Comments on: Vindication

by: Stephen

Sat, 27 May 2006 03:51:37 +0000

You’re a strange boy, Doug.

by: Tan

Fri, 26 May 2006 02:38:40 +0000

I want a cup of tea! oh? you dont do that? How about milk? Well I guess I can drink milk instead. What type of milk? Hot milk is what I want! What? you been serving cold milk for 3 years and doing very well in it? Well then, I guess I will take that cup of cold milk.

I often wonder the decisions we made around the system, xp or preplan, is it all that important? Is it just another way to get to the same place? I want to view a public announcement, if it is in my face, I will read it, if it hiding somewhere I will search it, if it is behind 10 clicks I will click it. If it is slow i will wait for it. It’s the service I really want to add to my value chain, not a system or a website.

by: stephen

Fri, 19 May 2006 11:10:32 +0000

Heh, I am not proposing that we all adopt XP completely, but I do agree with a lot of its core ideas (unit testing, peer programming, code ownership).

I think that maybe the Uniservices “XP” was more “we don’t know what we want so we’ll get the developers to make stuff up as they go along”

by: stephen

Fri, 19 May 2006 10:56:17 +0000

Aww, Craig, you did the best you could of a bad situation ^^

by: :P

Fri, 19 May 2006 02:17:53 +0000

off the topic…
customers don’t know what they want?! of course they don’t. we dun even know what we want a lot of the times. and we change our minds as we go along…

Those who study consumption on consumer choice making (or something like that) would have heard of this study.. by.. Soloman I think.
Study A - give someone 1 chocolate bar per week, for 3 weeks.
Study B - give someone a choice of 3 chocolate bar of any kind or the same kind… to consume for the next 3 weeks.

Results:
Study A - most people picked their favourite one week after week.
Study B - most people picked a selection of their favourite ones… rather than 3 of the same kind.

So do we really know what we want?

by: Anonymous

Fri, 19 May 2006 02:07:37 +0000

Mmmm, them poor developers. All their hard work and nobody likes it
Although I do wonder - is it really the devs fault that nobody likes the UI, after all we only did what we were told (um, I mean they).

by: :P

Fri, 19 May 2006 02:06:44 +0000

I have so much to say, but I haven’t gather my thoughts yet. I feel like ranting too!! Maybe later…
But hey, you hired ‘him’ who so wanted your job as soon as you left…
Oh, ps.. no no… the ex-tester and the person who does the business layer… are both ’senior developers’. there is no dev lead as such. It’s all going to drop on the PM’s desk when the PM has not been given enough authority. Nice.
But still surviving anyway

by: Ben

Fri, 19 May 2006 02:04:33 +0000

Have to agree with you there Steve, (as one of those old COM developers). The system was designed around Outlook which was somthing that most of the staff were familiar with, yet non of the students. Now considering that students probibly make up 99% of the load on the system….

On your XP comments (and a little off topic) I think there is a time and a place for and XP style of development though. I don’t ever want to go back to the XP styled environment that was available at Uniservices. Things were never confirmed and always in a state of flux. The customer contact side of things only works well if the customer knows exactly what they want. If the customer does not know what they want (which seems to be the case most of the time) I would rather see the customer rarely and be able to hide behind the legal protection of a contract.