February 15, 2018

Monolithic Rollouts of Legacy System Replacements

in: Business, Developers, Programming, Software Tagged: business, business efficiency, business productivity, consulting, custom software, custom software development, Programming tag, software development, softwares, solution design

Legacy system conversion projects are always challenging. Rollout strategy can make a huge difference in successful user adoption and overall project success. Only when I began writing them down did I realize that I had recurring dreams.  I had believed that my dreams were largely random and varied, but instead I learned that I had […]

September 18, 2017

User Support Isn’t Always a PICNIC

in: Developers, Programming, Software Tagged: Developers, software development, softwares, tech support, technical support, testing, user support

It’s easy to assume that someone needing user support is not using the application correctly. What if there really is a bug? We’ve all seen the acronyms from user support techs: ID-10-T errors, PICNIC, PEBKAC, and so on. On the one hand, they’re pretty mean-spirited (but kinda funny). On the other hand, who can blame user […]

August 4, 2017

How to QA for a Consulting Firm

in: Business, Developers, Programming, Software Tagged: QA, quality assurance, software development, testing

ONE:  Don’t just “break the system” I remember my very first QA task when I started here three years ago.  I was testing a client’s internal employee management system.  I had never tested anything before, so I asked my project manager, “How should I QA the software?  What does that mean?”  He answered simply: “Do […]

May 16, 2017

Naming Things is Hard

in: Programming, Software Tagged: computer science, Programming tag, software development

So What? “There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” – Phil Karlton. The above quote, while somewhat tongue in cheek, wears the ring of truth.  Naming things is hard.  Even when you put enormous effort into consistent and clear naming, you will invariably end up with some muddy […]