Tony Semana - Semantechs

Website Redesigns - IA vs. Functions

2005-10-02T19:07:00.000-05:00

Any company these days will want to have a public website. In Signal vs. Noise, the blog from the folks at 37signals, we’re given a timely post around a site’s role in the company. Here’s a clipping from Site Persona:

Your site should be your best employee. It should be the most knowledgeable, most polite, friendliest, and most useful member of your team. It should have the best grasp of language and the ability to clearly explain who it is and why it’s there to help you. It should especially have good people skills.

I want to point out that the majority of these objectives are accomplished by design-dependent decisions, and less so functionally dependent pieces. Which leads me to the core of this message; reviewing a company site for effectiveness against the described objectives is very important, and it’s not an uncommon decision that a site redesign is required to address a few shortcomings.

While this sounds simple and straight forward. It is unfortunately common that the reasons that drove the decision aren’t carried down to the planning of the redesign. It bears mentioning how many times drivers such as “It’s unprofessional, it’s hard to navigate, not intuitive, hard for first-time visitors to get sense of how to do things through the site” is brought to a redesign team and they say… “Great! We’ll scope a project with A, B, and C bells, and X, Y and Z whistles – a store locator, website content management, calculators for service fees and taxes –all functional pieces, and of course we’ll do some polishing up of the site and re-branding while we’re putting all these up”…

Yeah No, not so great. Concentrating on functional widgets that will be slapped into a website where the information architecture (IA) and usability are treated as third-class deliverables will most often perpetuate the original problems; it may continue to be hard to navigate, it may still be less than intuitive for first-time visitors, and if these issues remain true then it is definitely still unprofessional. “Hold on” you say, “Just because we’re adding function doesn’t mean we’re not looking at IA”. This may be true – and it depends on the people you’re depending on to handle the redesign. IA is less specifically mentioned by a redesign team when a) it is so in grained that it is a given or b) its actually not specifically recognized as a deliverable. In case of the first team, you would see a lot of discussion on user goals and profiling, intended calls to action, existing business structure. In the case of the second, you’ll see a list of features – mostly functional. Watch out for ‘b’, avoid.

Why should this be a concern? Because both pieces (building widgets and addressing IA/branding design) as deliverables represent– okay, should represent – comparable costs. A redesign that considers design as a byproduct of functional additions is well on its way to failure. This approach implies that the information on the sight prior to the redesign is invalid, useless. But somehow, the additions of the widgets will some how make the invalid information already there somehow valid again.

In the arena of IA vs. Functionality, Comment Roundup includes a description of information architecture in 10 words or less:

IA is Skeleton, Muscle, Bone
Design is Skin, Face, Hairstyle
Development is Nervous System, Brain

The first step is to stop counting function points as a metric for the effectiveness of a website redesign proposal. Clients looking for this work need to acknowledge, understand, and act on this truth.

A better-proven approach is looking at the current limitations of the site from the criteria set at the top of this post, and address what you need to do for clients to perceive your site (and therefore your service) as professional and trustworthy. If you’re going to call it a redesign, then make design a true deliverable. This does not preclude the need for new functional features, but it does require that every functional piece is built to support the goals of the site structure and not stand as self-contained goals themselves.

GTD Update and Managing Time

2005-09-22T19:46:00.000-05:00

Netcentrics has released GTD Outlook Addin update 2.1. GTD is the popular shorthand for "Getting Things Done", the work-life management sytem and book by David Allen. I adopted the GTD method just over a year ago and it's served me pretty well. YMMV.

The update itself installed with no problems, but I had installed the first so long ago that I forgot that I actually had made changes to the task views (color and filters etc), so when prompted whether to update the views my hair-trigger reaction foolishly clicked 'update all' before I thought about it. Small user-bug.

Having used for the whole day it's as polished as the previous version, a few comments:

Like: but haven't yet used, the fact that sub-projects are now implicitly supported. There are subtle changes but for the most part I was able to use it without breaking stride.
Like: being able to Send-and-File rather than having to create a task in order to file.
Strange behavior: Send-and-Delegate or and-File usage breaks down when multiple email composition windows are open. If you've opened multiple reply-to's, when you signal to send the task-creation and filing dialogue (current users know what this is) does not open - the email is sent, but don't know where the email is filed to, but the waiting-for task is not created.

Along the time-management line, I love the PocketMod. I wish I'd seen this during the 3-4 months that I was PDA-less holding out for my Treo650 - during that time my 'ubiquitous idea capture tool' (GTD-ism) was a stack of business cards alligator-clipped and stuck in my pocket. On the right side of the sight is a customizable pocketmod template tool. Sweeet.

http://www.netcentrics.com/
http://gtdsupport.netcentrics.com/learn/productUpdates.php
http://davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php
http://www.pocketmod.com/

Perspective

2005-09-21T04:50:00.000-05:00

It’s been a while, again, since the last post. It’s simply been a while since its felt appropriate to return to what is in perspective an excercise in self indulgence. A truly senseless tragedy touched one of our coworkers and that has, I think, hit very close to home for many of us. With utmost respect, and sympathy.

There is a sacredness in tears.
They are not the mark of weakness,
but of power.
They speak more eloquently
than ten thousand tongues.
They are the messengers
of overwhelming grief,
of deep contrition,
and of unspeakable love.
- Washington Irving

FitNesse, Persistence and Team Processes

2005-08-27T14:28:00.000-05:00

Our group just did a project debrief of our latest release. We went through our ‘worked well’ / ‘needs improvement’ discussions and, as I mentioned a few times, one of our ‘needs improvements’ was the fact that our FitNesse tests were allowed to fall into disuse. We’ve resolved as a team to getting these back in place.

A brief thread on the yahoo FitNesse group goes into the subject of handling acceptance testing and integrating persistence. I found Craig Demyanovich’s post on how his group handles it very useful, so I’m posting it here with his permission.

I'm working with a couple guys from ObjectMentor (lucky me!), creators of FitNesse, and we're doing mostly the same [mocking out persistence]. What's different is that our Acceptance Tests (ATs) always run against a database unless we specifically tell FitNesse to run them against in-memory containers. We control this with a custom variable, containerType:

...
!define containerType { database }
...

It's values are either database or inmemory.

We decided to do it this way because we always want the ATs to reflect how the application will be used: with a database. Also, when we were running ATs with the in-memory containers, we found that we forgot to
implement some things in the database container classes. We'd rather not have that happen again during a demo or a release!

To test things like SQL statements, we use Unit Tests (UTs) for our database container classes. ATs verify higher-level behavior: tell the application to manipulate a thing, save it, recall it and verify it.

We maintain our own databases. Our DBA has given us one for integration, and we each have one on our own machines. We have full control over them in terms of schema and data. We work against our own machines (UTs and ATs) until we're ready to integrate. Then, we run the ATs against the integration database. We control to which database we connect via a settings file for our application (though NUnit helps us here with its NUnit project concept). Finally, we track our database schema in Subversion in both a master script (create a database from scratch) and upgrade scripts (to move a database from one version of our application to another). Doing so makes it easy for us to create a new database or upgrade our local, integration and production environments.

Andy Hunt has started a new podcast. Cool

2005-08-24T19:52:00.000-05:00

Andy’s got 2 podcasts so far. One is an excerpt from the upcoming Pragmatic Bookshelf book Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby. The book is slotted for release on Sept. 15th, and I’m really looking forward to reading it.

The other podcast, "We the people" touches on the importance of the people in software development: being the raw material for a team's success, your ability to communicate well and learn quickly is key.

While I agree completely in both cases, I keyed specifically on the learning. This applies to any industry, field, or position.

listen to it here.

I know that I expect and depend on my ability to learn and adapt quickly above anything else. I was lucky to recognize this pretty early, and so had taken some time to look specifically at how I learn, and what techniques and methods work for me. That investment has serverd me very well so far - I’ll post a few resources in this area a little later.

I absolutely believe that your ability to learn translates directly into your ability not only to build on what you already have, but more importantly to begin anew if you had to. How many paths (or professions) have you walked down? If you really had to, could you leave the one you’re following now, and go to the beginning of another? How confident do you feel when you can honestly answer 'Yes'.

Blitzkrieg Testing and One Test Per Feature

2005-08-19T19:24:00.000-05:00

UPDATE 9/22/05: Jared's posted a pointer to this entry as an example of the Blitzkrieg Testing method. I humbly welcome everyone, thanks for looking and as Jared says, Enjoy!

Jared Richardson points to Johanna Rothman's blog post on a method of jumpstarting what Jared coins Blitzkrieg Testing. In this post I describe our experience with the technique (though I was not aware of the formalized name).

Jared's Blitzkrieg Testing essentially proposes a process of installing critical automated testing coverage where none originally existed. Key points in this style of testing:

Aim for breadth, not depth. If you're testing a portal product that has ten main pages, write a test that logs in, visits a page, verifies the page, and then logs out. You've written the equivalent of a "Hello world!" program for that page. Next, add the same type of test for every page in your portal ... your preferences page, configurations, content pages, and so on. The point here is to run across the product and create a basic test for as many areas as you can.
Don't get stuck in any one area. You don't want to dig in; you want to roll across the country in a tank!

Johanna's post recommends a similar practice in incorporating one test for each feature in the smoke test.

Interestingly enough, not having read Jared's formalized description prior to tonight, our group still saw how effective the practice was during our latest release cycle: I had mentioned previously that we wrap our business logic into FitNesse acceptance tests. That needs clarification: we did manage to do this for a few cycles previous to this one, but this last release developed from an amalgamation of 3 concurrent initiatives, 1 of which was maintaining the FitNesse tests, the other 2 were not. New team members were unfamiliar with the FitNesse or the specific fixture code and various pressures didn't allow us to back-track into familiarizing them with it. The other risk factor during this release: was a decision I made to switch our UI testing tool from Selenium to Watir a very short time ago, yes in the middle of this release cycle. Now it may sound strange, making that decision while automated acceptance tests would be left broken. We were essentially compounding the issues by switching UI coverage tools mid-stream. Well let's just say that once it was clear our UI tests would be our product's "testing vice" I had ramped up my use of Selenium but ran into maintenance and simple implementation issues that left me very nervous about putting all my eggs in that basket. Luckily, this is also when I found out about Watir for Ruby. As a test of Watir, I recreated our base UI-driven test of logging into the system using every combination of User Type, Access Level, and User Origin (our web application customizes the features available to users according to these parameters) and tested that navigation to each of the feature pages was successful for each login. This is the standard hook-in test that we run to verify that access and page availability is there on our system, and sounds a lot like the process that Jared describes above.

I had that going so painlessly that I was sold on Watir, so I continued to build on that login code to account for major functional features (client CRUD functions and basic transactions) to cover at a very high level the critical existing pieces. And from there I added a test to cover each of the new features being added in the release.

From there I experienced what Jared describes as momentum: we made a mind-map of the application on whiteboards where we listed major components branching to features, then branching to nodes, then branching to business rules. We traced on it the branches where our blitz had provided coverage, and then prioritized which areas needed to be given coverage next, and which could not be covered with automation and would therefore require greater attention from our exploratory manual testing effort.

Now, would I recommend doing away with any existing tests just to go through this experience? Definitely not: I sorely missed the practice of writing FitNesse tests as specifications by example and not just as automated tests. Having these back in place is my current priority. I am also very aware that many of the tests now placed in the UI script would be better placed in the FitNesse framework as business rule validations. Not to mention I was wickedly stressed until the release went into production (cleanly I might add) last week.

All said and done, we had rebuilt basic coverage of the existing features and planned release features prior to the start of the testing cycle, and a good picture of what needed to be accomplished when the application was built into our test environment. Our testing cycle was still very short and effective because we knew where to focus our manual tests, integration bugs were found and resolved quickly, and we added automated tests to cover many of the bugs found manually to address bug regression. In the end it allowed 3 of the 5 main project members, including myself, to keep vacations this week that were booked out months in advance. Niice.

Read Jared Richardson's original post on Blitzkrieg Testing here
Read Johanna Rothman's post on One Automated Test per Feature here

This process captures a very effective way of implementing the practice of automated testing (in this case acceptance/integration testing) in an environment/project where none exists.

Haloscan Trackbacks

2005-08-18T04:18:00.000-05:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Pen Spinning

2005-08-17T17:50:00.000-05:00

I've been spinning my pen since... seeing a friend of mine do it in highschool. I find myself continuing to do this while in meetings, reading reports etc.

Here's an interresting find through Slacker Manager: I never actually realized that there were actually names and methods. Apparently my particular spin is the 360Degree Normal.

niice.

FBI's software project failure dissected

2005-08-17T15:29:00.000-05:00

By way of Jeremy Miller's Blog:

James Shore has a good article in the current issue of SDTimes called It’s not Too Late to Learn about the massive failure of the FBI's Trilogy project.

My Designed Learning

2005-08-16T14:57:00.000-05:00

I mentioned the other day that, being on vacation, I was hoping to get some significant movement on a technical learning project. And in my last post I recognize a shortcoming in my understanding of the method/perspective that I am a proponent of.. weird, I know.

So formally, here’s the design for my next stage of learning:

What:
Understand how to apply concepts of TDD, Automated Acceptance Testing, and to create tested running software and improve the structure of existing production level software products.

How:

Work through and apply the ideas around working with, and improving, legacy code as described in Work Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
Work through examples of patterns such as M-V-P, Strategy and Factory to refactor and improve existing code, learn about idioms such as Interface-Based development, Interfaces at component boundaries, and no static methods.
Explore these concepts by applying them to an existing software component (a small parsing and transaction-entry client application whose business function I am very familiar with).
Drive improvements to the existing software piece with storytests using FitNesse

How do I know when I’m done:

When the client application is sufficient wrapped in test coverage so that a simple the tool’s functionality is successfully separated into separate file-parsing function and the transaction-entry components, and the transaction-entry component refactored out to allow a newer process to execute the process.

Read the Design Learning article by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas to learn more about the concept of planning your learning.

Scott Bellaware Podcast on TDD

2005-08-16T14:37:00.000-05:00

Scott Bellaware has an interesting podcast on PodcastStudio.net on TDD, and the concepts around it. I thought the content was solid. Which just aggravates the fact that I’m missing the Montreal TDD workshop – if only I’d known earlier.

Well back to the point - One part of the discussion that hit home was the distinction when discussing TDD:

People are picking this stuff up and not really learning the different types of testing.. diving in without taking a moment to reflect, or read, or research, or experience, or have conversations online with testing folks and tdd folks. [They’d] talking about unit tests and breaking it open and not seeing the key indicators that would really indicate that unit testing is happening like.. strategy pattern, and interface-based development, and interfaces at component boundaries..

And he lists a few other items. So how this applies to me? While in our group I think we’ve proven out that we’ve built more correct software by driving development with Automated Acceptance Tests as specifications, and so I believe that TDD would provide that same level of correctness when building the software. BUT, having always been a business-side technical resource, and not getting directly into production-level code, I realize that I’m a proponent of TDD without the perspective of having to deal with the implementation of unit tests at the code level (I’ve done the basic widgets and in-memory tools TDD – but not enterprises-level tools with data persistence and web access etc). Although I do try to be aware of the intricacies that Scott mentions, I can’t say that I’ve encountered them. So I’m formalizing my Learning Design for the next oh.. quarter or so.. to start correcting the lack of true experience. That's coming up shortly.

Your kung fu is very strong...

2005-08-16T00:23:00.000-05:00

That's the overdone quote from the Shaw Brothers era martial arts movie... though to be honest I couldn't really cite which one!

Although I've long since moved on from my primary school of Karate (the first of my full-time professions), I have always vouched that much of my present attitudes, mindset and successes have a lot to do with the 'twist' that my martial arts background has given me.

Anyway, to the point: Very Cool how, while the subject of martial arts has come up now more that few times in conversation between coworkers, the a confluence seems to be growing as more parallels are drawn between the discipline (and eventually the creativity) in practice of martial arts training and software development. Very cool indeed.

http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.TheProgrammingDojo

and much earlier..
http://blogs.pragprog.com/cgi-bin/pragdave.cgi/Practices/Kata

I've always admired practioners of skill, in both areas of mastery. So I continue to test the waters in one, even as I've continued eventually in the other styles in the other. I only very recently re-acquired the full-blown bug though, and I found it in Kali Deleon (check the movies you'll be amazed).

Setting Fair and Reasonable Rate

2005-08-14T19:39:00.000-05:00

I was recently asked to give a rate if I were to consider a short consulting engagement. Between the discussions we touched on what's fair and expected and common in the technical consulting rates, and it turned to how people set their rates. Well, I for one believe in getting paid a fair rate and setting your rate accordingly. For me, in order to do that I've got to be able to defend it.

I've been offered, and taken, a few private consulting engagements in the last couple of years. My rates have changed since the first (uneducated) job, and the biggest help was finding this resource a little while back: The Meter is Running: Setting Consulting Rates for Independence by a gentleman named Christopher Juillet.

For me, the base labor rate is always consistent - I have a pretty strong idea of my worth. But from there I play with the benefits multiple (the article gives a bse 1.5), indirect costs (the author tags it as TANSTAAFL), and margins. Deciding factors include whether the job will be my primary income, or a supplemental project, or my interest in the job / technology / people I'd be working with.

Regardless of circumstances though, this paper gave me one way of getting to a rate that isn't 'out of a hat', which in the end translates to a defensible value so long as you're starting with a fair base and not trying to cheat your clients.

More Lucas / Clones Bashing - too funny

2005-08-14T19:01:00.000-05:00

Brad Wilson's blogged a funny little blurb, Beating a Dead Horse, ending with

Once again, Lucas: you suck.

I tend to agree though, Garden State - excellent movie.

I'm an Espresso

2005-08-14T18:44:00.000-05:00

Interesting - but not quite on the addiction level..

You Are an Espresso

At your best, you are: straight shooting, ambitious, and energetic

At your worst, you are: anxious and high strung

You drink coffee when: anytime you're not sleeping

Your caffeine addiction level: high

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

A Vacation of Sorts

2005-08-14T18:23:00.000-05:00

So.. I'm officially on vacation this week. So I'm looking forward to a week of day trips and general quality time with my little boy - 7 years old is not so little anymore but fathers out there will relate.

I also hope to get to a few non-work related technical projects. In line with Dave Hunt's Designing Learning article.

Have you designed your leaning path? Your career?

Email on Schema Changes to your Database

2005-08-14T17:44:00.000-05:00

Although I'm not commonly required to get my hands into our company's database work - we have big enough brains for that - I know a cool little twist when I read about it.

Found this through Raymond Lewallen's blog:

Here is a nice little script from a guy who calls himself Shas3. This procedure sends an email report on table schema changes, new tables and deleted tables since the last time this procedure was run. Best to set this up on a weekly job if you want to know what’s going on in your database.

Follow the link above to see the script in its entirety. I sent it to the aforementioned big brains and got good feedback that it would indeed be useful. niice.

Been a while, but I'm not done yet..

2005-08-03T19:22:00.000-05:00

It's been a while - can't believe it's been a whole month!!

Anyways, I'll make sure to come back to this with a little more detail, but I've been very busy:

Major release being done, we're in our testing cycle and woohoo for automating tests - even if they're only UI tests. We're moving from Selenium to Watir for our UI testing. Primarily because Selenium's requirement to be install on the web server of the app under test is... cumbersome in our environment.

Our development team still doesn't work with a BugTracking tool/standard (unreal, I know). Just one full day of trying to manage bugs with excel and email and I made a decision. I took the chance to play with Rails (Ruby on Rails) to put together a bug tracker. Great experience: built it to work within an evening with very few features at first - added comment, status updates and rudimentary workflow - over the next 2 days - cool!

Cool stuff I've found since last post:

Watir: Scott Hanselman is doing more with Watir with a recorder for Ruby based Watir - I was hoping that someone would continue the work but unfortunately it seems not. Here's still hoping..

Management: Added the following to my bloglist: Manager Tools (www.manager-tools.com) - Great new management podcast blog, the first 4 'casts are amazing and include discussions on setting and running one-on-ones with your direct reports, advice on advancing your technical management carreer, and giving effective feedback. Looking forward to more as they go.
Glen Alleman's Herding Cats (herdingcats.typepad.com/my_weblog)

Coding Stuff: Brian Button's MSDN wedcast on refactoring. Great intro to refactoring.

more to come - a little sooner that an month.

Watir and the Testing of Test Tools (Selenium Follow-up)

2005-06-29T23:12:00.000-05:00

Honestly, I hate being sick... having a cold in the middle of a scorching summer and no AC sucks like no other experience. Being sent home by caring (read, scared of catching) co-workers, I swelter in 35+ degree weather and sneezing every other minute and finally drop into a dazed nap about late afternoon.

What does this have to do with Selenium and investigating other Testing Tools? And am I posted in my delirium? Hope not... Anyways, the point is instead of waiting in vain for an answer to my Selenium questions OR continuing to creating new Selenium scripts for the latest iteration of our web application in the method that I admittedly feel might be less than ideal [HTML documents as scripts], I fall asleep and go in and out of a doze until late tonight - and wake up to new options. Hence my post in the wee hours of the night:

Jason Huggins posted a response to my question on the Selenium mailing lists. It gives me instructions to try to correct the issues I'm facing with the Selenium Server implementation. niice, thanks Jason!

Encouraged by this good news, I move on to my RSS feeds. And Scott Hanselman has a very timely entry on his "search for the holy grail of automated web UI testing"... That's what I call great timing.

Scott's post provides a brief overview of similar tools including Selenium and NunitASP(being a .Net shop, we looked at this too). So Watir is Scott's endorsed tool - at least for right now. Scott includes a link to another article comparing Selenium with Watir, so the hits just keeps on coming. My first reaction was: 'I wish I'd seen this article back in April when Selenium caught my attention'. But giving it more consideration, I had only started playing with Ruby at the time, and probably would have shied away from Watir because of it. Selenium was exactly the tool we needed for the time we had. But now Selenium's need to be installed with the app is my biggest headache.

In short, Watir was designed for ease of use—but with the expectation that its users will be programming (rather than recording). Originally intended as a teaching tool, it was acceptable for the tool to be limited to IE and Windows. Selenium was designed for breadth of coverage. It was expected to be used by the same developers who built the application, so it’s biggest—that it be installed with the application under test—was acceptable.

So I find that at this point I'm drawn to exploring Watir as a new option - the ease of use and non-requirement not to be installed with the AUT makes the learning curve seem worthwhile, and the Ruby implementation is no longer the deterrent it would have been a few months back. Does this mean that Selenium is now shelved? necessarilyrily, it only means that I'll have another project for my 'spare time'. yipee thanks Scott! Okay, back to my summer cold and misery...

Selenium woes

2005-06-28T22:17:00.000-05:00

Selenium is "The coolest web testing tool money can't buy." Read all about it here.

admittedly it is very cool: We use it to build a set of UI-based smoketests for our web application and it worked very well.. We used FitNesse to implement the Business-logic acceptance tests.

With the success of those smoketests, we definitely want to followthrough with using Selenium as our full-coverage web testing implementation. So along I naturally looked to an easier way to create/maintain my tests than the 'quick-start' version of stringing HTML documents together to create test cases. This leads us to Selenium Server:

The standalone [Selenium] server does not require installation on the same web server as your test application. It "stands alone" on your workstation to test remote sites. Useful for testers with limited access to the test application's source code. With an XML-RPC client library, use the standalone server to drive a supported web browser from almost any programming language.

This is basically the perfect setup for my group, as we run our web app on 3 environments (dev, test and production), all of which is are strictly controlled access and must be tested remotely (Selenium's test driven option requires that selenium is run on the same web server as the application under test).

Unfortunately this is where the ideal and the real meet, and I ran into issues immediately upon running the example included with the installation. Running the provided ruby example script to test drive google breaks in one of 2 ways: either a) the test step specifying an input into a field loops endlessly or b) returns an error "ERROR: Result queue was empty".

I posted the question on the Selenium list. And also on Grig Gheorghu's very helpful blog. I've noticed a number of similar questions, but the lack of response on those (aside from Grig's) and the variations (it works on XP but not Win2k for some, doesn't work on XP for others etc.) is more than little discouraging.

Any good readers have any information/help on this would be greatly appreciated. Alternatively, any good readers have comparable web testing tools, feel free to drop in links and pointers. But, here's hoping that there is some attention given to this aspect of the project..

Related details:

XP Pro SP2
Selenium Server 0.3.0
ruby 1.8

Spoonfeeding Learning and Knowledge

2005-06-23T06:26:00.000-05:00

Are second posts usually harder to write than the first?!? I know what I want to say, but a few tries proves that I haven't pinned down how to say it - but here goes..

Andy Hunt posted his article on Designing Learning on the PragmaticProgrammer.com articles page.

"In order to be successful, we need to improve and take a more active role in our own learning whether we are working as developers, testers, or managers."

And I say Amen to that. A lack of comments on the original article was attributed to 'preaching to the choir', the site being self-filtering since those that already take an interest in their own learning are the ones that visit the site (badly paraphrased).. Sadly I think that is the case.

Quality and professionalism is usually proportionate to the amount of attention someone puts into their own continued growth. This seems especially for true for us (2 to 3 decade range) 'younger' professionals, some are focused on continuously improving while others put off learning new things or improving on their existing skill set until their actual work involves the technology or technique. ugh.

Discussing the topic last month with a coworker, also a self-confessed ravenous reader, he's quick to defend those who aren't self-starting learners: "Send them to a course and they'll bring back and apply what they learn. Some guys just don't learn by picking up a book". While I didn't raise it at the time, I think that it got a little off topic. With the amount and types of information available to us, not being a book reader is no longer a reasonable excuse (especially not for technology workers!) - find video tutorial, join an interest group, attend conferences and workshops. In the end, it's not a question of how you learn, but whether you attempt to learn at all. Take the course yourself before your employer sends you to it. I've personally attended and funded my enrollment in courses and programs. Some related directly to my job at the time and some didn't, on a rare occasion I was able to expense the cost after I showed it's impact on my productivity/quality. But the refund came after the fact, and at no time did I expect it.

If you haven't taken initiative to hone or expand your 'toolbox', regardless of how you go about it, I don't want to hang a deliverable on your ability to 'learn on the job'. Just like I wouldn't depend on a couch potato to be able to finish a marathon just because they are asked to. It's a discussion on how seriously you take your product, and to technology and knowledge workers, that 'product' is your head. Make sure you keep it in shape

First Hello Wor... I can't do it!

2005-06-21T22:20:00.000-05:00

I guess the normal thing is to do an intro: My name is Tony Semana, now in my 30-somethings I've grown through a number of professions (and held even more jobs in between), steadily moving towards the technology industry.

Most recently (the last year), I've gone from Software Development Business Analyst / Project Manager in a financial services company to Business Analysis Practice Lead in a software development firm and then to Manager of Business Integration. This last (current) position in a respectable sized financial services company. My 'department' is called Business Integration - think of it as IT/Product Development/Operations rolled into one - we're building our platform as we do business, the idea being to stay ahead of the demand.

So to summarize, I am a geek. Am I the only person who actually feels the term 'hobby developer' applies to them? Yes, my work deals closely with software projects and I go home and play with software development - Anyways - tying back to my professional life, is it wrong to try to herd/cajole/arm-bar a company who's first focus is not software development into looking at doing software development well? Whatever the answer, I think that this topic, along with some of my other interests will hold the main entries in this blog. Let's go off looking for that meaning, and have some fun doing it.

welcome aboard.