Matt Goebel

During the evolution of software development many ambitious project managers, business analyst, developers and demanding users have earned the practice a notorious reputation for failure on some level.  They complicate simple processes with “cool” and “cutting-edge” technology, take the approach that they can solve EVERYTHING at once or allow users to add requirements at will without change management.  This all inevitably results in budget overruns, missed deadlines, unhappy users and ultimately failure.

The good news is there are simple and easy ways to overcome this…and most of them actually reduce cost/time in the process.  Here is a simple and good one…use the 80/20 rule when defining what is in scope for the first phase of a project.  A different way to look at this is that the users, subject matter experts and business analyst need to ask themselves “Is this essential?” for each requirements or piece of requested functionality.  Take the approach to capture and document the 80% of requirements that are core and essential to the business process that the software is going to support.  This won’t cover all the exceptions and there will be minor holes…that is the remaining 20%.  Looking back at experience that 20% is the main culprit to 80% of the cost/issues/time.  By only consuming the core 80% in the first phase you have the opportunity to focus on building a solid foundation for a fraction of the total cost. 

Once satisfied that your core 80% is tested, verified and working, start all over.  Take the remaining 20% and look at it as a new project…repeating the 80/20 rule.  Repeating this process will enable you to build a solid application in controlled phased approach that ups your chances for success and reduces your overall risk for failure.

An article I wrote on WCF was just published by Developer.com.  It covers a good amount of intro material on setting up and consuming a WCF service.

Distributed Application Communication Using WCF

Last week I was asked by one of my clients to assist in test coordination / project management task for a large release they have planned for early January.  The activities and responsibilities are right up my alley so it was a great new project to tackle….with one small exception, the tool.  It didn’t take me long…about 2 hours to realize that I was going to have issues with the test coordination software they have.  It is a web application, and a mediocre one at that.  Naming the software is not important.  The “point” or common issue that it represents is very important.

Information Workers are helplessly at the mercy of web application short comings everyday.  And most don’t even realize it, they just assume and accept that software is suppose to be difficult to use…such a shame.  In a short week of using this particular web application I have already compiled the following list of short comings that plague web applications and Information Workers as a result.

• Scr…..ee…..n….Re…..fre…….she……..s…… [Screen Refreshes for those not picking up on the humor]  New technologies like AJAX makes this more bearable, but sadly the test coordination web app had none and was slow to boot.
• Tabbing through entry fields and hitting the ‘Backspace’ key on the wrong field…losing data.  Unless I’m the only person that every once in a while hits the wrong key during some mundane data entry, this is VERY annoying.  Loosing an entire form’s data because of a single keystroke error is counterproductive to say the least.
• Pop-ups – allowing them and losing data. This particular web application required you to allow pop-ups for pasting from Word (see the next item for that little gem).  I’m okay with that except for when it randomly ask you to do that after entering an entire (lengthy) form’s data and by doing so refreshes the page…loosing all the data.  Not the fault of the web application necessarily, but a fault of web applications in general.
• Can’t handle pasting from Word numbered list.  I’ve seen this on other web applications as well so web control Rich Textboxes must not do a very good job at handling formatting.  The annoyance of the extra 5 clicks to paste a simple list from Word does not scream productive or efficient to me.
• Page finishes loading causing the focus to move to a different entry field mid-typing.  This issue is frustrating because it is avoidable…don’t let the user enter data until the page is loaded.  Like many of these issues, this is a non-issue in the client world.
• There is no undo functionality.  This is self explanatory.  Who doesn’t make mistakes in repetitive processes?

All and all, I wasn’t a fan of web applications before and this experience has done nothing more than to reinforce that.  More importantly it underlines the lost productivity, frustration and inefficiencies that Information Works using web application are forced to live with everyday.

If you are getting a 405 error page returned when trying to view the debug page of a WCF service and you are running Windows 7…try executing the following command in a command prompt (run as an administrator).

netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:8000/WCFProductService user=[username]

Developer.com has just published my second article on Windows Azure.  The second article is a walkthrough on building a Windows Azure application that uses both Web and Worker Roles as well as Azure Storage.

Building in the Cloud with Azure Storage and the Azure SDK

UPDATED 11/19:  Developer.com has requested a new title and lead due to formatting issues on their new content system.