Configuring Drupal for McNiff Plumbing & Heating

As mentioned in my last post on Selecting Drupal for McNiff Plumbing & Heating, I wanted to talk about configuring Drupal for a mostly static site.

The requirements are:

• Anonymous Users can view all content
• The site is Page oriented; Home, Services, Comments, Contact Us
• No navigation menu
  
• No login options visible to anonymous users
• No content titles, author information or posting dates on pages
• No user comment links

To start with, I went to Administer >> Site Building >> Blocks and disabled nearly all the blocks. I changed the Navigation block to be visible only to Authenticated Users.

I then created the following pages: Home, Services & Comments and copied some of the content from the current site as a place holder. I also set the Menu Title Links in each of these pages to their base name, so that it could be referenced from a menu.

I used Administer >> Site Building >> Menus >> Primary Links to add a menu item for each page.

Next up was creating the Contact Us form. I enabled the Contact module in the Core - optional section, wen to "Administer By Module" and configured the permissions for the Contact Form and enabled "access site-wide contact form" for all users.

Back to the Menus to add a new Primary Link menu option for Contact by specifying the "contact" page as the target. After saving this new menu item, it was showing up as a new tab with the other menu pages. Great!

Let's check for an anonymous users. I opened up a different browser (I just hate logging out and in and out and in) and checked the development site. No joy in Mudville -- and no tab either.

Somewhere along the line, I was missing permissions. I checked and double checked that the menu was enabled and that anonymous users could access the contact form. I even typed the path into the other browser and the form displayed. Hmmm; not a permission problem because the anonymous user could see the form. The navigation link was simply not being displayed.

Back to Administer >> Site Building >> Contact Form >> Edit. There is a "Selected" option, which was set to "No". Changing that to "Yes" turned on the tab in the Anonymous User's view.

Yea!

Next up; clean up the pages to show only the pieces of information we want. This might require a custom View.

Selecting Drupal for McNiff Plumbing & Heating

I've been helping a local service provide, James McNiff of McNiff Plumbing & Heating improve his website. When we started, his site was a single page, over 60 keywords, and practically no inbound links. Website Grader gave it a 7 out of 100

My first work was to try and touch as little as possible and clean up the HTML so that the site was more search engine friendly. It was actually less time to re-implement the site in clean HTML with CSS, but it was still one page and still was lacking on the SEM side. Website grader raised it to an 8 out of 100.

Version 2 broke the single page into three pages, Home, Services, Comments and to add a rudimentary Contact form. I like working in Ruby on Rails, but his hosting provide charged extra for that application, so I used ROR to generate the web pages, captured them statically and uploaded the static content to his provider. Website grader raised it to a 12 out of 100.

Adding listings to his services and website to some business directories has helped, raising his score to 15.

However, Mr. McNiff didn't really like to content, which had been carried over from the original site and he wanted to be able to add pictures to his site. Given my interest in Drupal, I thought this was a perfect application for trying Drupal.

The hosting provide had a control panel installer for installing Drupal, which set up the MySQL database and installed Drupal 6.14. Here is a list of the modules that I added to begin configuring the site:

• Admin Menu
• Advanced Help
• CCK
• Devel
• FCKEditor
• Google Analytics
• IMCE (for image upload)
• INT Meta
• Webform (although the Contact module looks sufficient)

Please note, that as of this posting, the Drupal site is hidden. As soon as it's ready, I'll swap Drupal to the HTML root and archive the current site.

Next up, a bit about configuring Drupal for a site with essentially static content.

Installing Spree eCommerce

I'm looking to update a website that was written in a decent, but not great website creator application. I want to write it in Rails (yea!) because I had such great fun creating the Zepatter.com website. I mean, that took less than 12 hours from sitting down with the GIMP to getting the application installed on the hosting environment. And a huge chunk of that 12 hours was figuring out how to get the hosting environment configured correctly. hehe.

So, I'm looking for an eCommerce engine for Rails. Yes, I could create the whole shopping cart and payment gateway on my own because there are tons of tutorials and general advice. However, I suspect that if I could find a full-featured engine, then someone else will have thought of -- and solved -- problems that will take me time to recognize and address.

So I came across Spree eCommerce.

However, I haven't updated Rails on my system in a while and Spree requires Rails 2.3.2. So I start by doing a

sudo gem update rails

which gets me to Rails 2.3.4. However, Spree wants 2.3.2 ONLY. So I remove Rails 2.3.4 and install 2.3.2. Then I install Spree according to the instructions. Then I try to create my first Spree application with:

spree mystore

Unfortunately, I got this error:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:578:in `report_activate_error': RubyGem version error: hoe(1.5.3 not >= 1.8.0) (Gem::LoadError)

OK. No problem. Need to update hoe

~/src:sudo gem update hoe
Updating installed gems
Updating hoe
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError)
hoe requires RubyGems version >= 1.3.1

OK. No problem. Need to update gem. After all,

~/src:gem --version
1.2.0

So I do the following:

~/src:sudo gem update --system
Updating RubyGems
Nothing to update

OK, this may be a problem. Referring to the rubygems documentation, one needs to do the following:

gem install rubygems-update
update_rubygems

However, this failed with:

~/src:sudo update_rubygems
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:578:in `report_activate_error': Could not find RubyGem session (>= 0) (Gem::LoadError)
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:134:in `activate'
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:158:in `activate'
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:157:in `each'
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:157:in `activate'
 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:49:in `gem'
 from /usr/local/bin/update_rubygems:18

Mark Howe has a helpful blog on the matter.

In the end, the trick was to uninstall the partly installed rubygems 1.3.5, install rubygems 1.3.4, then do the

update_rubygems

And all was well. I was able to update hoe and then successfully run

spree mystore

How to Get Real in Corporate Development, Part VI

This is the sixth part of a series of essays on how to leverage the concepts of Agile software product development from Getting Real from 37signals in a corporate development organization. Part I introduces the concepts of Getting Real, part II looks at the idea of building less, part III is on focusing on one idea, part IV is on getting something functional out quickly and part V talks about focusing on how your users will use the application.

Now it's time to look at:

Focus on fulfilling business stories, not big specification documents.

In my 20+ years of technology experience, I have seen this as being the biggest and most pervasive problem. And I understand that it comes from a very valid perspective from the engineering community.

Engineers can not easily manage huge amounts of change to requirements. Imagine building a bridge if the length of the span changes weekly, the material under the footings shift regularly and the sponsor wants the bridge in steel; no, titanium; no, wood; no, aluminum; no, steel -- you get the point. Therefore, engineers seek to define the requirements and get agreement and sign-off on those documents so they can build something once. Plus, we all know that change gets more expensive as a project progresses, especially if you have a waterfall or spiral approach. All that inflexible foundation work is very expensive to change. (Another reason to stay light and agile!)

Because of the cost of constant change, engineers push to define requirements up front so that they know what to build and where to start. They require definitions, use cases, scenarios, storyboards, and so forth. From this collected material, they define the grand scheme, break it down into delivery phases and get agreement and sign-off. Again, they want to build something once.

The flaw with this approach is that the requirements cannot be entirely known in advance. Therefore, just as soon as the project starts, the huge requirements specification is out of date. I once worked on a project with over one thousand distinct requirements. Because we were inventing new science and technology while producing a commercial product, the requirements churn was huge. We touched every single requirement dozens of times; the requirements churn topped 1000%!! That's like writing over 10,000 requirements! It was nuts!

Here is the fix: Focus on business stories. Start with the most important story. It works like this.

The business problem is, "We have to generate an inventory spreadsheet daily by running a report in our inventory management software (IMS), copying the date and transforming it into Excel, then cleaning up the data by re-arranging the columns and saving it as a semi-colon delimited file so it can be emailed to the web services group so they can update the inventory counts on the website. Errors and delays in the process can mean displaying products as in-stock when they are currently back-ordered, which annoys customers."

The business story becomes, "We want to automate the daily inventory reporting from our IMS to our web server to increase accuracy, decrease information turn around time, and free business resources for other work."

I can immediately see a number of ways to do this, from using whatever automation exists within the IMS to generate and send that report, or accessing the IMS database directly with a custom report, or using the IMS database programmatic API to write an automated application to pull the data and update the web database, or to make the web database read its data from the IMS database live, or on a daily batch bases, or exposing a web service so the data can be pushed into the web database. I bet you have a few more options.

The take away is that solving the technical problem isn't usually the problem. The problem is solving the correct business problem. Getting bogged down with a huge requirements document doesn't make solving today's problem go any faster and doesn't produce a solution to today's problem any faster.

So, how would I apply this advice to that huge 1000% churn project? Well, the biggest constraint was that we had to produce a commercially shippable product. A goal was to create a single architecture that could be leveraged along the future product line. However, since we were creating new technology and a new command and control system, we set the bar too high.

The immediate business story was to operate the machine and provide a sufficiently flexible control system that would allow for the scientific invention to continue without requiring huge software re-writes. Today, I would drop the goal that we create an architecture that could handle future demands. The project was already very challenging without that goal and we ended up pulling out all the infrastructure that was built to handle that goal anyway, just to get the first product to ship.

We made the classic mistake of solving tomorrow's problem before solving today's problem. You can avoid that mistake by focusing on the business stories that you have today and not creating that huge, over-arching requirements document that will doubtlessly saddle you to a very sizable ball and chain.

Weebly does web sites wite! Uh, Right!

I came across Weebly while reading some blog posting and recalled a conversation that I had recently with Jennifer Lee, the owner of A Doggone Good Life. Jen was a great program manager with a client of mine years back and is now a very happy entrepreneur pursuing her dream.

Jen and I were talking about some web-business ideas things, so when I read about Weebly and the professed ease with which one is able to create new websites, I had to give it a shot. After all, I've used web-site builders over the years. My general take-away is that they all sucked, sucked, sucked.

I tried Word to HTML generation (puke). I tried PDF to web-site generators (retch). I tried WYSIWYG generators (pain). I tried 1and1.com website builder (oh, boring ick). I tried NetObjects (workable, but still a PITA) and ColdFusion (there's a tool, but you need to be a serious web-head to make something worth while). The best was still coding a site by hand (slow and painful to revise) until one added some code generation (PHP, which apparently means "Powerful; Help Please") and Ruby on Rails (rocks).

The technically-light web entreprenuer does not want to learn coding paradigms, so out go PHP, ROR, ColdFusion, etc. What's left is for them to hire a company ($$) and pay them to maintain the site ($$$) or hire some full time staff ($$$$).

Nope, no more. Weebly makes very attractive and highly functional websites. SEO goodness, tags, sub-pages, custom HTML (for your easy shopping-cart functionality with PayPal). Also available are two-column layouts, YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, forums, audio, a scheduler for your service-based organization, Google Adsense and Analytics, and an API to build custom widgets which your users can use on their Weebly sites.

There's enough serious good stuff that doesn't require a deep engineering background to grock to make me say, "Weebly is a great start".

Plus, Weebly will give you a FREE subdomain, or let you purchase a domain from them, or even let you use your existing domain (They even have instructions to point your domain from GoDaddy or 1and1 to their servers).

Oh, and let's mention that you can get started with a real website, e-commerce capable, with a blog and everything for FREE. Yes. Free. As in "you do not have to pay anything ever". They make their money on the premium services. And, the upgrade to Pro wasn't expensive. Something like $5 per month. Seriously, that's way cheep.

Check it out. I fast forwarded myself many years into the future and built a fantasy website called "Doggie Heaven" that I may actually do some day in the far, far future. I added some e-commerce functionality (don't actually buy anything, OK?) and a blog in only a few minutes.

There are a bunch of very servicable templates and I love the way elements are dragged and dropped onto the page for layout.

Very impressive, congratulations Weebly.

How to Get Real in Corporate Development, Part V

This is the fifth part of a series of essays on how to leverage the concepts of Agile software product development from Getting Real from 37signals in a corporate development organization. Part I introduces the concepts of Getting Real, part II looks at the idea of building less, part III was on focusing on one idea and part IV was on getting something functional out quickly.

In this essay we look at:

Start with the UI design and focus on how your users will use your application.

Lots of experienced engineers like to start with the UI. A new project brings a geyser of ideas and concepts that make the fingers itch to start writing code. So, mockups, prototypes and proofs of concepts are often the first things to come out.

Good! Almost.

Don't let your engineers close themselves in a room for the four weeks that they have and create something they love. The rest of the sentence is the key -- "focus on ... your users ..."

In "Getting Real", the folks at 37signals assume they are writing an appliation for the outside to use. They don't have an opportunity to sit with their most important users when creating something new. But you do! This is where the corporate environment make Getting Real better than the original. You're making software for your business, you and your users are the domain experts. You don't need to go outside. Lucky you!

Get your engineering team (2 really good engineers and a kick-ass business analyst) in the same room as the key stakeholders -- the folks who will use this new system. Understand the business problem (Focus on One Idea) by talking to the users and examining the problem they need solved.

Have the team work through what they need to do. What tasks are grouped to gether logically? What actions are done most of the time? What actions are done only a small fraction of the time? Make the application fix the problem elegantly. That way, the team has to Build Less and will be able to Get Something Functional Deployed Quickly.

Start light. Whiteboard and sketches. Wireframes and light-HTML. Test the process. Can the users do their important tasks quickly and easily? Can they see how they get to the additional features that they don't use every day?

Put the most important information right in the middle. Make sure that new state, the populated state and the error state are considered. Ensure the engineers make the application behave appropriately when it encounters something unexpected. Leave out what doesn't belong to do the task (who cares if it's a "standard" menu item?). Put in everything important. Leave out everything else.

Match and support what the users need to do, then go and make it happen. Start with the UI. Not the UI and the database, just the UI. Not the UI and the object model, just the UI.

The engineers will have a clearer idea of what's important. They will have proven the work flow that they are about to implement. The users will have increased confidence that what will be produced will really help them.

Can you just imagine the response when the first version comes out a few weeks later? Hey, please write and let me know! I don't want to do this in a vacuum!

Thanks again for reading! In the next essay, we'll talk about how to use business stories.

How to Get Real in Corporate Development, Part IV

This is the fourth part of a series of essays on how to leverage the concepts of Agile software product development from Getting Real from 37signals in a corporate development organization. Part I introduces the concepts of Getting Real, part II looks at the idea of building less and part III was on focusing on one idea.

Next, we talk about structuring the project to quickly produce working code. So here it is:

Get something functional and usable deployed quickly. Plan on your next release right away. Make a choice and go with it.

Constraints are what drive a project. If you had unlimited time and money, you would probably never produce anything, as ironic as that may sound. You need limits to focus you on getting something done. My triathlon training buddy and I like to say that we "train to race and race to train" because without the race date, it's too easy to sleep in instead of hitting the pool at 5:00 AM. Constraints drive us.

So, pick one of your projects and give it to a small group of good engineers. Tell them they have four weeks to produce the first version that the business can use, but then they'll have four more weeks to produce the next release. And close the door.

They will focus on building less and implementing one idea. It's all that they'll have time for. Meanwhile, let the business know that the first iteration will be ready for use in four weeks and that the engineers will need their feedback to produce the second iteration.

Your job is to get out of the way and make sure the engineers have the tools, access and permissions they need to do their work. Herein lies additional opportunity.

Perhaps there are procedure and process documents in your organization. Perhaps there is a PMO and a review committee. Perhaps you have strict regression testing requirements for deployments. Perhaps, under normal circumstances it would take your small, Agile group of engineers four weeks just to get permission to connect to the database they need to fulfill this project.

Your opportunity is to fix this. Yes, security and access control is critically important. But, we're in the 21st Century, aren't we? Network directories with access control list are mature technologies and are probably in your organization. Are your Oracle databases set up to take advantage of your LDAP infrastructure? They should be. And no one better exists than you to make it happen.

Your organization should have four environments:

• Development -- open and flexible for the developers to do anything. Developers should work in both Debug and Non-Debug environments. Don't accept "Well, it worked on my machine."
• Test -- mirrors production, but allows developers to see everything in the system.
• Staging -- mirrors production as closely as possible
• Production -- full security and access controls.

Using virtualization, farms, and similar techniques can keep this from being a horrible amount of overhead. The key is that you need to unlock your most productive engineers. Now is a good time to note that not all of your engineers are your most productive ones. Make sure your less productive engineers are fully supporting your most productive ones. There are opportunities for training and mentoring, which build employee satisfaction and loyalty, but let's get back to getting functional software out.

How many times have you already read that a skilled and senior engineer is many times -- 10 times, 15 times, 20 times -- more productive than a junior engineer? So, we don't need to say it again. Nope. Not going to say it. Na-uh.

So then, just how will this work? Well, let's start off by looking at the typical process. The business has an urgent need. Something like, "they spend a huge amount of time running end of month reports and small errors in the data cause regular heroics."

In the typical process they fill out an Application Enhancement Request or New Application Request or some such like that. This gets reviewed at the next Application Review Committee meeting and goes back to the requester for more details. Two weeks go by for the out and back trip and the ARC approves the request. The next week a project manager and business analyst are assigned to it. They take two weeks to gather requirements, another week to create a Statement of Work and one more to have that approved by the stakeholders. The following week, a project team is assembled while the analyst writes the Functional Specification. The stakeholders don't even bother reading that.

We're up to, um, nine weeks. The team takes two months to write the application, three weeks to test it, one week to slot it into deployment and, lo and behold! More than five (5!!) months later, the application is first released. The users try it and file a new Application Enhancement Request to get it to do all the things that they need and eliminate the stupid things that crept into the application. Time to happy users: 9 months.

Here's how we want it to run:

First, you've addressed the infrastructure, you have the governance in place to enable rapid development and you've now paired your best engineers with the business users we just talked about. They meet for one day and use up another afternoon or two. In four weeks the first release is out and in use. In four more weeks the next version comes out and fixes the big problems with the first release and adds a few more features. One more four week period and the business has something that really works for them. Time to happy users: 3 months.

Even if you give this team another three iterations -- that would be a total of six (6!) releases, it would still be 66% of the duration of the Same Old Way, which would have produced 2 releases. Which application do you think would be better? The one that had six tight, focused releases, or the other one? There is no doubt in my mind.

You need to have really great developers to do this. But then again, nothing outstanding was built by mediocre engineers. You need an infrastructure that enables these really great engineers. You still need to have proper governance, SOPs, checks and balances to put software into production, but you can get the work done much, much faster by Getting Real. And this will generate real value for your company.

Thanks again for reading! In the next essay, we'll look at starting with the UI.

How to Get Real in Corporate Development, Part III

This is the third part of an essay on how the concepts of Getting Real from 37signals can benefit development groups in corporate environments. Part I introduces the concepts of Getting Real and part II looks at the idea of building less. To build less, you need to select one problem to solve and focus just on that. Part I introduced this, so let's continue to look at that aspect.

Focus on one idea. Start with the big problem, build the large scale functionality and don’t sweat the details.

One challenge every development effort has is where to stop. That is, where to define the edge of the application. Otherwise stated as, "how far out from the core idea is it reasonable to extend?" For example, should the document handling system not only import PDF's, but generate PDF's and fax them?

One helpful concept is the constraint of time and budget. However, it is not uncommon in corporate development shops to have projects loose the continuity of effort that makes a strict delivery time or budget tracking approach overly challenging. Here is where having one focus pays of immensely.

The thinking is: We are going to solve only the problem at hand (Today's Problem). Building less gets us a solution more quickly. Focusing on the problem helps us meet the goal of solving only the problem at hand.

Engineers with are much easier to keep focused and on-task when they have a delivery due in only a few weeks. Assigning a single, short-term purpose accomplishes this. Part of the standard challenge in corporate development shops is that the an engineer wears many hats as she maintains existing applications, develops one or more concurrent projects, and concurrently designs and plans future applications.

Switching between different types of tasks is a known productivity killer. The well-known blog by Joel on Software lays out the trouble with human task switching. You know it yourself, having your concentrated thought process interrupted is, literally, disruptive. For your team, this means that they need quite, private work spaces, few meetings during sprints, and very long periods of uninterrupted time. It also means you need to keep their plates clear of other tasks.

When you do this, your engineers will be able to stay focused on delivering that one idea.

"Hmmm, good," you say, "but what is the correct one idea?" Good question. After all, "solve global poverty" is one idea, but it's obviously not at the right level.

You're looking for an idea that represents a specific business pain point with a solution that can be produced by a small team in a few quick iterations. Since your team of three engineers can't bang out a solution to global poverty in a few three-week sprints, it's not at the right level. (But you already knew that -- this was an illustration :-)

Let's try some on for size. "Create a portal that allows secure transmission of documents from customers to service representatives." Or how about, "Replace a key paper form with an internal website." Here's what each of these have going for them:

• Each of these have a good change of being produced rapidly in only a few iterations.
• They both address only one problem.
• They require one small application to successfully meet the business need
• They both are probably very well understood by stakeholders and engineers.

Given all this, there is very likely little risk of implementing the wrong software. Even if the end product doesn't work out completely, you have only invested a small amount of time and effort and you're team has more clearly illustrated the business need.

Are you thinking that you don't have any small, simple problems to solve? Are you thinking that you need complex applications to solve complex business problems? Are you thinking that there isn't any opportunity to do something small and elegant like this in your shop?

If you have any of these thoughts, or thoughts similar to them, please try an experiment. Find a key stakeholder at the line level. Perhaps a manager of customer service, or a project manager who executes key services repeatedly. Take them to lunch and ask them about the most challenging aspects of their work and the work their team or group does.

You will probably learn some things you didn't know. And some of what you learn could very well fall right into this camp of creating high-value for the business with a light, flexible, low-risk and low-cost development approach.

The next part is to work with wide brushes and big strokes. You're not looking for a whiz-bang gizmo that does everything. Get the big pieces right first. Now that you know about some business pain points (if you already knew some or knew the ones you talked about over that lunch, then kudos for you!), you're looking to address just that need. Nothing else right now, just that one need.

Yes, the fund accounting deals with mutual funds, 401(k)'s of mutual funds, annuities, closed-end funds, etc. But the bulk of the work is mutual funds. Or the bulk of the time is 401(k)'s. Or the bulk of the revenue is generated by something else. It's up to you to figure out, with your key stakeholders, what the most valuable problem to solve will be, then it's up to you to focus on that one factor.

The mandate you give your team is to fix just that one piece, make it better for the business and don't worry about the details. You will re-work and re-engineer as you dig down into the next set of priorities on upcoming iterations. But you will be providing a high-value solution in very short order, and that is worth more to the business in the long run.

Thanks for staying with me as we continue exploring the approach of Getting Real in your corporate development shop.

How to Get Real in Corporate Development, Part II

This is the second part of an essay on how the concepts of Getting Real from 37signals can benefit development groups in corporate environments. Exploring this mash-up is worthwhile because at first glance, there seems to be very little in common between the web-application, small-team, product bootstrap philosophy in Getting Real and the realities of corporate development teams. These realities include governance, oversight, processes, controlled systems and similar best practices. But pull the covers back a bit and enough similarities appear to make for a compelling argument. Let's dive right in and take a closer look at the key concepts from the first essay.

Build less. Build smaller applications with only the most important features and delivery it quickly.

This is sage advice because the corporate development life cycle is typically beset with serious birthing pains. Life cycles are heavy with process, stages, gate reviews and sign-offs. The corporate process inevitably includes requirements gathering and documentation, which involve meetings, drawings, documents and reviews. The requirements themselves transform from stakeholder statements to business requirements to technical requirements to design documents. After all that, there is finally the build, test, deploy, train, support and maintain functions. All to get one release to the business users.

Some problems with this model is that it takes too darn long and is too darn expensive. Half a year can pass filled with stakeholder interviews, document drafts, reviews, modifications and so forth that will ultimately produce a few dozen pages of specifications and diagrams. One team of stakeholders, business analysis and engineers can easily spend multiple person months or even a person year (or years) producing 60 pages. If you have a blended team salary rate of $90K, then each page costs $1,500. And you haven't built anything yet!

"No" you might be answering resolutely right now, "but we know know what to build! And we have a plan to build it."

True. I've worked this way too and I know that it helps to reduce the risk of development in the long run. You can plan for a three-phase development effort, get the budget lined up and all that. However, please consider an alternative.

Your team knew -- on day one -- what was the most important functionality needed. You, and they, don't need 6o expensive pages for that. Here's how it would work for you when you Get Real.

Two good engineers and a business analyst -- your development team -- meet with the key stakeholders. The stakeholders are asked to identify their top problems within the problem space. Then they have to choose only one. The top problem. Your development team ask enough questions to fully understand that problem and how it relates to the other top problems.

Then, they go away and produce something small to fix that top problem and only that top problem. This takes three weeks. After all, they are focused on only one key important problem.

Next, the key stakeholders begin to use the new application. After one week, the team reconvenes and the development team learns what works, what doesn't and what the next most important problem to solve is.

At this point, you've spent a tiny fraction of the expense and effort of that functional specification we taked about earlier and you have an application that, hopefully, solves an immediate business problem. If it doesn't, it has shone a big, bright light on that problem. How much longer do you think it will really take your development team to get it right? One more iteration? Two? Fine; because at that point three months will have gone by and you will have a demonstrable ROI. Compare that to a functional spec that takes six to nine months to write. You are seriously ahead of the curve.

OK, another valid concern is that when your development team learns about the next problem they will have to throw away a lot of what they've done. And they might. This is why we focus on solving one problem within the context of the larger scope. However, it is critical to solve only one problem at a time. Fix the problem you have today, not the problem you anticipate having tomorrow.

The way to do this is to build only what you need to fix that problem. Build less. What is the smallest, most elegant solution to the business problem?

Keep in mind that the business problem might not be the problem the users report. They may be unhappy with emailing spreadsheets around and want the population, generation and transmission automated. However, what they really need is a way to exchange and store information centrally instead of relying on spreadsheets.

Thanks for reading. We will continue to peel back this onion in the next essay on Getting Real in your corporate development shop.

Using Getting Real Concepts in the Corporate Office

The talented and intelligent folks at 37signals have created some great applications. As major contributors to Ruby on Rails, they also have been fundamental in building and leading a revolution in rapidly developed, high quality web applications. 37signals is successful because they think creatively about the problem that they are trying to solve. Fortunately for all of us, part of that thinking is that they should be open and transparent with many aspects of their process and business. Therefore, they often preach about the practices that have helped them attain success.

Anyone can read their preachings online. For free! It's a great concept, and one that is often encouraged by industry leaders -- think Seth Godin for one.

You can also purchase a high-quality bound copy of their book “Getting Real” from Lulu.com. I have because I like being able to read when not in front of the computer. It’s all laid out in their book (the exact same copy in the web pages, downloadable PDF or book) – their philosophical approach to clients, development, hiring, customer service, and so on.

When I became aware of 37signals , I was developing Ruby on Rails web applications. Because I was creating web apps, which is clearly the focus of the book and philosophy, I found myself agreeing with just about everything they were saying. And hey, I’m a software development veteran.

I’ve done this for years and years and have focused extensively on managing complex projects to successful deliveries. I’ve been through waterfall, spiral, iterative, agile, ad hoc, chaotic, random and panic-driven development models. I agreed with what they were saying because it makes sense and I was able to make it work successfully on my projects without any pain or difficult transitions. There aren’t many “new” development philosophies about which that can be said! For light, flexibile web apps, “Getting Real” made total sense and, more importantly, it worked.

But what about corporate environments with ongoing development efforts? These shops have a different set of starting points and different base assumptions. What if you aren’t developing a web app? What if you aren’t focused on revenue generation with your app? What if your users are waiting for their application and have expectations about how it will help them?

Can your corporate development efforts also Get Real? Yes, I believe that they can. let's look at the components of Getting Real that will help your corporate development teams use the principles from Getting Real to improve productivity and stakeholder satisfaction levels.

Let’s start with some of the key concepts of Getting Real that are directly beneficial for all development efforts. (Links are to the essays on those concepts)

1. Build less. Build smaller applications with only the most important features and deliver it quickly.
2. Focus on one idea. Start with the big problem, build the large scale functionality and don’t sweat the details.
3. Get something functional and useable deployed quickly. Plan on your next release right away. Make a choice and go with it.
4. Start with the UI design and focus on how your users will use your application.
5. Focus on fulfilling business stories, not big specification documents.
6. Keep your developers on the front line of support
7. Be willing to radically change the application to make it better. Resist the urge to make one monolithic tool to solve everyone’s problems at once.

Notice that these nuggets are completely environment, tool, and technology agnostic. There are some radical ideas that will doubtlessly shake up the “way things are done”, but these are the right ideas to grab onto and the right changes to make.

Fortunately, there are some components of Getting Real that an internal corporate development group can safely ignore right off the bat. For example, you’re probably not looking to generate revenue with something like an internal workflow enhancement tool. Not that you can ignore development costs or the value proposition of the development effort, but at least your users won’t be facing the prospect of paying a monthly fee. (Although, there may be something here….)

You can safely ignore the need to market and promote your application extensively. Please note the qualifier. The new whiz-bang tool you’ve developed for Operations is straight sunk costs if end users aren’t using it. Therefore, they do need to know about it and they should be excited about its arrival and feature set. But that should come from good communications and interactive product development and not from promotional marketing campaigns. Trumpeting successes is always allowed, however, so some allowance is made, but we’re not talking at all about the same degree of importance of marketing discussed in the book.

Most importantly, as you – the development lead, manager, director, VP, CTO, Whatever – read Getting Real, you can insert your favorite technology du jour whenever the book talks about web applications. The thrust of web apps in Getting Real is their rapid deployment and instant accessibility to customers. No CD burning, no distribution efforts, no retail operations, etc.

But let’s face it, how long does it really take to deploy a new version of an internally developed application in your shop whether it was written in C++, Java, Lotus Domino, C#, .NET or Ruby on Rails? If you’re thinking “weeks”, then you’ve got another problem, don’t you? You can quickly push out new applications through automated corporate update mechanisms, internal web sites and internal installers with the exact same degree of responsiveness that is the base assumption in the book So don’t sweat it that you’re not making a web app. The underlying philosophies in “Getting Real” remain pertinent, applicable and valid to you and can revolutionize your development centers.

The next essay will look at those seven take-away concepts in greater detail and will focus on how you can leverage these concepts to make high quality software faster.

SEO & SEM For C-Level Executives

I have encountered a number of C-Level executives (CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs in particular) who are looking for guidance on a number of aspects around effective web presences. At the heart of this issue is the need for a high-level understanding of SEO and SEM. So, for their benefit, as well as for the general benefit of the Netverse, I thought I would provide an overview to these topics.

We'll start by defining our terms. SEO is Search Engine Optimization, which generally refers to optimizing ones website and pages to enhance ones placement in search engine result pages (SERPs). This placement is often referred to as "organic" because it comes from work you do on your site. My feeling is that SEO is a bit of a misnomer. After all, webmasters are not optimizing any search engines, but rather optimizing their website. Digital Asset Optimization is a better term in my opinion, plus I like the way that DAO reflects Tao (The Way). But SEO is well understood, so let's stick with that.

SEM is the other hand to SEO, the Yang to the SEO Yin. SEM is Search Engine Marketing, which generally consists of purchasing keywords and marketing links to drive traffic to your site. The fine folks at icrossing have a white paper from March 2007 called "Search Synergy Report" which concludes that a combination of SEO and SEM is more effective than either approach singly. Here, over two years later, this is not a revolutionary thought, but rather part of the standard practices for many successful sites.

I would also like to mention that there is a vast sea of acronyms surrounding this dense area of Internet technology. Don't be put off by it. This is not rocket science, but rather an ongoing dance of search companies trying to determine the highest quality content while websites try to figure out what the search companies are looking for so they can appear to have the highest quality content. Dynamicism and change are the constants in this equation.

SEO & SEM In Brief

Enhancing a website for organic search optimization is still very straight forward and can be summed up as follows:

• Have a domain name that matches your industry and purpose.
• Have a clear focus for your site. Make that focus permeate through your site.
• Ensure that your pages (or posts) have the name of your site in a text form that can be read by spiders.
• Ensure that your keywords and meta description match your message.
• Ensure that your pages have great titles. A great title is clear and describes the content well.
• Obtain links by creating unique, distinct and high-value content. Then, participate as a good citizen by reading and commenting on blogs, posting articles that can define you as an industry and thought leader. Your bios on other sites should link back to your site.
• Each page or post should have a clear and consistent focus. Along with your descriptive title and heading, you should use consistent language in your pages and posts.
• Be conservative with your links out and cross links within your site.
• Use available tools to analyze and improve your site. DAO is an ongoing process, not a one time event.

Your SEO efforts will be supported by a thoughtful and consistent SEM practice. This practice should include:

• Active Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns across major search engines
• Active ad campaigns across major search engines
• Active monitoring of campaign returns, landing page conversions, and website utilization and traffic patterns

In spite of the vendors who promise top rankings in a day or less, the industry consensus is that quality sites are built over time. Consistency and focus are the most important elements. Supporting the delivery of your message with well-selected paid search marketing will increase the visibility over your site, but only quality and an unique value proposition will create sticky visits to your site.

My advice is to be a good netizen and create something of unique and real value to improve enhance the SERP position of your site. Pay attention to the mechanics of your site by focusing your message so that search engine crawlers can understand your message and weigh it appropriately. In summary, honest, hard work and attention to detail are at the heart of mastering SEO or DAO and SEM.

Ooooh, this makes me angry!

A substitute teacher in Connecticut has been found guilty of child endangerment because the PC in the classroom where she was substituting was unprotected, had been infected with viruses and adware, was displaying porn pop-up ads, and she was too much a computer neophyte (and computer-phobe to boot!) to know how to deal with the situation.

Here is where I learned about it: http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070222/#story0

Here is the NY Times story (tinyURL): http://tinyurl.com/255wq2

Finally, here is the blog her husband has made: http://julieamer.blogspot.com/

This is wrong on so many levels.

Samsung ML-1430 Won't Feed Paper

My printer had stopped feeding paper reliably a while ago. This had reduced me to manually pushing each sheet of paper into the machine until the roller caught it. Which, in turn, often resulted in many expletives directed towards said printer.

All in all I like the Samsung ML-1430, which has been discontinued. It was pretty inexpensive, the toner cartridges aren't too bad considering I really have gotten thousands of pages (at Staples, which has a wicked good customer loyalty program, IMHO).

However, after only two years, there is this feed problem. I found the answer in an Amazon posting (thank you brs for posting this). Here is the solution from there:

1. You need to rotate the rubber band on the feeder roll to a fresh surface. Start by turning off the printer, disconnecting it from power & data feed.
2. Remove the two screws from the back panel and press the small tabs to pull the back panel off.
3. Open the front of the machine and remove the two screws that hold the top panel in place. Take note of how the sheet feeder sits in this assembly. The sheet feeder is not screwed in, but rather held in by the other pieces.
4. Remove the toner cartridge and set aside.
5. There are four screws that go through the metal plate now visible at the top. Leave the wires connected and remove these screws. Take note that there is a grounding cable that needs to be reconnected.
6. You need to remove that top assembly, so take note of how the roller fits into the black tie rod that actually turns the roller. I found that lifting the unit up and sliding it to the right (as viewed from the back) disconnected the roller from the tie rod.
7. Remove one screw from the roller pickup assembly and disassemble the roller.
8. Note that one side of the rubber band is shinier than the other. This is the problem. Carefully work the rubber band off, rotate it 180 degrees and slide it back on to the roller.
9. Reassemble and test

This repair took less than 20 minutes and I expect that it will last another two years of rather heavy usage.

BTW, brs on Amazon also provided a repair part number: JC72-00109A. However, searching on Samsung for this part yielded nothing. I suspect this is due to the machine being discontinued.

Have fun!

Get Perpendicular

Hitachi has a great animation that does a superb job of explaining their new perpendicular storage model. Get ready for terabytes on your home system. Time for some big, fast pipes from hard drive storage to CPU.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

Hallelujah

Finally, finally, finally.

I got the new system up and running. It took only about two dozen installs, an hour or so of phone calls with Asus, an RMA with NewEgg (they really are wonderful!), slipstreaming SP2 into my SP1a installer, a new case with a larger power supply and nearly three weeks of elapsed time.

As I give the final answer, there will be sage nodding from those in the know. However, I hasten to point out (in my own defense) that the Asus people, both Level 1 and Level 2 tech support didn't help me to the final answer.

The final answer was.... (drum roll, please):

Use the latest drivers!

What do you mean, anti-climatic? Everyone knows that? Who? Tech support didn't. The folks on the forum didn't.

OK, I'll be less obtuse.

Asus tech support got me to the point of installing the latest BIOS and chipset drivers. The process is this: Update the BIOS at POST. Install the OS, then run the executable to update the chipset drivers. Every time, except the last, the PC would hang upon next boot. I had tapped out Asus. They really couldn't do more. I was using the latest BIOS and chipset drivers. However, the chipset is made by nVidia, so I went to their website.

Asus had version 6.65 for the Force4 chipset. nVidia had version 6.70. That seemed better so i downloaded it and used it. And it worked!

Yea! I don't have to RMA all the hardware and ship it back to NewEgg!

Yea! I finally built a machine after all these years.

Yea! I can once again say "I am geek"

Thanks for reading

Agony of DIY

Actually, I should call it "Agony of Duh"

It has to do with building a new computer. The foundation (the loss of the original machine and some of the difficulties) is described in another post, which I started to keep, ah, pleasure separate from business. However, since I had a good amount of business data on the lost machine, and I am considering merging blogs, I thought I would continue the tale here.

Briefly:

The motherboard support CD-ROM was bootable. Who knew? It certainly wasn't documented anywhere, not in any manual, not in a FAQ, not in a forum. The bootable motherboard CD can make the driver disk needed to install XP

Asus wins awards for a reliable motherboard, and for reasonably fast phone support, but looses big time on the whole "self-service" concept for the internet. The forums are really the worst I've ever experienced. First, they work only in Internet Exploder. Every time you click on a link for another area (Support, Download, Forum), a new browser window opens. The search in the forum will show you the question with the subject that matches your query, but none of the threaded answers to the question. Oh, and it seems like all the data is coming from Asia b e c a u s e i t i s s o s l o w.

Here's the real beef. After going through the pain of making a RAID driver disk (see the other story for that fire drill!), the system boots up (YEA!!). Time to update Windows (I have XP-Pro SP1a). Need a network controller device driver. Pop in the support CD. Install the drivers.

There are three checkboxes (nVidia SMBus Driver, nVidia Ethernet Driver, and nVidia IDE Driver). The IDE Driver install gives me severe warnings and then says that I probably don't need to install it after all, 'cause the Microsoft one works just as well. That's OK, I'm in for a penny, in for a pound, so I say "Yes" to everything.

Heck, I even install the built-in Firewall and one other do-hickey when the prompt comes up. Reboot. Hang.

Yup, something broke the install.

Re-install, quick-format, boot, install only the Ethernet driver (cause I've done this before and know that one builds a Windows system one piece at a time, if it don't work out of the box). Reboot. Hang.

Much searching, time on the phone with Asus. Mobo (that's the cool term) is defective. RMA, new board, repeat one mo' time. Reboot. Hang.

More phone time with Asus. Slipstream SP2 into my 1a installation CD, burn a new CD, do the whole thing again. Reboot. Hang.

Pull the mobo out of the case to elminate electromagnetic interference (EMI). Re-install, reboot, hang. This will be funny one day.

Meanwhile, days are slipping by, bills are starting to pile up, yada yada.

On the phone with Asus, my case get elevated to Level 2. In a single two minute phone call, the technician says that I need to have -- get this -- all three check boxes checked. Yup, the drivers are a set and must always get installed together. I mean, doesn't this beg the obvious question of why, oh why, are there checkboxes? DUH!!

At this point (ATP, for you old time coders), system is SP2 with a network. I'm going to put the the whole kit and kaboodle back into the case and see if it will still work.

Wish me luck.

And Computers, too -- Installing XP on ASUS A8N

Our computer died last Sunday. I'll tell that story another time. Right now, I want to crow about the new computer.

For context, I'll mention that the old computer was about six years old, a Dell 700 MHz. Rather pokey by today's standards. I missed building my own machine, and since things are tight, but I run my company from that machine, so I decided to build my own. When I priced it out, I realized that I could build, for under $900 shipped, what would cost $1600 assembled.

To keep this to a reasonable length, here are the key facts: The motherboard is an ASUS A8N-E. The motherboard has a built in RAID controller that supports RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 1+0.

The challenge -- and the point of this post -- was getting the Windows XP install started.

Naturally, the XP installer needed the driver for the new RAID controller. The motherboard came with a CD-ROM with drivers (many drivers). After realizing that none of the three laptops in the house have a floppy drive and running over to Staples to get a USB floppy, I put the CD-ROM into the drive and was horrified to see that it wouldn't run. It reported "Can't load ASCDDMI.DLL" So I put it into my wife's laptop, which has a optical drive in a drive bay, compared to my laptop, which has a USB CD-ROM. In my wife's laptop, the CD-ROM loaded the ASUSACPI.exe, but it reported "Detect no proper item" and didn't give me the option of creating a driver disk.

So, I had to find which of the drivers I should use from the CD-ROM. As we all know, using the wrong driver can have consequences ranging from the innocuous (it didn't work) to the terrible (ruins the hardware). I didn't want to risk the latter.

I searched the ASUS technical forums, which I found really quite bad, for help. There were a few postings on which files to use, or the contents of which directory to use. However, the directory structure of the CD-ROM didn't match the directory structure listed in the technical articles and postings, and the suggestions didn't work. The XP installer kept prompting for the hardware drivers.

Oh, and when I did find a list of detailed instructions for installing a RAID driver, it was too much information -- there were 10 different RAID controllers listed, and no way to determine which RAID controller is on my motherboard! Oy Vey!

So I guessed. I guessed that since I was using SATA hard drives, that I would want the SATA RAID drivers from the Windows XP directory.

Here's the summary:

Asus A8N-E Motherboard, revision 2.00, BIOS 4.84
Support CD-ROM "NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Serices support CD Rev.99.06"
2 Maxtor DiamondMax SATA 100 MB hard drive

I used the drivers from the following directory:

[CD-ROM]:\Drivers\Chipset\WINXP\IDE\WinXP\sataraid

I copied all the files from this directory onto a formatted floppy and the XP installer found the two drivers necessary -- just as the instructions said it would. We are 95% done formatting the RAID array and I am happy.

Or at least, I will be happy until the next problem.

Thanks for reading!