seems to me that monitoring Cost of Delay metrics would also be a very efficient addition to the way we currently do things.

Hubert

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Silverlight 4: the Trusted choice

Mix was awsome. I had the chance to meet people from Microsoft: business people, developers and architects. I also had the chance to attend presentations, some of which blew my mind. Of course, there is Azure and .Net. Of course, there is Windows Phone and Windows 7. All that is fine and in line with what big companies like Microsoft can generate. Where this year’s crop stands out for me is with SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight 4. Now we are talking integrating LAN with Internet without losing sight of security and membership management. We’re talking User Experience without losing track of the fact that system administrator needs to be able to secure and manage the applications.

I’ll talk in another post on SharePoint. For now, it’s Silverlight 4 that is of interest to me. I don’t recall ever being excited about front end technologies. Up to now, front end was basically html, css, JavaScript and Flash, none of the first 2 having the same output across browsers (which is a pain) and the last two, being 2 variations of the same ECMAScript v.2, share the same idiosyncrasies that my head just cannot get around to appreciate. There is also JavaFX that I’ve considered. The Java developer in me says: yeah! Finally Java presentation layer that does not look like it was made in 1990. And had Microsoft impressed me less, I might have given it a better chance than just the few demos I’ve build.

Microsoft, as hinted above, showed me a better deal. Microsoft showed me an ecosystem where the designer/ergonomist can communicate with their client AND with the development team effectively; an ecosystem where security and manageability in taken into account; an ecosystem where best practices and good software engineering is valued and favored; an ecosystem where I can better serve my clients and be proud of my work. In short, Microsoft showed with its 2010 crop that it had figured out the Internet and, being Microsoft, turned it into a coherent, integrated system that clients will rush to buy.

One of the big new feature for Silverlight 4 is the fact that out of browser application in Silverlight will be able to run in trusted mode (i.e. have access to the network, the file system, etc.) if the end user chooses to grant this kind of permission to the application. For Ad4Stream and Vivé, two products developed by Nexio, this capability is huge. It opens doors and allows features we were hoping to offer our clients. While this trust feature is great, there is more to me in the 2010 proposition from Microsoft: there is the reason to trust Microsoft.



Monday, March 15, 2010

Azure: Do the maths!

Yesterday was the workshow day for Mix 10. Great day indeed! I attended the Silverlight boot camp in the morning and the “Building Cloud Services with Windows Azure Platform” sessions in the afternoon. I’ll post on Silverlight 4 later on but for now, what caught my attention was the presentation on Azure by Chris Auld from Intergen.

As technical director, I’m obviously concerned with technological progress and making sure we invest money only where the ROI justifies it. I’ve been using EC2 since its inception, mostly for making sure I can scale easily without incurring actual expenses on projects that might realize a profit. Basic equation: nothing to write mom about. But after attending Chris Auld’s presentation, I realize I did not get the Cloud right. Coding for high volume and high availability is not enough on the cloud. Partitioning and denormalizing for performance as one does in a non-cloud environment is not only not enough but will bite you big time when your next invoice comes.

Therefore, while the economic aspect of cloud do relate to scaling and managing upfront costs,  it also relates to managing the architecture such as to leverage the possibilities of cloud computing and working with the “pay as you go” nature of that beast. Cloud changes the way one thinks of scaling as well as the way one thinks of his data. For example, denormalization and duplications need to be considered at least as much as the parallel and asynchronous dimensions of the cloud application. Batch jobs, queues, blobs and CSS sprites are all tools one need to consider in his architecture when thinking of cloud. What you store and where you store it is also a consideration. For example, Binaries in SQL Server can make sense but it doesn’t in SQL Azure as we pay by the GB of space.

So what I take from yesterday’s workshop is that cloud is about maths: performance will not be an issue as long as you apply sound development methods. Success though, will come by figuring out the economic aspects of the beast and adjusting the application architecture accordingly. In the end, I think one could feel justify to think of Cloud as a game changer. It will not be so much a divide between those who are on the cloud and those who are not but between those who can leverage the cloud and those who get bitten by it.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

AOP on .Net

Erich Eichinger posted in december 2009 the first of a series of posts on AOP in ,Net. It is worth reading. Find the first here.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Silverlight vs Flex

I found a very well structured post on the comparison between Silverlight and Flex. It's almost a year old but remains relevant (to me at least): Find it here.