Chris Austin's Pad

Communication is the key to success!

2009-04-15T23:27:14-05:00:00

I know, what's new Chris! We have heard this a million times before you. And, yes, you might have heard this a million times before me.

But, as I go from project to project there is one thing that remains constant for a successful project and that is good communication. When communication fails the project fails when its flows easily then projects are successful. That's one of the reasons why I am a fan of true Agile/Scrum types of development efforts over things like Rational and waterfall. Don't get me wrong documentation is great and all but just like everything else written including instant messages and e-mails, what does it communicate and is the correct thing being communicated? Written documents and people reading them, you just never know what or how they will interpret it.

Anything you can do to improve communcation between your business, your team and your project the better. If it's written and everyone gets the document then great! My experience has been writing everything down in word documents, e-mails and instant messages is like playing the "Pass it along" game where you whisper in one person's ear a phrase they turn and whisper it to the next person and by the time it gets back to you its completely different.

In my humble opinion, I agree that Agile gets people communicating. There should not be any "he said she said" type of comments. It should be, "Hey, you remember Joe saying this the other day? Yeah, what about it?" There shouldn't be any silent time bombers or "Secret Trolls", who sit there not saying anything until it becomes so frustrating that they go somewhere else besides the source and make people's lives miserable. Instead, you should work with the direct source verbally and daily to gain understanding and allow them to ask questions and probe even if its in areas you don't feel they belong.

For these reasons I support daily project scrum stand up meetings but with verbal follow-up on items after the meeting for details on things that were said in the meeting. A good manager/scrum master will follow-up daily with people after the scrum meeting to gain better understanding and details. The bad ones sit in their office quietly miscommunicating things to people outside of the project and wonder what happened when it's not what they thought it was and getting pissed about it.

I think planning poker sessions is a great idea! I may or may not want to sit there and hold up a card showing my estimate even though that seems like it could be fun. But the cards is not the point of the meeting. The point of the meeting is find out from each member if they understand the task at hand for the current sprint and if not, communicate with each other until everyone does understand. The key point is, it improves communication! I knew a person once that thought this was a bad idea! To this day I still cannot understand where someone thinks that this would be a bad idea but I could be missing something.

The other reason why you keep things verbal and open is that is quick! I have asked myself recently how long did I really sit there and stare at that Visio document and Word Document re-phrasing and re-drawing things just trying to make sure that I am clearly communicating what needs to be done only to find out 2 days later I could have done it better if I only did this tweak and that tweak. I would say I have spent hours and days doing that where 30 minutes in a conference room or at someone's desk would have accomplished the same thing but 10 times better!

I do think there should be documentation though. But I think it should come after the meetings where you discussed it and the team came up with the answers. By that time the document becomes the record of the meeting just to remind everyone of the decisions, designs, approaches, business rules and concepts that were talked about and not a instructional "how to do your job" manual. If developers were technical writers able to clearly communicate instructional step by step items then I would not be typing this out. But, developers are not technical writers. They are coders and they speak languages that only a computer can really understand in the end.

In summary, whatever is the right method of communication for you, then you should build on that and nourish it for growth and to be better than before. I have yet to run across a problem in life that could have been avoided or solved quickly with really good communication.

It's been a while

2008-11-02T22:32:41-06:00:00

Wow! It has been a while since I blogged here. I had a server of my own for a while but I got tired of the up keep so I quit blogging all together.

Then, I was at Microsoft PDC 2008 and I saw a booth for geekswithblogs.net and it reminded me that I had an account here! I will say, I am impressed with everything they have done with geekswithblogs.net since I last blogged!

What have I been up to since my last blog.

Well, I have been working for about 2 years now with GameSpy/IGN/FIM/Fox/News Corporation doing all kinds of things for http://www.fileplanet.com and their crew of wacky production content team. It has been a lot of fun so far and I am planning on doing a complete "refactoring" of the FilePlanet system(s) in the next coming months before I go insane.

I added some more categories to blog about. As, I continue to expand my universe of web technolgoy knowledge. I also added in some fun categories around gaming and movies. Movies mainly because my wife and I have watched thousands of movies together and the Blockbuster Video employees down the street now ask for our reviews as they tend to agree with them a lot.

So, more to come.

"Strangers" Movie

2008-11-02T17:11:31-06:00:00

So my wife and I sat down to watch "Strangers" last night. We tried to watch it for Halloween but our youngster was so hyper from candy overload it was hard to get him to bed.

My rating would be: 6.5 stars out of 10

Summary:
Overall, not a bad movie to watch and was entertaining for a horror flick. Liv Tyler, I thought did a good job with her acting. In many parts she betrayed really well how freaked out someone in that situation should have been. Scott Speedman on the other hand couldn't get less plain with his acting. He really hasn't changed since his acting days on the T.V. Show "Felicity" and "Underworld".

This movie freaked my wife out! It mainly got to her because this movie hit on her worst fear around when I leave town for events like Microsoft PDC or company meetings and releases. WARNING! Spoiler information is about to come your way so if you don't want it then you might want to quit reading right about now.

The movie is about a young couple where the guy was planning on a great evening with his girl at his parents empty house in the woods after she accepts his proposal of marriage. But, obviously she said she was ready to get married which put the guy in a fit of depression. Even though they are upset with each other, they both go to the house to stay the night to split up in the morning and cancel their road trip of celebration.

Kristen runs out of smokes so James takes off at 4 AM to get more for her when the fun starts. 3 people all in masks 9 (1 guy and 2 women) start terrorizing Kristen by banging on the door and showing themselves in the windows of the house. Kristen's cell phone is dead so she plugs it into the wall and makes for the house phone to call James to get his butt back to the house fast. Here was the first thing that I was "sighing" with is that I don't know about you folks but anytime my cell phone is dead and I plug it in then the phone works! I don't have to wait for a charge that sucker comes right up and as long as it is plugged in I can talk all day long. Not to mention, the first phone call I would make would be to 911 not my boyfriend who I just declined to marry! But, we would not have much of a movie now would we.

Before I rapidly shorten this up. The other large "sigh" I let out about this movie was when he was outside with the shotgun and saw one of the mask ladies round the corner of the barn with a flash light. I would have shot her without even thinking about it. Instead, he pauses, appears to be blinded by the flash light and then the guy runs up to him knocking him out cold for a bit.

Now to shorten this up! After a full early morning nothing but being terrorized, taunted and tricked into shooting their best friend Mike. They get tied up, James was stabbed to death with a kitchen knife. Kristen was stabbed but didn't die. She was left to bleed to death unless someone found her before she died. Which 2 Christian spreading boys did with a nice screaming scare tatic at the end.

At the beginning of the movie they stated this movie was based on real life events. So, I was curious and did some Google searching on it. It's funny because there is a lot of people out there that try very hard to make this movie about an actual event! But, none the less, it was not. The screen writer(s) were inspired by the Manson murders and Keddie Cabin murders. The director even said in an interview that he wanted to make it more real to him so he used a childhood memory where someone knocked on his door at 4 AM asking for someone that didn't live there. In his case, the people were trying to find out if people were home and if not then they would break into the house. He merely changed things around that they were knocking to see if people were home in order to kill them. So, this story is nothing but fiction. People have tried to spice it up saying that they know Kristen and that she is alive and will be broadcasting her story on A & E. Perhaps as a guest on "Dog the bounty hunter" show! If you really want to get detailed with it the name "Hoyt" is actually believed to be taken from the sheriff in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre!

If this story isn't fiction then I challenge anyone to produce any real facts that can be found and post a reply to my blog with links to the information.

Response.Redirect vs. Server.Transfer

2005-09-28T13:19:00-05:00:00

I have recently been involved in an interesting debate whether to have development teams utilize Server.Transfer or Response.Redirect as the method of choice for transferring the user from 1 place in the application to another.

One side debates Response.Redirect is not a scalable solution because of the performance hit it causes because it has to ask the client browser to please request this next page using a 302 header. Which really, I think they should be using the point that Form and Query string variables are not persisted between pages using the Response.Redirect instead you have to stick information into Session which can be problematic in itself sometimes. I have personally coded on some very large, high volume sites that use nothing but Response.Redirect and the application scaled just fine.

The other side debates that Server.Transfer is not user friendly because the page requested may not be the page that shows in the URL. And, if the user hits the “Refresh” button then basically the code has to execute all the way from the page the user originally started from to the last page the actually viewed in the process. Not to mention, the Microsoft bug where if you do a Server.Transfer(”page.aspx”, true) you will get an “Invalid ViewState” error. Which may cause the developers to want to disable the enableViewStateMac which I personally don't think is a very good security practice. Also, your application could potentially run into a “stack overflow” situation if a developer does a Server.Transfer to the same page. It has been a while but I also think Server.Transfer doesn't invoke PrincipalPermissionAttribute security on the target page when transferring to it.

I am curious what other people in the ASP.Net community think about this. I really have just summarized the conversations we had over this topic so please expect that I have missed some details. Personally, I think both have pros and cons but with that they are also were created to meet different development needs for different situations. So, locking it down and forcing a team of developers to use one way or the other for every situation is a recipe for disaster.

Form usability and phone numbers

2005-08-12T11:13:00-05:00:00

I have been developing web applications for almost a decade now. In latter half of my career I discovered a very interesting topic called “usability” or “human factors engineering”. This has been a fascinating topic but very half and half between logical and subjective as well. Today the subject came up again whether or not to collect a user’s phone number utilizing 1 text field or utilizing 3 text fields.

I personally suggest using 1 text field to my clients and for the following reasons:

The majority of people that utilize web sites are not experienced typist so they immediately see the request for a phone number and then look down to peck in the right numbers. Only to realize that after typing the whole number only the area code was entered.
Some sites try to resolve the above issue with auto tabbing after the user types the correct number or digits. The issue with this is when a user mistypes the last digit of their area code and it auto tabs to the next then the user either needs to “Alt – Tab” back or take their hand off the keyboard to move and click the mouse back to the field.
Three fields can not be easily internationalized because there are nations with phone number formats like “xx xx xx xx xx”.

Plus, I think users should be able to enter phone numbers in whatever format they like. For me, it is pretty easy in code to strip out all alpha characters leaving only digits then validate against just the digits. Then if I need to format it in 1 standard format I can do the format before submitting to the database or before displaying the value back to the user. Either way, it should make any difference to me if the user likes to enter their phone number like: 222-555-1212 or 222.555.1212 or 2225551212 or (222)555-1212 and etc.

I also, believe the above rules can and should be applied for inputs such as a date value.

From my development perspective, I think all the extra JavaScript and the need to create a custom validator for a 3 text field phone number control is a whole lot more complexity that does not add any real value to justify the costs.

Simple is better!

Enterprise Library 2.0 information

2005-08-08T18:58:00-05:00:00

Sounds like the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group are close to getting the Enterprise Library ready for Whibey!

http://blogs.msdn.com/scottdensmore/archive/2005/08/01/446190.aspx

Int32 notation vs. int

2005-08-05T06:42:00-05:00:00

A while back I was working on a project with Microsoft when we had a visit from someone on the Microsoft .net CLR product team. This person coded examples and when he defined his variables he used “Int32” vs. “int” and “String” vs. “string”. I had remembered seeing this style in other example code from Microsoft. So, I did some research and found that everyone says that there is no difference between the “Int32” and “int” except for syntax coloring. In fact, I found a lot of material suggesting you use “Int32” to make your code more readable. So, I adopted the style.

The other day I did find a difference! The compiler doesn’t allow you to type enum using the “Int32” but it does when you use “int”. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know yet.

Example:

public enum MyEnum : Int32

{

AEnum = 0

}

This works.

public enum MyEnum : int

{

AEnum = 0

}