Webcast: Connecting Conversations, Requirements, Construction, and Testing

Robert Bogue October 13, 2006 No Comments

Today I had the pleasure of delivering a presentation entitled: Connecting Conversations, Requirements, Construction, and Testing to the Indianapolis Quality Assurance Associations’ symposium. During that talk I promised to make the slides and a web cast (link removed) version of the material available.

The presentation focuses on the need to connect conversations through requirements, design, construction, and testing. Learning how to make sure that everyone knows what they need to know — and eliminating all of the disconnects beween the different parts of the process can make software development easier, and more fun. Learn how to eliminate those awkward situations where development builds something, quality assurance says it fails, and development insists that it matches the requirements. It can also help you identify gaps in the requirements document before they get out of hand.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback. Send me an email (as comment spammers have made me turn off comments.)

Article: More Effective Requirements Gathering with Microsoft OneNote

Robert Bogue October 8, 2006 No Comments

The requirements gathering process is very difficult. Getting the information from the subject matter experts and packaging it into a coherent set of thoughts that the architect and developers can understand is among the hardest parts of developing software.

There’s been little help with this process over the past few decades as we’ve struggled with other tools, techniques, and technologies in the rest of the software development process. For most folks the technology of requirements gathering has remained a pen and a pad of paper. However time tested this may be it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of efficiency and the ability to completely capture what the subject matter expert is saying.

Microsoft’s OneNote tool may be the perfect replacement for the pen and paper. With its ability to create outlines, add flags, and highlight it’s like Microsoft Word, which some hard-core functional analysts have used to take notes, with a few enhancements. When you add in the ability to record audio and create screen clippings you now have a platform that can change the way that requirements are gathered.

More…

WebCast: Defining Your Own Software Development Methodology

Robert Bogue September 29, 2006 No Comments

A few weeks back I did an on-line web cast for Jupiter Media on “Defining Your Own Software Development Methodology” If you missed the event and want to pickup the on demand version, it’s available at http://www.jupiterwebcasts.com/_archives/2006/webcast_09-19-06/index.html.

The web cast talks about what methodologies are, how they are made up, some common techniques you can use, and how your software development methodology may relate to others.

Webcast: Get Your SharePoint Project Started Right

Robert Bogue September 29, 2006 No Comments

SharePoint projects can be complicated animals. Knowing how to make the project successful is more complicated that making a roll out of Microsoft Office successful and is more challenging than writing a small application. I’ve been giving a presentation for the past year or so that discusses how to get your SharePoint project started off right (and a little bit of how to recover it if it goes astray).

I’ve packaged that presentation and am making it available as a webcast. You can now see and hear the “Get Your SharePoint Project Started Right” presentation at the link provided (link removed). I was able to compress the content down into an hour but I’ll warn you it goes fast.

If you want the matrix referenced in the web cast use the contact me link to send me an email and I’ll get you a copy of it for free.

As always I appreciate any feedback you can provide on the content and on the delivery mechanism.

Experience: User names with spaces + MOSS 2007 = Bad and other thoughts

Robert Bogue September 22, 2006 No Comments

I thought I’d post a quick entry this morning to share a few things that I learned about MOSS 2007 in the last few days.

1) Don’t use spaces in your user names. While I can not say with absolute definitiveness that my issues with MOSS have been because of user names with spaces … I have a strong suspicion.

2) Log files for various operations can be found in the user’s temp folder (for the installation operations), under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS (for most of the web stuff), and in the computers application and system logs. There are a few things to note, check the computer’s event logs first. The good stuff tends to show up there. You may need to follow up with the logs in the 12 hive but at least you get a starting point. You can use central administration to turn up the logs. They get big quickly, but can definitely help you home in on problems.

3) If you’re trying to create an SSP and you don’t see a web application that you expect to see in the list, delete it — including the IIS site. It’s possible that the IIS site wasn’t created correctly. (This was the case for me recently.)

4) If you need to delete an SSP because it didn’t provision correctly you need to create another SSP first. Delete on the context menu will only be enabled after there is another SSP for the web application to attach to. Even doing a delete from the command line will fail until your web application has another SSP.

5) If you miss entering the load balanced address for a web application the first time through, you have to go to operations and alternate URLs, from application management you can’t change the URLs for the web application.

6) There’s still an unexplainable affinity to using host headers rather than IP addresses for provisioning sites. Don’t even both trying to use IP addresses with B2TR. When it provisions sites it will add the host headers in on the IIS site — even if you’ve already created it yourself.

Article: Convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge to ensure better application development

Robert Bogue September 21, 2006 No Comments

Anyone who’s ever developed an application from scratch knows that it’s difficult to fully understand the objective of the user or subject matter expert, when they describe the problem that the code is supposed to solve. It’s not a mystery that the requirements gathering process is a challenge. However, why it’s so difficult to get good requirements and what you can do about it are a mystery.

We review the objective of gathering requirements (or elicitation, if you prefer an agile moniker), what makes it difficult, and what you can do about it. To do that we need to examine: what tacit knowledge is, what explicit knowledge is, how to convert one to the other, and why you should care.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/convert-tacit-knowledge-into-explicit-knowledge-to-ensure-better-application-development/

Article: Fiddler Can Make Debugging Easy

Robert Bogue September 17, 2006 No Comments

Building web applications is hard work. There are so many things that can go wrong, so many technologies to learn, and so many issues that remain undiscovered because everything is designed to allow things to continue to work even when they’re not quite right. All of our fault tolerant design begins to work against us.

Most people remain unaware of precisely how their web application is interacting with the web browsers that their clients have installed. If analytics are present on the site then the number of requests ending in a 404 status (File not found) may be logged but identifying precisely why the client was requesting a page in the first place may be difficult or impossible.

This is where Fiddler, a free tool, can simplify the process substantially. Fiddler is a transparent proxy that automatically adds itself to the WININET chain so that it can see every request being made. It logs those requests and the responses to allow you to see what is working and what isn’t working.

http://www.developer.com/lang/jscript/article.php/3631066

WebCast: Using SharePoint Search to Find Information in Your Enterprise

Robert Bogue September 13, 2006 1 Comment

I’ve been giving a presentation live for 18 months or so. That presentation explains how SharePoint Portal Search works, shows you how to setup a search for content on your network, how to customize search results, and even shows you how to use SharePoint to search information in your custom applications.

There’s a lot of power in SharePoint Portal Server Search that most folks don’t leverage. Although the web cast focuses on SharePoint Portal Server 2003 you’ll find that many of the same concepts apply directly to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Since I can only be in one place at a time, I’m making the presentation available as a web cast. For now you can get the web cast here (link removed). If you are going to link to the content please link to this blog post as I may move the web cast in the future. (If I do I’ll update this post to reflect the new location.)

I hope you enjoy the presentation and I’d appreciate your feedback.

Link: Description of a new command-line operation that is available for the Spsadm.exe command line tool that you can use to clean up orphaned items in the configuration database in SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Robert Bogue September 7, 2006 No Comments

I’m slow on the uptake. I missed this when it came out. (I’m not sure how.) If you’ve ever had orphaned data in your SharePoint databases you want to check out KB918742.

You’ll know you have orphaned data because you can’t restore or delete a site. You are told that you can’t delete the site, but you can’t restore it either — because it already exists or at least part of it does.

Thanks to Chris Chapman for blogging about this.

Home Made Post Cards

Robert Bogue September 4, 2006 No Comments

Note: This is categorized personal. If you don’t want to see these subscribe to the professional category.

My son and my brother-in-law have a silly game where my brother-in-law pretends to eat my son’s feet. Don’t ask me how it started because I don’t know. However, my son as we were leaving started holding his feet up for his uncle to eat. Thus was born the idea of sending my brother-in-law a post card with my son’s feet on it.

Loving a challenge, I figured out a way to create our own post cards. First, take some pictures and make a 4×6 print. (I don’t have a photo printer here at home since I can never make the math work out right so I had to stop by Target.) For the sake of argument, let’s call the cost 39 cents. Second, get a 4×6 index card (blank). It cost me about 1 cent for the index card. Third, spray mount (or glue) the index card to the back of the print. I have no idea on a cost for this one so we’ll call it 10 cents. Fourth, write the addresses on the back left side of the index card. (or cheat like I did and use your label maker — it prints postal delivery point barcodes so hopefully the post card won’t get too lost.) Fifth, write your message on the other side of the card. Finally, add a postcard stamp to the card and mail it. The current postal rate for a post card at 4×6 is .24 cents.

The net of this is for somewhere around 65 cents you’ve sent a cute (and sometimes strange) message to family and friends.

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