The application does not work

Posted by mkhairul - December 17, 2009 at 04:12:48 pm - No Comments

Categories: rants

There’s a project I’m involved in where the staff says to their boss that the software that we provide does not work. Since I have dealt with quite a handful of people in the past, I knew this was not the case.

The software that we use is Moodle (we dont actually sell Moodle, just the services like customization, training, setup and configuration). It seems simple enough to use but if you involve some complex process to it (like managing classes etc), it would be overwhelming to use hence the claim that was supposed to be “I don’t know how to use it” to “It does not work”.

I am slightly annoyed at this claim, since we’re dealing with a bunch of IT people (and working collaboratively trying to make this project a success) the phrase should be more precise on the things that “does not work”. For example, “I don’t know the step to do so and so”, “We can’t log into the application”, “We can’t batch upload the student csv files”, etc.

Oh, did I mentioned that the client is up far north, so collaborative work through the internet might be somewhat hard and awkward for them.

I’m going up there on new year’s eve to show them that the damn thing works and refute all the nonsensical claim that was made.

Pondering while reading

Posted by mkhairul - December 16, 2009 at 11:12:41 pm - No Comments

Categories: blog

One of the few stuffs that I do while reading a book is to ponder at a sentence that makes a really good quote. Since I’m driving around now (less public transport), my speed to finish a book almost halted but I still bring a book everywhere I went to because you never know there’s bound to be late appointments, clients, waiting for something, etc.

Pondering is what I do when I read before going to sleep, sometimes the pondering puts me to sleep, other times it gives me the urge to write something in my notebook or do some google search and more reading on the subject matter.

Anyway, its nice to ponder.

Secret Sauce for Software Development

Posted by mkhairul - December 9, 2009 at 04:12:54 pm - No Comments

Categories: blog

From kirk’s post, The Secret Sauce. Words of wisdom from Ralph Johnson..

The state of the practice in software development is pretty dismal. Some groups do a great job, but most do not. As I tell the students in my software engineering course, if you manage requirements, make sure the developers talk to each other, release working code regularly, have some sort of a systematic testing process, use build and version control tools, and periodically stop and see how you are doing and how you can improve, you will be better than 90% of the groups out there. Of course, I could be exaggerating. Maybe it is only better than 75%.

Sounds simple enough. The human factor makes it difficult.

Defaced

Posted by mkhairul - December 8, 2009 at 06:12:42 pm - No Comments

Categories: rants

Recently my blog have been defaced twice, I have a couple of ideas what it is (but have not tested it yet). Hopefully I have time to look into it and fix it up.

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