*** and Spam

A Solution Architect according to Izzy

ivega-MSFT — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:25:43 GMT

I was recently asked to provide my definition of an architect. I have a more philosophical view of the role in comparison to others, but this is my Blog and these are my thoughts. My job is to spew nonsense; your job is to read it and disagree (at least that’s what most people do).

An architect is responsible for getting the job done right vs. just getting the job done. They are the visionary responsible for the spirit of a design along with establishing the guardrails for the implementation. They are also the person that is responsible for understanding the design, the use, the potential use, the management and maintenance as well as the implementation of a solution. They will use many tools, experiences, references and guidance add in some customer requirements and constraints and produce what they feel is the best solution for the problem at hand.

Here are some stories that read recently where the architect failed:

A building architect/designer was inspired to create a design for a building that was “open and airy”. They were to construct this building on some land had already been purchased. The architect created a design that allowed for open air flow in the lobby; with high ceilings. It will take elements of the outside and bring them inside. The space will be a smooth transition for patrons as they make their way from the outside to the inside. One problem. The location of the building and the layout of the lobby was downwind from a river. Across the street from the river, was a landfill. Had the architect looked around, he would have known to change the design for the building, change the lobby layout or change his inspiration altogether due to the surroundings.
Another more famous example was the The History of Amazon’s Tab Navigation. For those who don’t remember, the home page used to have tabs. The problem was that no one ever considered what would happen if the number of tabs were increased to something more than 10.

Architects do good as well. I am always amazed at the thought that goes into software frameworks where the intended purpose if completely unknown. Think about the HTTP protocol RFC. I bet when the architects where in the room back in 1999, thinking about what people might do, the thought of using it to build systems that would be able to able to carry videos, executables, HTML, voice, and pretty much anything we throw at it.. However, the design was simple enough to understand (request and response between servers and some data in the middle) yet complex enough to allow for others to use and extend without major redesign of the protocol. Great architecture.

Using and choosing methodologies

ivega-MSFT — Fri, 14 May 2010 17:47:01 GMT

The studio wants to put on a play. The play will be about things and stuff and will be directed by you. The producers, studio and investors have allocated some funding and have given you a date when the play must go on. They will make billboards, buy air time, sell tickets and run ads in news papers. All this cost money. It is really a really important, high visibility, high impact and will be great for all of us if you can help pull this off (heard any of those things before?).

The producers will also find you a set of actors based on the budget and will help with anything you need. You ask for a team of actors that you have worked with in the past. They know how to work together and are happy to play any part they can but that confidence and quality comes a cost and we only have $1.00.

As the director, you consider the following:

You have never directed a play about things and stuff. Stuff, yes. Thingamabobs, yes. Widgets, kinda. But never together.
You have the following roles based on the script I’ve been provided
You have a deadline and no money
You have to get wardrobe, props and actors all aligned and working in parallel and hope they come together in the end
The producers, investors and studio will walk in unexpectedly and often to see how things are going and will get very worried if they think the opening will be affected in anyway
You can’t quit because if I do, you will never work in this town again.

Time for auditions. In comes a band of actors, each with their own pedigree, attitude, various experiences and expectations. “I need my own trailer”, “I better be the lead”, “You aren’t doing it right”, “this is impossible, where is my agent”. The only thing they have in common is that they have never seen each other or worked together.

You need to fill the following roles: Cinderella (lead), some dwarfs (supporting), a tree and a rock (live props with some lines), and I need someone to play the stand-in for the second lead which is currently filming somewhere else because it’s an animated role. 2 weeks into rehearsals, everyone wants to be the lead, you have 3 of 7 dwarfs, a rock, no tree and you are playing the stand-in because no one else wants to be “out of the spotlight”. You also have homemade costumes, a few hand-me-down stage props, no place to practice together and here comes the studio asking for status.

Let’s map it to software development:

Play – New application development project. Probably never been done before, if so, not quite like this
Producers, studio, investors – The bobs, monkey managers and customers
The Date – When other people will come to see ~~your~~ the studio’s play
The actors – Cinderella (lead dev), dwarfs (just plain ole developers), the rock and tree (testers), the costumes (UI), the animated role (insert integration system of choice here)
Props – The tools
Stage – Location

Here is what I do:

Keep the bobs happy
- Let them know when, where and how you will report status to them. Keep them out of your rehearsal area but if they drop in, make sure they are “silent observers”. In Agile, the bobs are chickens and chickens are not to disrupt the daily work.
Separate status reporting from daily work
- There will always be a deadline otherwise work will go on forever. Sometimes the deadline is movable. No one will tell you the actual date, ever! If you knew it, you would slow down; it’s human nature to take up all the time allotted for a task. The roadmap and milestones are a waterfall tracking mechanism for reporting out. Daily work should be summarized at this level.
- Let the work be the data. At the end of the day, telling someone that you have 3 of 7 dwarfs means nothing. Showing them a chart of “dwarf work” goes a long way. The bobs see the world as color charts, graphs, and dashboards. As technical people, we see the world as black, white and grey.
- Reporting, tracking and process methodology on the outside, implementation and execution methodology on the inside. Let the purist scream and protest and boycott but this is what I found works in all cases. When I don’t know where to go, I look to process to tell me where I’m supposed to be. Those are milestones. Any documentation, testing requirement, hardware ordering process, training lead time, etc, is added to my product backlog the same as localization framework. It is scheduled into the sprint and tracked like any other work item.
Ensure the proper isolation of work
- I call them swim lanes. You can call them feature crews, branches, paths, tracks, whatever. Costume designers go their way, actors go another way, and props go another way. Give your team direction and trust that they will do their job by the time we all need to come together. I call it controlled chaos. Put chaos in a box so when people ask what’s all this chaos, you can say, it’s in the box and I’m watching it so it doesn’t get out.
Ensure the actors are happy and always working on what is important
- When you keep the bobs out of the workplace, actors can focus on acting. Not reporting, status calls, budget meetings, etc. Also make sure that the rock is not trying to tell the tree how to be a tree. If that happens, you get a bad rock and terrible tree. No one wins. Stay on target.
Never let a day go by that you don’t check in
- Jim McCarthy's 1995 book Dynamics of Software Development calls it “going dark”. Others call it “Nomadic development” or remote work. Either way, if you can’t be accountable for your work, maybe you should go flip burgers. You get paid to be accountable, professional and knowledgeable. “Where are you on bedazzling the Cinderella costume?” is a reasonable question because next week is full dress rehearsal, so quit whining.
Never kiss on the mouth (From Pretty Woman), don’t get attached to anything you can’t walk away from (From Heat), and always be ready to say goodbye.
- You don’t own the purse strings. It is not your play. You are not responsible for the success (failure, yes. success no). There are no Oscar’s for best director or Grammy’s for best composer. The best you can hope for is the continued employment award (aka paycheck). The moral is that you have been entrusted with the management of the play temporarily. You are a steward of the play and you are allowed to be in charge as long as the studio, producers, and investors feel like it. That’s the reality.

Wrap it up:

Tools, tools, tools. A methodology and a process is a tool You will choose the right one for the job at hand. Sometimes you need all waterfall. Sometimes you need Agile. Other times you need a little XP, some Agile, and MSF-Waterfall on the outside. For nails, use hammers. foundation, use cement. For electricity, use copper. For software, choose what works when you need it. Know your tools their their strengths and weaknesses (See section II.4) but also know how the will be used and who will use them (See #Section III.18).

About a buck-fiddy

ivega-MSFT — Sat, 01 May 2010 20:22:43 GMT

Warning geeks – I will use my accounting degree for something more than a beer coaster in this post.
Warning business folks – I will use my technical jargon and humor to belittle your craft.

No 10-K statements were harmed during the creation of this post

As a software consultant, you are a:

COG to the company your are employed by (as a consultant you are the inventory)
A variable cost to the company that hires your company (your consultant fees come out of OpeX)
A fixed cost if you are a W-2’d employee or a variable cost if 1099’d to the company that employs you (yes I know you can be a variable cost, W2’d employee but for the sake of argument, let’s keep it simple)
Included as a whole on a project that has been allocated in part or whole as CapEx

What does all this mean? Your project most likely has been pre-assigned dollars that come out of operating revenue with no actual data on how much with really cost to complete. Huh? Dramatic pause…

Here is the way most projects get allocated money:

Year 1 – We made 100 dollars last year (Revenue) of that money, 10% will go to capital expense next year ($10). Managers, bring your project estimates.
Manager 1: We are building a new intranet portal. How much will it cost? Our last one 5 years ago cost around $3 and most of what we built for the last 5 years should be out of the box now, so I’ve read. That means that this project should cost about a $1.50 (pronounced buck-fiddy), I think.
CxO: If we divide the budget among you, you will use around 15% (1.50/10) of the overall budget. That’s too high for your group. You get 10% (1$).
Year 2 – Bring in some vendors to bid on this project.
Manger 1: Mr.. Vendor, how much will this cost me.
Vendor says (say it with me..) about a $1.50.

Let the dilemma begin. How do we deliver a $1.50 project with $1? Here is where the variable, fixed costs and project triangle come in.

I can hire a bunch of different people at different rates and make up the difference
I can augment my staff with the vendor staff (mix fixed and variable costs since the fixed costs are already paid for) .
Reduce my …..dramatic pause

Let’s go back to the roadmap. This contains, where are going (vision), how are going to get there (tasks) and what we want (requirements). The vendors add how much it will cost to deliver on your requirements in the timeframe you are looking for (cost for vendors is people-rate * project-time). This is where the infamous PM Timetable comes into play. Scope, cost, schedule and quality.

Remember however that the cost is already fixed ($1). And the schedule is usually fixed (we gave an estimate of how long so we can come up with an estimate on how much to ask for). So what’s left? Can you select the correct answer?

Scope
Quality
Both
None of the above. I should be able to achieve everything I want with high quality, on time and under budget

The CORRECT answer is 1. The most common answer is 4. The result is 2. Ok, Izzy, wrap it up.

Some funny quotes heard on my teams:

$50 if I do it, $100 if you help (quality)
How do I fit 10 LB of poo in a 5 lb bag? (Scope)
I can do it fast, I can do it cheap, I can do it right. Pick 2. (All the above)

As software consultants, we are at a distinct disadvantage from the beginning, you are a variable cost which means that at any time, you’re services may no longer be needed, you must deliver a project for less than what it would normally take, you are not able use your regular circle of trusted Winston Wolfe’s AND you may have to work harder along the way. I love this job!

Dear software people,

There will never be enough time, money or resources to complete your job; deal with it.

Signed,

The man.

Building teams that build software

ivega-MSFT — Sat, 01 May 2010 15:27:49 GMT

I am starting a series of blog posts that will cover my experiences as an architect/team lead/dev lead (insert phrase for guy that is in charge of bag of poo) over the last 10 years. I say that not as a badge of honor but as a statement of I’ve been around a few projects.

The series will cover the following areas of observations:

About a buck-fiddy
Software “blocking and tackling” 101
Team building
Using and choosing methodologies
The rhythms
Dealing with the Bobs, the monkeys and when the lawyers come knocking
Handling, shining and presenting the big bag of poo
Saying goodbye

Those who know me, understand my Izzy-isms. Those who don’t, I explain them like this; I am not a smart man so I need to draw correlations to daily life. To do that, I use a TON of analogies to fool myself into thinking that I somehow understand what you’re talking about. I also tell lots of stories to help relate the yesterday to the today and the potential tomorrow.

I see life as a very large home building project and throughout it, you will collect different sets of tools that will help you, hurt you, or when used with other tools, make magic. Some author of a book I read called the tools “golden nuggets”. Hopefully I can become a tool in your life :-).

Men can relate to the tools analogy and women hopefully can relate to the home building. We will have dreams of additions, remodels, new and shiny things, pretty paint and fabric. And men think of places to put their stuff, big TV's and places to sit and enjoy our stuff.

Here is your first nugget;

Draw a line between the vision of tomorrow and the reality of today. This line is your roadmap. The vision is the goal (where you want to be).
Now draw a line at different intersecting points as signals to alert you that you are on track. We will call these “milestones”.
Now, create a list of things that are required to walk your roadmap and get to your milestones. We will call this list a “task list”.
With the task list, we will re-order it based on priority and delegation. We can call this our “plan”
Next we take our plan, and assign a random dollar amount based on how much money I am willing to pay to walk my roadmap. I will call that random dollar amount, “budget”.
And now the fun part; let’s find people to help us walk our path because after looking at all the tasks on the task list, I quickly realize that:
- ohh, that looks difficult and maybe painful;
- no one I know can do it or is willing to do it,
- I know its going to cost more than what I have in my pocket so I’ll find someone that can do it cheaper
- I need it NOW!

Sometimes I come in before step 1 (strategy). Sometimes around step 4 or 5 (planning, bidding or RFP). Other times I walk in around step 40 (recovery), when you’ve wondered so far off the path or someone you hired took you off the path or worse yet, when someone else calls me in because they see you off the path and you are so far lost, that you don’t even know you’re off the path (bag of poo).

Here we go. 1st stop, About a buck-fiddy.

Izzy's Rules

ivega-MSFT — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:04:25 GMT

I've been a consultant for over 8 years and during that time, I've lead a few projects, been on a few and helped to clean up a few more. I have also been a part of some failed projects, which honestly, if you're going to fail, fail big. Anyway, during my time I have created a set of rules that I carry with me on every project. These rules are kind of like the 10 Immutable laws of security, they transcend all technology. I decided to share them in case others want to share their rules or comment on mine. Enjoy!

If you say it's easy, you have just signed up for that work
If you say it's done, then it better be Done.Done
If you break the build, you buy doughnuts
You are not allowed to estimate unless you are willing and able to do the work. Willing and able are different, see rule 5 and 6.
If you're not a developer, don't act like one.
If you're not an architect, don't act like one.
If you don't know, are unclear or have questions, ask.
If you built it, you're not allowed to say it works. "It works" is for the unit tests, test scripts and testers to decide.
If its broken, fix it. The team is accountable.
If you didn't pay for it, it's not yours. Don't act like it.

Defining Done on a Project - Done means done until we redefine done!

ivega-MSFT — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:50:39 GMT

A common issue that occurs on all development projects is when is someone done. You will here phrases like:

I'm done, but...
I'm done except for...
I'm kinda done.
I'm done when it works on my machine, etc...

There are several ideas about what is done and what does “done” mean so in this post, I will define the done criteria across each discipline that should be taken into account on any development project. I have used this successfully on several projects and it helps to level set across the team that when someone says they are done. We mean "Done.Done".

Development

1. Code is adequately commented according to the coding standards

2. Code adheres to the coding standards

3. All hard coded strings that can be resolved are removed

4. Unit tests are created and test all positive and negative functionality and any exceptions

5. TODO statements are removed/resolved/entered in TFS as tasks

6. Diagrams and documents are updated to reflect any new changes

7. Code integrates with the latest build and is checked in

8. Code passes the integration build and is deployed to test

9. You have had a peer review by the track lead or another developer

10. Any deployment and configuration requirements are documented and communicated

11. TFS has been updated, the task has been closed and associated with a work item

Build and Test

1. The solution is able to be deployed with no errors.

Deployment

1. Any external requirements are documented

2. A target environment document has been created and the deployment is a repeatable process either by process or automation

UAT

1. Customer has signed off on the functionality and no changes are required

Support

1. Documentation has been delivered to the support staff

2. Support staff has signed off on the deliverables

Designing a Commerce Server catalog - Scenarios and Solutions

ivega-MSFT — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:48:47 GMT

I have taken a long break from Blogging because of customer commitments but I realized the EVERYONE has the same 24 hours in a day that I have, it's just a matter of how you use it. I noticed that I have not been using my time to give back to the greater community so here goes.

I am starting a series of catalog design blog posts where I will share different scenarios I have encountered and also share how we solved it. There is an art to catalog design and you must strike a balance between ease of use for the catalog managers, the back end catalog/item master, the user experience, the reporting/orders/marketing and the UI representation of the data (WOW, do I really need to understand all of these pieces?).. the answer is, as always, it depends.

The scenario: I did some work for an online beauty product manufacturer where we needed to provide a list of "ingredients" for a given product. They had a list of ingredients for a product stored in their item master as separate fields for inventory, accounting and other purposes. They don't sell each individual ingredient (such as water) but they wanted to:

a) show the list on the site for consumers

b) display the ingredient list as a hyperlinks so that they could have a description for the ingredient

Solution: As part of the catalog load process, we concatenated the list of ingredients using a semi-colon and placed the value in a long-text field. We also loaded each ingredient with the definition into the product catalog as individual, non-sellable items. We used the ingredient ID from the back end system as the SKU for the products.

Once we had the catalog loaded, we wrote some code to split the field data into an array (string.split(fielddata)) and added a foreach loop in order to generate the hyperlinks for each ingredient. This allowed the system to be flexible enough to handle any list of ingredients.

So the product field in catalog manager contained: water; vitamin E; collagen...

At runtime (pseudo code, not actual code):

ingredList = product.properties["ingredients"].split(';');

foreach(string s in ingredList)
{
link = string.format("<a href=\ingredpopup.aspx?p={0} ...", s);
}

Scenario: used the same "pattern" to solve a similar problem when we needed to display a description for a class. The customer was a sports club and when we displayed the schedule information, each class needed a hyperlink with a popup showing the description.

Solution: We added the classes as products and when the class list is rendered, we generate a link.

(pseudo code again)

foreach(timeSlot t in timeSlotList)
{
string className = timeSlot.ClassName;
string popUp = string.format("javascript:showPopUp('/classpopup.aspx?p={0}')", className);

}

Building Websites with Content Management Server 2002 series

ivega-MSFT — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:19:00 GMT

I received several notes about this offline so I decided to post the entire series. I apologize to those that have been waiting but hopefully I gain some brownie points for including the code too :)

Day 2: Support links and Q&A

ivega-MSFT — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:35:16 GMT

Today we covered capacity planning, high availability, server roles and migration. Here are a list of additional links, resources and the answers to some of the questions in the class.

Links

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/tags/File+Shares/default.aspx

http://blog.krichie.com/2007/02/21/importingexporting-sharepoint-document-libraries-tofrom-the-file-system/

Tools

SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool

Universal SharePoint Manager

http://www.casahl.com

http://www.quest.com

~~Free Extractors:~~ Migration Utilities:

http://www.codeplex.com/SPIEFolder

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Advanced Migration Scenarios

Questions

Can you give me more information on the SharePoint hosting service
- Microsoft Online Services
What is the correct Log file recovery mode for the databases
- It depends, some databases are set to full recovery mode while others are set to simple.
- http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/04/23/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-1-introduction-overview-and-basics.aspx
- http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175987.aspx
What is the ACL limit on site collections?
- 2000 security principles is the recommended limit. Several users in 1 group count as 1 security principle.
Can you share the SharePoint Blogs and wikis futures
- http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/06/07/answers-to-faqs-about-sharepoint-blogs-and-wikis.aspx
SSP mirroring supported DB

Day 1: Support links and Q&A

ivega-MSFT — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:25:34 GMT

Day 1 of the Advanced SharePoint Server 2007 Training for Architects ended with some questions and some takeaways for me. During the class, we spoke about authentication, site architecture, governance and deployment options.

Here is a list of support links we spoke about during class.

Blogs:

Support Links:

Questions from today:

How do I lock down a WCM site?

Are Excel trusted locations automatically added to the a crawl scope?

No. You would have to add it manually to the crawl list.

Can I add a friendly display name for a forms based auth user account?

No. The membership provider returns a MembershipUser which does have a display name property, only user logon name property.

What type of optimization can I do the SharePoint databases?