blog.RedRockResearch.com

Do you like designing on whiteboards?  I do.   Colorful markers against a clean, white surface inspire all kinds of creativity and fun.

Recently David Crossett of Ready Receipts gave me a great tip.  He told me that instead of going to your local OfficeBOX superstore and paying $200 for a 4×8 whiteboard, just hit HomeDepot instead and get a $12 piece of showerboard.  It works just as good and if you need a smaller size they will cut it for you on site for no additional charge!  At that price, you can line your walls with thinking space.  Power to the Consumer–thanks David!

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

I’ve heard people make references to Geoffrey A. Moore’s Crossing the CHASM book for several years now but had’t read it until this past week. 

Moore’s book is a must-read for any IT company trying to launch a new product.  Although the concepts in the book are not novel (so admit’s Moore) the book brings a vocabulary and metaphoric dictionary to the readers allowing marketing groups, investors, and techies alike to communicate about the playing field in a proactive manner.

Moore discusses the importance of delivering continuous innovation, instead if discontinuous innovation.  Our new innovations need to help people do what they are already doing better, and not force them to abruptly change something that kinda works for something that they are not sure about that may possibly work better.

Moore introduces the Technology Adoption LifeCycle, complete with five categories of market segments.  He discusses how to market in succession to each group:

1. Innovators
2. Early Adopters
3. Early Majority
4. Late Majority
5. Laggards 

Finally, Moore introduces some business concepts you may have heard of by now, like the bowling alley, the tornado, and the fault line.

If you haven’t heard of these, then you need to get reading!

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

Want to visit ground-zero for data security?  Experts from SANS, MITRE, SAFECode, EMC, Juniper, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Symantec, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division last week presented a listing of The Top 25 Most Dangerous (Information Security) Programming Errors.  Expect to see future government and big-money RFP’s mandate these items be addressed.

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

Have you been challenged with performing a high-risk task like upgrading a prominent server, for example?

Here’s an execution plan template that you can use to guide you.

I. Executive Summary
Brief overview of intended event.

II. Review of Discovery
Details of what efforts were made to research what is listed in the following sections.  Meetings, Vendor consultations,  OnLine Resources, and Conventional Wisdom can be included.

III. Pre-Upgrade Procedures
Steps identified to be taken before the event.

IV. Upgrade Procedures
Steps identified to be taken during the event.

V. Post-Upgrade Procedures
Steps identified to be taken after the event.

VI. Test Plan
Verification procedures to confirm the event was a success.  This section should define the success criteria.

VII. Rollback Plan
In case the worst happens, what to do.

IIX. Situational Awareness Plan
After-the-event steps to validate the success of the event with the system’s business users.  This would include a two-way communication between your group and the business users, announcing the success, and providing contact information for them to contact you in case there is still a problem.

IX. Risk-Management plan
A plan listing risks associated with the steps above and recommendations as to how to lower those risks.

X. Schedule
If the event spans many hours or days, you may want to draft a schedule for the benefit of all involved.  Include on the schedule the ‘rollback point,’ which would be the latest time a rollback could be successfully performed.  Your success criteria whould have to be met by this point to avoid a rollback.

Be sure the Execution Plan is in a checklist format, not a bullet-list format.  Require participants in the event to ’check’ completed checklist items and sign-off sections they are responsible for. 

For critical areas of high-risk, (ie: setting up replication), for example, you may want to require two individuals to perform the checklist steps and sign their names when that section is complete.   

If you like, add a ‘lessons learned’ section to be completed later, and keep a copy of the execution plan for historical purposes. 

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

NewsCHIME.com, the ‘News from everywhere, every 10 minutes’ website has officially passed the 100+ repeat visitor mark!  This site was launched in May of ‘08 with no advertising at all, and now enjoys more than 100 repeat visitors, and over 1000 unique visits per month. 

I classify a ‘repeat visitor’ as somebody who has come back four or more times.   The number four is kind of arbitrary, but I think somebody who comes back only once or twice is not really a captive audience participant.  They are more link a potential customer peering into the store window.

NewsCHIME.com was created to bring headline news to people who, like me, love to read the news.   We love it so much, in fact, that that’s all we want to see on the site–news headlines and nothing else. 

Have a BlackBerry and a few spare minutes between (or during) your meetings?  Go to NewsCHIME.com and check out what’s happing across the world!

Need to do research for education, work, or personal interest?  You can search for headlines topics from the past 18 months or so on the search page.  

This works great if you are expected to know about something newsworthy in a short amount of time.

For example, a search for ‘Obama’ or ‘McCain’ and a quick headline perusal will give you a one-sentence summary of everything noteworthy these candidates have done for the past 18 months.  10 minutes on NewsCHIME and you be more infomed about the upcoming presidential election than more than 300 million other people.

Need research project material on the mortgage meltdown, type ‘mortgage’ and you’ll see the unfortunate play-by-play.

Be sure to take note of what you will NOT see at NewsCHIME.com.  You will not see lots of useless links to various websites that have nothing to do with your topic.  You will not see pictures of dancing people,  and you will not see ads from GM, Chevy or eHarmony. 

I almost forgot to mention, NewsCHIME has free news alerts!  That’s right, Free!  Sign up and select which search criteria you want, and as those terms are named in news events you’ll be the first one to know about them. 

So, impress your friends, impress your boss, impress you teacher.  The faster you can get at information, the more beneficial your decisions will become.  Enjoy.

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

The value of information…

Here’s a fun site if you are a news junkie.  www.NewsChime.com is a simple site that grabs news headlines from major news sites and lists them in an easy-to-peruse text-only format. 

I’ve got the site on my PDA which makes reading news articles perfect for that boring meeting or that inconvenient 10-minute wait you hadn’t planned on.

An interesting feature on www.NewsChime.com is the ability to search for keywords in past news headlines.  Want to know what has been newsworthy about Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama?  Housing Crisis?  Gas Prices?  You can easily search for past headline keywords with this feature.

www.NewsChime.com also allows you to get news alerts sent to your phone or email.  I have news alerts sent to my phone about mortgage prices, home-loans, home-lending, and foreclosure because we talk a lot about this at work.  It’s been fun to be the first one at the office to know the latest.

www.NewsChime.com is a free service.  Enjoy.

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

In a conversation with a friend once, they jokingly described their inability to play racquetball against other seasoned players as ”They are playing racquetball, while I am just hitting a ball around the room.”

I’ll borrow that reference and apply it to Software Production Support.

Is your Software Production Support group ”playing racquetball,” or are they “just hitting a ball around the room?”

From a distance they can appear like the same activities.  On closer inspection however, one is much more organized, elegant, patterned, and proactive–while the other is only reactive. 

Finding the order from all the choas separates the effective from the ineffective.

There are three particular areas your Software Production Support team should be focus on.  These three areas are:

1. Maintaining Systems
2. Managing Customer Expectations
3. Become a Quick-Reaction Force

1. Maintaining Systems:

Think of your production servers like a fleet of cars.  In a fleet plan, the company sends every car to get an oil change after x number of miles, a tire rotation after y number of miles, and a general tune-up, fluid change, etc. after z number of miles.  This pattern repeats itself for the life of the car that is serviced by the fleet manager.

How often are your server hard drives defragmented?  How often are the transaction-logs backed up?  How often are the indexes reindexed, and the statistics updated?

How often are memory settings adjusted for performance? Latest patches applied? How often are your servers checked to see if there any impending disk space issues? 

To maximize system performance, create a “fleet plan” for your servers which checks all of these items at regular intervals.

2. Managing Customer Expectations:

If a server fails, do you know which systems depend on it? If a database goes corrupt, do you know which applications need it, and which corresponding business units will be impacted when that happens? 

Do you have a way to communicate to those groups immediately?

Create a dependency map for your products.  A dependency map illustrates which servers host which databases, and then which databases are used by which applications, and finally the names, numbers, and email groups of the business users that are affected by that server/database failure.  This will enable your team to proactively manage your customers expectations.  You can notify them before they have to notify you.

3. Become a Quick-Reaction Force:

The SWAT team, the FireStation, and the Ambulance services all have something in common: they are ready to take action at a moment’s notice.

They have the information they need available to them, and additional services available with a simple call.

Do your products have support information organized and readily available?  Do you have the names and numbers of your account representative for each third-party product or tool you support?  Do you have the product-support phone numbers and your support plan credentials readily available?

Do you know who knows what about each application in your enterprise?  Who programmed it originally?  Who has supported it lately?  Which business units use it?  Where is the source code located?

Keeping information about each system updated in a central location should also be part of your “fleet plan.”

Another effective tool for a Quick-Response group is a monitoring system.  Something that indicates the overall attitude of each of your production servers?  Disk Space available? Will the system reply to a ping?  Is SQL Agent running? Is that required Windows Service up and running?  Monitoring tools like Nagios can do this for you.

 Another great idea is to keep a lessons-learned log for each component you support.  Track problems, fixes to problems, assumptions to be confirmed, and ways to test if the component is functioning properly. 

All of these pieces in place will make your production support much more effective.

So, think about it…is your Software Production Support team playing racquetball, or are they just hitting a ball around a room?

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

I just finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, by Timothy Ferriss.  Timothy Ferriss is a 29-year old self-made millionaire, TV actor in China, athletic advisor to more than 30 world record holders, Chinese Kickboxing Champion, first American to hold Guinness world record in Tango, speaker of four languages, and a four-world champion cage fighter.   This book now makes him an author.

Ferriss’s book is about beating Corporate America, and becoming content and happy using the newer technologies available to us today. 

He provides a formula for successful entrepreneurship.  One important point he makes is the need to find a market, before investing in building the product.  He suggests this successful pattern:

1. Pick an industry you understand.
2. Target a product you can Create, License, or Resell.
3. Look at competition to see how you need to differentiate your product.  Examples:
   1. More credibility indicators
   2. Offer a better guarantee
   3. Offer a better selection
   4. Offer free, or faster shipping
4. Micro-test your product (before you put any money into it), by using eBay, or Google Ad’s.  Microtesting is “probing” customers to see if they would buy the product.  Some examples:
   1. Put an add on eBay, then cancel the add minutes before the auction ends, to see how much people are willing to pay.
   2. Build a dummy website, with item, description, pictures, and pricing.  After the user pressed ‘purchase now,’ display a “Thank you but this item is temporarily unavailable.”  This enables you to test your conversion rate up front, without needing to invest in manufacturing, etc.

This way, you can determine up front if there is a market for your product.  He suggests putting the price on a separate webpage altogether so you can measure the effects that changing the price alone will have on your conversion rate.

Ferris goes on to explain how to transform managing a business into automating the business.  He suggests time management is a thing of the past.  The key to living better today is to remove distracting inputs from our lives. 

He talks about outsourcing every part of you business and empowering the outsourcers.  He talks about only answering email one day a week, and having your cell phone message redirect people to you email. 

The final part of Ferriss’s book talks about what to do after you have successfully started and automated you business.  He talks about getting out of your comfort zone, travelling, learning new skills, and new languages. 

I think this book is an excellent read, and surprisingly cutting-edge.  It’s nice to read a business book about PPC, Google AdWords, and eBay microtesting.   Makes me feel understood.

Mike J Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

I finally finished Halo 3—in Heroic mode!  Heroic mode is one notch above Normal, and one below Legendary.   For those of you that have not completed the game, relax–there are no spoilers here.  I will offer some strategy advice, though.

Halo 3 is the third installment in Bungie’s highly-popular XBox video-game series.  The storyline takes place in a futuristic world that has been infested with an alien army.  Led by a creepy villain who calls himself the ‘Prophet of Truth,’ the alien onslaught will annihaliate the entire human race unless, of course, you and the space marines expel them. 

Halo 3 is a little twist from 1 and 2 because you have an alien-defector who helps you during most of the levels, and well, it’s the Xbox 360 this time! 

The graphics are outstanding and the playability is great.   I remember playing Halo 1 with my friend, Greg Wright.   He came to my house the day I brought the game home.   It was around 5pm when we started playing the game.  After what seemed to us to be about three hours, his wife called us to ask if her husband was ever coming home again because it was 2:30 am and she hadn’t heard from him.

With Halo 2, my neighbor Rob and I finished the campaign game in about two weeks.   We’d play every night until about 1 am.  By then, our brains were so fried we couldn’t speak properly.  We had to use hand signals to communicate ‘good-night’ and ’same time tomorrow.’

My all-time favorite games were Bolo and Bilestoad on the Apple II, Doom and Klingon Academy on the PC, and 007 on the N64.  Ghost Recon is my most-played XBox game, and so far, Halo 3 is the best 360 game.

Heroic is a difficult level.  It took me about three months to complete, playing solo and moderately during that time.  The first few levels are pretty easy.  You basically shoot anything moving at you.  As the game progresses however, you start facing more difficult aliens and tougher challenges.  

Here are some strategies that helped me:

1. Learn to be patient and lure the bigger aliens out one-by-one.  You have a much better chance of being successful facing them one-by-one.

2. Don’t feel compelled to annihilate every alien you come across.  Sometimes, the melee was so chaotic it was simply easier to run past everything and through the next door.

3. Discover your melee-punch attack.  This is where you run up on an alien, and punch them with your weapon.  I found this to be the best way to clobber a tough alien.  One or two hits and you can take down a Brute.  This works especially well inside a shield-dome.

4. Chieftains are the toughest opponents.  Wielding gravity hammers, and invincibility armor, they strike pure terror when they run at you.  There are three excellent techniques to use to defeat them:

A. Blast them with plasma cannons.  The continuous impact will stun and drain them of health.

B. If you have an invisibility shield, go invisible, quickly walk up behind the chieftain, and melee punch him in the back several times. 

C. Learn to jump up over them when they run at you.  You can stay alive and shoot at them for a while doing this.

5. Attack the exhaust vent of the Wraith.

6. Attack the legs of the Scarab SuperTank, then jump on, run up to the top, and blast it’s power source.

7. This should be obvious to you– running over the aliens is easier than shooting them.

Halo 3 is a guys game.   It’s full of marines, monsters, lasers, rockets, jeeps, four-wheelers, space-ships and shooting.  There are only three women in the game.  A dispatcher who you never see,  the operations commander, and an attractive computer persona.

There are nine levels.  The environments range from jungle, to desert, to internal facilities, to inside creepy, fleshy-spaceships.  The final level is a unique racetrack-like experience.

I really liked the humor in the game.  The little grunt aliens see you coming and say “Oh, no!  A monster!”  Sometimes the little grunts poke fun at their bigger alien buddies by saying “Brute’s are jerks.” 

The brutes have their own humor.  They are big, scary aliens that speak with deep voices.  Sometimes, when you die, one of them will say ”All to easy…” which is a direct quote from Darth Vader. 

The brute comment that makes me laugh the most is sometimes heard when you are unfortunate enough to come across a mass of Brute aliens marching towards you.  One of them will say, in their deep, Vader-like voice, “No inappropriate touching!”

I noticed a recent news snippet that Microsoft has released it’s seven-year hold on Bungie.  They’re now free again to wow us with more great games.

I really enjoyed playing this game.  I guess I’m ready for some Halo parties, now.  If you are having one, let me know.  Find me as MBER on Xbox Live.  I’d welcome some comments from others who have finished the game.

Mike J Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

In Steve McConnell’s book, Software Project Survival Guide, he describes the foundation and procedures for managing a successful software development project.

Researching from NASA, IEEE, and some other industry giants like Grady Booch  and Tom Demarco, McConnell summarizes software development into six stages:

1. Planning
2. Design
3. Construction
4. Testing
5. Release
6. Wrap-up

McConnell also offers some great ideas like keeping a project history to record lessons learned and actual project data (time to completion, lines of code, etc.)

He talks about Quality Assurance practices and team development.  Interestingly enough, his book starts with a diagram and commentary on Maslow’s human needs heirachy, and how the needs of a software development group are similar.  He proposes a Bill of Rights for the project team, and a Bill or Rights for the customers.

He offers a project health quiz–allowing you to measure your project to see how probable it is at succeeding.

McConnell ends his book with a chapter on project do’s and don’t, borrowed from NASA.  These are:

Software Development Project Do’s:

1. Create and follow a software development plan.
2. Empower project personnel.
3. Minimize the bureaucracy.
4. Define the requirements baseline, and manage changes to it.
5. Take periodic snapshots of project health and progress, and replan when necessary.
6. Re-estimate system size, effort, and schedules periodically.
7. Define and manage phase transitions.
8. Foster a team spirit.

Software Development Project Don’ts:

1. Don’t let team members work in an unsystematic way.
2. Don’t set unreasonable goals.
3. Don’t implement changes without assessing their impact and obtaining approval of the change board.
4. Don’t gold-plate (don’t add features no customer asked for).
5. Don’t over-staff, especially early in the project.
6. Don’t assume that a schedule slip in the middle of a phase will be made up later.
7. Don’t relax standards in order to cut costs or shorten a schedule.
8. Don’t assume that a  large amount of documentation ensures success.

 Overall, this is a great book for new software development managers, and software development mangers who have chosen SDLC, or other non-Agile development methods.  Published in 1998, this book came out before the Agile software development movement.  Regardless, it’s a good book to refer to occasionally.

Mike J Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com