Writing more effective emails in your company.

I work at a very email-centric environment and worked under the best CTO I’ve ever had the pleasure to work under. One of his emails he sent out is a great template to follow when writing emails. I wanted to share the email template.

1. Format email responses that consistently repeat the following:

• What is the problem?
• What are the steps that will be taken to identify the fix?
• Who owns driving those steps?
• When will those steps be taken and results published?

2. The above email should be sent daily until the issue is resolved

• A day in SRS time is a week for another company

The second item is clarity of communication.  When we are sending an email that contains release notes, UAT notes/plans, crisis management steps (i.e. what was mentioned above), etc. we need to make sure we are explaining things in layman terms.  Describe the situation like you would to a family member who doesn’t work at the company.  Someone you care about.  This may sound silly, but it’s not.  Terms engineering uses are not universal and are thus a foreign language to others in the company.  Please communicate briefly, but clearly using words that are more likely to appear in Webster’s dictionary than in the wiki.

Reengineering Engineering with a new SDLC, with influences from Salesforce.com and Facebook

Our company has made amazing progress over several years and we create some world class products and we had a SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) that matched.

• We were in a niche market owning about 95% and we were doing excellent.
• We acquired three other companies and placed them under an umbrella corporation.
• We were generating millions in profits after operating expenses.
• For the past five to six years we’ve had a twenty percent profit every year.
• We are the true company that will actual go public. Not just talk about it. You see we’ve been keeping our closet clean and our books show that for the past six years we have profits, a clean SDLC, and a top notch workforce, we continually get on the Inc. 5000 as top 5 fastest growing software company.
• We’ve built up a great culture here. People we hire know how to work hard and we know how to reward that work.

However as the term goes “who moved my cheese” things change. We turned around and had a recession in the automobile industry so we had to adjust. We then had a dozen competitors who were taking our business away from us.

Rant!

We offered a “Premium” package, this means we offered our customers everything. Put our products in your shop. Follow our processes and you WILL make more revenue which pays off our cost and puts a s**t amount more money into your pocket. Just because somebody builds something that looks like clone at a 3rd of the cost, does not mean it equals our product!!. As they soon found out and came back to us. But still! where’s the faith!.

Anyway we got a new presidente that recognized this and ALA Carted our product. Which I think was genius, we now offer completive rates with many behind the covers that our competitors just can’t match.

Reengineering:

Okay so now we want to show these competitors who their dealing with. Lets. We need a new SDLC for the new strategy.  It will be painful and tough to communicate to our offshore teams. A quick look at our old SDLC yielded something like this:

• Milestone I (Define Features)
• Milestone II (Specifications)
• Milestone III (Developer Code Complete)
• Milestone IV (Quality Assurance Complete)
• Milestone V ( User Acceptance Testing)
• General Release

This was built with a vertically integrated, monolithic technology for our onsite client/server architecture (distributed). It served us well and when functionality and reliability were being invented to address the needs of our customers.

Cons of old SDLC:

• It took QA as much time as it took the developer creating the code. Two weeks for a feature, Two weeks for QA.
• There is or can be a lot of finger pointing between QA and Development.
• Development might just code something and throw it over the wall, thus developers were not taking as much ownership over not writing bugs VS allowing somebody to find bugs and then building the cushion for them to fix the bug. This still held up the release date.
• Technical Debt would bite us sometimes because of the all too quick agile design to produce features.
• Million of other projects to add to the existing core products to address other roles in the service departments. But not enough developers as well as cost of training new development into the domain.
• Inaccurate early estimates resulted in missed features and their complete dates.
• Teams compressing their testing schedules to meet the demands of the hard feature date.
• Lack of visibility at all stages of the release.
• Late feedback on features at the end of the release cycle.
• Long and unpredictable release schedules.
• Gradual productivity decline as the team grew.

Research:

Here is some great resources that helps put things in perspective.

1. http://tcrn.ch/qEp6i1
2. http://bit.ly/rntqq6

NOTE: I just want to say in video 2. I love how Eric Schmidt started talking about US workforce and how he believes what America needs to accomplish to help bring it back into the top workforce of the world. I think it starts around 0:45:00. It’s very interesting.

New SDLC:

Outcome of our Company Engineering Standards Meeting.

• Foster Open Communication and over communicate.
• Empower teams.
• Continuous iteration.
• Delivering customer value early (More agile type processes in the form of weekly releases).

So what did we do. We looked at how Facebook operates and focus our SDLC towards their structure. Yes we know we are not Facebook. which is why we don’t adopt everything across the board. But obviously they have some good ideas.

• We eliminated quality assurance and took all those resources with their existing domain knowledge and put it back into the development organization.
• This means quality is now the responsibility of all developers.
• We determine to build a software architecture to be more in line with Salesforce.com and their service offerings.
• The development organization will adopt test driven development that allows for the discovery and resolution of bugs at the top of the project effort instead of at the end. “lean manufacturing” or lean software development.
• The development team has ownership over the features, this means they are responsible for seeing their feature promoted to production in a controlled manner.

Each team is now responsible for their own:

• Browser/OS Test Matrix.
• Repository Updates.
• End-to-End Testing.
• Environment Update Testing.
• Crash Emails.
• IT updates.
• Load and Performance Tests.
• Release Version Tracking.
• Server Setup.
• TSG (Trouble Shooting Guide) Documentation.
• User Acceptance Testing, in combination with other teams.

What we learned:

It has now been a 12 months since we’ve completely revamped our engineering SDLC so what have we learned, what’s the the post mortem?

• We are now a loosely coupled organization (Robust).
• We built a CI server that allows every team to use Ant and PowerShell to build their own CI that works for them.
• Every team now implements acceptance tests driven by the ScrumMaster/PM.
• Every team now has all their Ant/Powershell scripts custom to their unique needs and running on every check.
• Each team has dropped off branches and we focus on a single main branch.
• New teams/projects formed pick the new technology. So although we are primarily a Microsoft workshop. We have Java, Rails, Android, I O/S teams. (After approval. of course.)
• Teams have adopted testing as part of their development processes
• Reduced the number of processes.
• Strengthen those processes that remain so they now have more attention.
• Teams that spent a lot of time manually testing their products, now focus that time allocation towards building a effective acceptance test or integration test when applicable.
• Don’t write up bugs caught during the development life cycle. that just slows you down. Only create the bugs after a project has passed all unit and acceptance tests when a bug is found.
• Teams now focus on team throughput rather than individual productivity.
• Simple agile processes with common vocabulary.
• Prioritized work for every team.
• More defined organization roles (ScrumMaster, Product Owner…).
• Daily metric visibility into each team.
• Weekly Scrum of Scrums that provides visibility to all teams at a higher level.
• Reduction of bugs.
• Potentially release-able products every 30 days.
• Mandatory design meetings, code reviews. Any change no matter what is reviewed by at least one person
• Our code is beginning to look like one single developer wrote everything, not just a multitudes of everybody.

What we would do next time:

• Involve more individual contributors earlier.
• Train PM earlier.
• Work on automation earlier.
• Communicate delayed deadlines to executives due to the reengineering.
• Be more clear to workforce what the new SDLC rules are and ensure the dev managers enforce them more.
• Encourage more peer to peer coaching.
• Create a better dedicated, fully empowered cross functional rollout team.
• Managers need to understand to be patient and expect mistakes.

I hope this information enlightens you as it has me through this process. Much thanks to my old CTO Marcus Daleyand VP of Software Architecting Nate Zobrist. Marcus is a CTO that can keep at least 600 people all on their toes and pushing them all to be better and everybody should thank him for making them better at their career. Nate is a forward thinker and just has a much higher IQ then most anybody I’ve ever met.

Hiring Fresh Engineers VS Seasoned Engineers.

Me and friend at my company were having a discussion on this topic, I thought I would share.

Company Problem:

In a leadership position you want to attempt to get a talented, preferably super star team.  To assemble this team, every manager is faced with which pool of developer he/she wants to focus efforts in.

Seems the current trend with some larger companies like Google and Facebook is to hire, isolate from the workforce on a boot camp project for a few months (so employees don’t miss Josh, who was a great guy, but gone in a few months.) and then determine termination or placement into the engineering ladder. So who best to focus efforts on attempting to recruit?

His view as I understand it:

His thoughts was to pick only from the Fresh Engineers pool. Because most likely you’ll get the root skillset that drives the best engineers. Passion. With passion you can provide them a great training ground, and with the different degrees of mentoring and reviews, which can be a big help for them in the first couple of years. As a bonus, they can join at a cheaper salary.

You are less likely to find a Seasoned Engineers who has that same level of passion that’s wanted to make a good employee.

Thus, his choice, hire from fresh engineers, put them in boot camp, determine placement.

My view on this matter:

I think a Fresh Engineer should try to find a company that will truly grow him/her and fill in the gaps of education or self taught programming with experience to build a well rounded and solid engineer. However some students end up at a company and never learned the modern tools they are using. Do you really think that he/she is going to show you what a super-star they are in a few months? I don’t believe so. Most companies must hire a developer coming out of school and pay them their salary for at least a year before their return on investment starts coming back to them. But during this time the criteria of what’s considered a “super star” is set. Each company. I would even say each manager, has a different set of pre-defined criteria’s on what they consider a excellent talent.

for Seasoned Engineers. This is the engineer that you can put on the un-sexy projects, the projects that are a pretty thankless task and there isn’t really any rewards or spotlight, but are very necessary. These engineers are seasoned enough to get the job done and to not put up a big fight about going to these projects. Of course they also want the sexy projects as well, which helps them enjoy their work too. It’s tough to keep a good programmer as many many other companies will snatch up good talent.

My Conclusion

So the way I see it is that you need a mixed team of both. Fresh and Seasoned Engineers. Passion and Dedication to getting the job done. It won’t take long before the team will close the technological knowledge gap and all your engineers are within the same range skillset focused towards the overall team project outputs.

There is so many more differences I can get into between the two types of developers. But it’s not for this article.

Be nice to your fellow developer in a shared environment.

Hey,

Several times we’ve found the need to hook a debugger from Visual Studio into the deployed central server dll code, to see what’s going on.
However on our shared environment we have several instances of IIS (W3WP.exe) for each instance running. So which one is the one we are supposed to hook into.  If you hook into all the processes you might get a break point from somebody else testing at the same time. So here’s a little trick to find your correct IIS process running to hook your debugger into.

From IIS 7.0 you need you to run IIS Command Tool ( appcmd ).
• Start > Run > Cmd
• Go To Windows > System32 > Inetsrv
• Run “appcmd list wp”

Copy of your dll in the GAC

Search for text in Stored Procedure

I’m tried of searching for this all the time. So here is where I’m storing it. ^_^

SELECT ROUTINE_SCHEMA, ROUTINE_NAME, ROUTINE_DEFINITION
    FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES
    WHERE ROUTINE_DEFINITION LIKE '%text%'
    AND ROUTINE_TYPE='PROCEDURE'
    ORDER BY ROUTINE_SCHEMA, ROUTINE_NAME

Just replace text with whatever you are looking for. But this does not search for functions or such.

Software Construction

1.1 What is Software Construction?

Many books, articles will make analogies that software construction is a lot like building development. They port over concepts from building development into the software construction world. Many points are accurate, but some are not. The root problem that everybody should agree to is that computer software can be a complicated process.

To me programming is human thought codified and crystallized. Today's software metaphor normally relate software to buildings. There are others beside this metaphor, programming to math, programming as a model, or programming as rule-following. Given that my premise of programming is just raw human thought, then it stands to reason that some people are more apt towards this field then others are. That doesn't mean we can't train our brains or though process to be better focused towards this field. But it also means that there are those out there with slight advantages as a "master programmer." however the software industry does not only need "master programmers" just because you are a great problem solver does not mean you are somebody that can stand back and look at the larger picture. So in our field you also need the "Architect." Metaphors, design patterns and coding styles cannot replace actual intelligence, but they do help us to communicate to each other what it is we are trying to do. This is what Software Construction is about.

1.2 Why is Software Construction Important?

In our current market of today, construction is a major part of the Software Development Life Cycle. (SDLC), this is the life cycle of a software project with formalized stages for a start to finish solution. In the business world, it is a major part of their process.

Each software project you begin, you must realized there are four factors that effect that project;

• Time
• Resources
• Quality
• Features

At any given moment, you as the developer, own one of those four items. The other two are controlled by external sources. For example, say you have to complete this project in three months. You have customers flying in to train, or trainers flying out to train on your new feature/product. This is a hard date (meaning it can't be moved). Also the quality of the product must work as a finished product with very high quality requirements. In this situation you should be able to control how many resources it takes to get to this milestone.

• For every project you work on you must pay the price of time. Either you pay for that time up front with some good construction design. Making your application scalable or flexible . Then when you do need to be handle changing something, because you designed your application with flexibility, you can easily "hook" into the existing code "interject" some new behavior at the right processing stage, debug, test and ship over to QA. (because we all know you don't just ship out to the customer without QA approval. That is what we call a "Hope Install.", and your customer should not be your first and last QA).

• Most business stakeholders want you to finish the project faster and meet the requirements. Get it done and quickly. These people do not know that choice leads to greater bug time, as the developer will have to either refactor a lot of code to fit in the new changes. Let me put it to you another way business people. You tell me which is cheaper. When would you like to choose to move a elevator shaft if it ends up not being in the proper position. Would you choose to do this on paper while designing, or once it's completed. If you choose to do so once it's completed, it will be very expensive.

However there is a pitfall here. Anybody can sit down with a architect and produce a "specification" that, in truth does not adequately describe what the customer wants or what the requirements needs. This fact may not be apparent until after the customer sees the first demo of the software. Identifying these features and planning on them moving will money and time for all involved.

• Many software projects fail because of weak specifications, not all of them, but enough to say.. Don't make weak specifications.
• Many formally trained developers might over engineer and take way too much time for specifications that are not accurate. So don’t over engineer, just for the sake of making documentation.

My recommendation to you is, take some time to focus on the most critical 20% of your project core that needs to be worked out (thoughts onto paper) and then proceed with the project. This is a good general rule, but depending on the size of the project, may or may not be necessary. Large projects need more documentation, projects with more then three developers need more documentation to coordinate API's with each other. Small projects or one developer don’t need as much. It's a weighted scale and you must identify what is necessary to get the job done.

1.3 Determine the Kind of Software or Industry requirements you are working on.

Ask yourself what category does this project fit into?

• Business Systems
  • Type of Projects: Internal, Intranet
  • Type of Work: As-needed testing and QA Planning, informal requirements, Design and coding are combined, Developers test their own code and little or no testing by separate test group, somewhat informal deployment procedure.

• Core Systems
  • Type of Projects: Embedded Software, Packaged Software, Tools, Web Services
  • Type of Work: Staged delivery, up front planning, basic test planning, semiformal requirements, architectural designs documented, as-needed design reviews, code reviews, developers test their own code, separate testing group, formal deployment procedure.

• Mission-Critical Systems
  • Type of Projects: Core Embedded Frameworks, Required Release Set Software
  • Type of Work: Staged Delivery, Extensive up-front planning, extensive QA test planning, Rigorous change control, Formal requirements specification, Architectural design, formal architecture inspections, formal detailed design, formal check-in procure, code reviews, developers test their own code, separate testing group, formal deployment procedure.

1.4 Defining the Problem

Defining the problem should be described from the user's point of view, not to be stated in technical computer terms. You don't want to tie the problem to specific technologies, because that may not be the best solution to the problem. If you list something like "Refactor stored procedures to solve performance problems." You are focusing on the specific area that may not be the problem at all. Instead the problem should be stated. "Performance problems when running client reports." This way you are not miscommunicating to the developer where the problem lies. Listing stored procedures may or may not be the solution.

1.5 Categorizing the Software Project

1. Small Projects
   1. Less then 100,000 lines of code

1. Medium Projects
   1. Greater than 100,000 lines of code and less than 3 million lines of code

1. Large Projects
   1. Greater than 3 million lines of code

Lines of Codes of other projects

• Windows NT 3.1 ( 4-5 Million)
• Android OS (12 Million)
• Windows Server 2003 (50 million)

• Mac OS X (86 Million)

1.6 Meeting the Business needs of your Software Project

This is where you choose your technology you want to use to solve your software project. This includes the programming language, any third party libraries or technologies. Most times the programming language has been selected for you, so you might want to determine the type of classes you are going to use. Are you going to consistently use LINQ Query Syntax, or use long query syntax. Maybe you will use EJB's for Java, maybe not, or you might use WCF for .NET technologies.

What types of coding conventions do you follow? Good code should look like one developer wrote all of it, not pieced together from multiple developers. When choosing technologies if it's bleeding edge, realize that the community for it will not be mature. VS a mature community of a proven product or technologies which chances are that somebody already has tried what you are attempting to do. Be certain to choose the best software practices and tools that are best suited to your project.

1.7 Quick Construction example

Focus on documenting 20% of the Core requirements, do this by identifying the most critical components to achieve success. Focus on categorizing each component into three categories:

Lets say my company required me to create a listening web service for a partner to push massive amounts of data through so I can parse some information out of it, and build a held message for another project to pull from my storage cloud down to it's domain.

Identify your components

• Focus on documenting 20% of the Core requirements, do this by identifying the most critical components to achieve success. Focus on categorizing each component into three categories:
• Lets say my company required me to create a listening web service for a partner to push massive amounts of data through so I can parse some information out of it, and build a held message for another project to pull from my storage cloud down to it's domain.

Identify my components

1. Listening Web Service: I choose WCF
2. Partner Interface Method:  I choose to follow a standard in my industry name STAR Standard
3. Extracting data - I will use LINQ Query Syntax
4. Storing Message Structure - Build a project that handles dealing with Message Packets.
5. Storage - Utilize Windows Azure Cloud
6. Testing - Utilize a 3rd party tool. SOAPUI to mimic our partners message, use Azure storage explorer to see data in cloud

1. Deploying -
   1. Dev - (Use host file to build a friendly name for dev testing purpose, no need to bother IT with outside dns) Azure also provides the Cloud Compute Emulator to simulate cloud on dev box
   1. Stage - Azure accounts each have staging and production. This can be combined for a "Dev Azure Account for my final testing"
   1. QA - Get a Domain Name alias (friendly name) to give to partner to use. Map to a "QA" Cloud account. Again there is a Staging and Production in the cloud, so no staging is necessary to configure.
   1. Production- Get a domain name alias (friendly name). Deploy to cloud

1. Maintaining - What can I do to minimize having to redeploy for bug fixes? Research this with the cloud to see what I can use. Estimate: 6 hours for research. 3 for designing something if there is anything. After that.

1. Recovery Plan - Research.

Focus on identifying the 20%

• I know what I know (1 - lowest to 5 - strongest)
  1. (4) WCF
  2. (3) STAR Standard
  3. (4) LINQ Query Syntax - extracting data from where clause. No fancy queries foreseeable.
  4. (1) Azure Storage Cloud
  5. (3) SOAP UI
  6. (3) Azure Storage Explorer
• I know what I don't know (this only focuses on what we actually have in the requirements)
  1. Customer data structure
  2. Performance of WCF in Cloud
  3. Integrating WCF with Web Role or Worker Roles of the Azure Cloud
  4. What types of configuration/power should I give to those that maintain this?
  5. Logging in the cloud. (Limitations?)
  1. Recovery if production is wiped out, how to rebuild this easily? Scripts? What?
• I don't know what I don't know (these are the what if scenarios)
  1. Schema validation?
  1. Duplicate messages one to many?

  So from the look of things, I think I should probably focus my detailed documentation on what happens When I extract the data from the customer and how I'm storing the message. I might end up with a rough draft that looks something like this:

•  

  1. Inputs to Public Azure Roles

  • PutMessageV1.svc : Called by IIK Series Partner to send information through. Message will parse information and create a unique address name.
  • ProcessMessageV1.svc: See PutMessageV1, exact same functionality.

  2. Input to Internal Azure Roles

  • ReceiverV1.svc Receives structured data to store until pulled by another project.

  3. Internal Azure Storage

  • Held Packet Table Held messages in Azure Storage.
  • Delivered Packet Table Once message has been delivered it is stored in this table for archiving or audit purposes as well as guaranteed delivery
  • Log Table Log table for storing log entries.