Randomness: WordPress Fail, Feature Branching

  • I tried editing a post that I had started from Windows Live Writer, in the WordPress iPad app. Something about how the HTML got formed killed the editor there, as well as the rich text box editor on the WordPress site. Not having a laptop with me, I tried Remote Desktop from the iPad to my work computer, but that experience was too hard to do any real content creation. So I gave up and am writing this post instead.
  • I have had a rough patch at work the last few weeks. End of Release, lots of defects. We did a post-mortem, traced down each defect and where it came from, and found out:
    • Only about 10%were actual code errors. Yay, professional pride intact.
    • The rest were of the nature that no matter how much we looked at it, we would not have detected it was not what the customer wanted. The customer had to look at it, give us feedback, unfortunately in the form of a defect, because that is the stage of the SDLC we were in.
    • We are trying to find ways to get the customer to give us their eyeballs earlier in the process. The good news: The customer “gets it”, and now one of their style stars is hanging out on campfire where we can trade screenshots. Hopefully they will also be able to use the CI build and deploy to “play” with the latest code.
    • Part of the learning experience here is that the customer is going from a single pipeline of development to “Feature Branching”, and everybody is learning this new paradigmn. I could probably do a blog post on things to watch for with Feature Branching.
    • To be fair, we also missed a lot of things that if we had read every word of the requirements very carefully, we would have gotten. Yet, with feature requirements changing often, it was very easy to go with what we thought was common consensus rather than being word nazi on the requirements that may not have been up to date. Possible solution: as our perspective of things drifted, we could add notes to the requirements, as addendums.
  • I have not had a chance to get back to crunching car stats. the next thing I want to do there is visualize tracks in 3D using Processing. I have something working, but its not pretty enough yet.
  • A friend asked me for advice on how to do a timelapse of some work their employer is getting done. I hope I get to help!

Oops look at the time I am needed elsewhere. Publish without Pretty!