So Yazix, start-up, interesting challenge.
First thing is that by next week – hopefully – we will have yazix.com up and running, and you can learn a lot more about the whole thing – like, why yazix, what do the mongols have to do with it, and actually what is yazix?
[By the way, if you know what the word 'yazix' means, leave your tip in the comments below. There is no prize to win though.]

Second thing: what is yazix?

Imagine that you are an 8th grader and you got home from school at 1PM. You have a football match with your friends at 3PM, and a load of homework to do before that – you have strict parents who wants you to finish school with at least average grades, and they have the idea that no play until you finish your homework.
The most painful thing is that your German homework makes up the bulk of the whole thing, with a massive text to translate. You realize that you have no chance to finish it in time to get to the match.

Afternoon ruined. You miss the match, your friends ridicule you, you become a cast-out, a pariah, all because you had an impossibly long German text as a homework on an inconvenient day.

Now imagine that you can go to Yazix, enter the text, and while it will not translate it for you, it will help you to pick the correct sentences you need from a database filled up by other students who did the same homework last year, or two months ago.
Day saved, you finish your homework in about 35 minutes, and happily rides off to the match where you bag 3 goals, become the hero of the day and the cute girl shares her ice cream with you.

Ok, maybe it won’t be exactly like that. First of all you are not an 8th grader, and what you want to translate is not the German homework but a short article, a novel or a technical journal. Serious stuff.
And you don’t play football with your buddies at 3PM, you just want to go home early to spend quality time with your children and the cute girl who in the meantime became your wife…

Ok, so maybe the above story was not that far from the truth. We just grew up since the first sentence. Time flies.

But it was just a brief try at the explanation of one bit of yazix, and I promise to give you a more complete, more detailed and more accurate explanation soon.

Disclaimer: Yazix won’t help you score the goals on the football field, nor will assign you a cute girl to marry. That you have to do yourself. Just saying.

This is not a huge tragedy, but as it happens the financial crisis caught up with this part of the world, and basically every single project I had in sight was shot down in the last minute. Last minute means on Monday it’s “good to go”, on Tuesday it is “canceled”. Good luck with planning.

So here I am, trying to find something so I can pay my bills – thankfully I had the common sense to have a debt-insurance on every credit card, loan, debt so if everything goes really south, I will have it a bit easier for a short time.

There are two possibilities right now – I can fight claws and teeth to land a job as an employee, or I can fight claws and teeth to land a contract. Honestly, at the moment either solution would make me glad.
The plan to go and work abroad are ditched for now – the situation is at least as bad as here all over Europe, with the added benefit of my saving worth much less abroad than it does at home. Especially since the Forint (HUF) crashed so spectacularly in the last 3 months.

So just you know the whole story. I am at home right now, hunting jobs, talking with people, and hoping for a better future – maybe I should play the lottery, winning would solve my problems for sure.
And, accidentally reading up on marketing, finances, economics, and whatever I can find about small business and freelancing, and having huge lunch and coffee meetings with people in case I have to go totally independent, building some business knowledge in advance.

I planned to have a business in 5 years anyway, but then there were a lot of things in my career that I have reached faster than expected – and yes, I know I have had this idea since December, but fact is the local system is not really favouring small businesses. Quite the contrary.

But as they say: “A tight spot sharpens the mind”. The photo on the top, from au_tiger01 shows the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina. It shows a rather disastrous event, but also shows that while the market for cars is definitely down for the moment, boats can flourish. So I intend to find a boat – one with a strong engine. And preferably wheels for the time when the water is gone.

I have no doubt that I will have some solution – if all fails, I go and load trucks. That’s a job too -, I just wish life would go in less of a zig-zag.

personally, I believe that the Project Manager and the Business Analyst roles should not be dumped on one person, both roles require a lot of work, both has a different view of the project, and a day has only 24 hours in it. This latest problem is frequently forgotten by people and then they wonder why the previously so good BA or PM suddenly turned into an awful, useless one. Nonetheless, companies try to do it all the time for some reason.

The other thread, which is more interesting for me at the moment is Glenn R. Brûl?s Getting Back to Basics series. The series has four chapters – so far – and are pretty interesting:

1. First Fundamental: Understanding Overall Business Goals
2. Second Fundamental: Creating a Common Vocabulary
3. Third Fundamental – Identifying Your Sources
4. Choosing Elicitation Techniques

Note, that to read the articles you have to register. While it can be inconvenient, if you are interested in the topic you should anyway, so no big loss there.

Before anyone starts to wonder, no I will not reiterate his points here, nor will I oppose them. Basically I just want to urge you to go and read. If you are or likely will be responsible of starting a project either or on the client or the delivery site, go and read it. It does worth your time.

All I want to put here as an addition is that it will not work at all if you send out a handful people to gather requirements, each talking with different department, different people and then trying to merge the results.

First of all, no one will see how the whole works. Second, there will be a whole lot of unanswered and what’s worst, unasked questions. Departments interact. Departments have an effect on each other’s processes. Logistics on customer service. Document management on manufacturing.

And you will never, ever see these interdependencies because they will go unasked and so unanswered.

How does it connect to a project? The second lesson I personally learned from the project I wrote about in “It’s a Babel Fish”, was the necessity of teamwork.

Yes, I know, it’s basic and everyone stresses it all the time, teamwork is important, teamwork is indispensable, but most of the time it’s about teamwork with your co-workers, the developers in your own company.

What I mean is the teamwork with the client, and your partner contractors. Duh, you say, that’s agile. I don’t know if it is agile or not, I think it’s basic common sense – which, as we know is not that common -, what I know that not working as a team with your customer, and with the other contractors, or worse, treating them as antagonists, hurts your project big time.

It should be like on the picture above. The whole project depends not only on the players – the developers of your team – but on the fans and the cheer team – the client and the other participants of the project – too.

Too many times I saw that after the contract has been signed everyone goes home and starts to work independently, not really caring about what the other does – of course, there are all the mandatory e-mails, the excel files, the task lists, the status reports speeding back and forth, that gives the appearance of working together, but that’s all, if you scratch the surface you quickly discover that there is no real knowledge, actual nobody knows what the others are doing. All you have to do is ask any member of the project team “what is the client doing with the project?” and you will find it out rather quickly.

And if you have some disruptive elements in your project – like people at the client company, who wants the project to fail, a situation that rather frequent – then you will have a pretty hard time.

And as not working a team means there is no real communication either, you end up peering into the “Fog of War”, which makes avoiding and defending against surprises almost impossible.

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

The end of a one and half year long project is getting near, and I am thinking about all the lessons I learned from this endeavour.

The project started as an interesting one, a totally new business domain for us, in a foreign country working with a local a partner company. And it did not just start, it really is and was an interesting project, and I have learned a lot both professionally and otherwise.

Right now, I want to think, and write about the non professional lessons, which boils down to one thing mainly: communication.

As I said we’ve been working for a foreign client, where none of the involved speak English, so we had to rely on our partner company to translate and manage the communication between us, and the client. That poses several problems.

First of all, the translations were made by the employees of the company, the developers, receptionists and not by professional translators.

Second, there was no direct contact with the client – except for the requirement gathering, and some later visits to clear up some things -, and that means there were two points where e-mails could get lost, between the client and the partner, and between the partner and us. Plus the usual internal mishaps.

So, what are the most important lessons

You need a professional translator.

Whenever you go to talk with a client you either both talk the same language or you better get a professional translator. Having a co-worker, or a partner who can translate is great, but if the translator has an interest in understanding the problem then it won’t work. In our case we had a guy who also worked on the project partly as a developer/business analyst, and while it may sound good – hey he will understand what we need! – it is not.

When the translator tries to understand the problem and business domain, which would be your task, then he extrapolates, leaves out things he deems unimportant, and generally will just pass on his understanding, not what the client said.

And you have no chance to crosscheck it,you have to trust him. And it’s not a good feeling when a year later you sit down with the client to work out some problems, this time with another translator, and you find out that you implemented the wrong functionality.

Not to mention when you mess up because of a mistake in translation.

What you need, in my experience, is a “tube”, Someone who translates what is said, but does not try to understand it.

Don’t try to save on the translator. It will cost more in the long run.

E-mail is not good enough.

Or at least, it should not be your main communication channel.

It is slow. Especially when you have to send it through someone who will translate it, and vice verse – plus, the previous point applies here too, get someone who does not want to understand the problem, or you’ll never know what the original request was.
And if you use e-mail this way, insist on receiving the original from the client along with the translating party, and that the translated letter contains the original too. You won’t understand it, but you can ask about missing translations.

Hey, we got a letter in Howondalandian, and there is no English mail with the same subject! Did you translate it?

Because it will happen, the translating party forgets an e-mail, and if you are out of the loop, you won’t even realize it. And 5 months later you wonder what functionality is missing according to the client.

Use Google Documents, Zoho, Huddle. It’s a pain to keep all the excel files up to date even in house, but when it travels between different companies it turns into a nightmare. I know, they are going to get hacked, and they will steal the business secrets, but get serious, just for a moment. I bet they spend more on internet security than your company, and I really don’t see why would Google or Zoho steal your project status files. They do it once, and the news will spread on the interwebz faster than wildfire on speed. Not good for business.

Don’t track bugs and issues in an excel either. Set up an issue tracking system. I know that the internet is the unsafe, unprotected wilderness, and if we put anything out there we all will die, at least according to IT, but I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

For communications set up a forum, a blog, whatever, but don’t rely on people forwarding e-mails and replying to the right people all the time. You don’t want to send all the little problems and issues to the CEO, but then if six months later you need to, it is a nightmare to find it in the e-mail folder (what was the subject, who sent it, when did he sent it, did I delete it?).

And the same goes for new project members, it’s easier to send them over to a “project blog” than to find the mails, and let him find out how they fit together.

Tighter, more concentrated project management

Due to the distance it is necessary that the project manager concentrates tightly on the client, nudging him to do his part.
Being so far takes the whole project out of sight for the client. He forgets it. Really forgets it, so you have to send him reminders, questions and pester him regularly, and as you do it through a partner, it may or may not arrive to him. Send the not yet translated message to him too, so he can ask if the translation does not arrive in a sensible time.

Plus side for the website is that he will see there is a new, not translated “post”, and knows that’s something is going on.

Visit the client regularly

Simply because when you are not there, they do nothing – they got their daily job, and it will get more attention simply because that’s what they are supposed to do anyway -, and when you finally go there, they will start to look at the already deployed things and will shower you with change requests, about things that could have been noticed a long time ago if they looked at the system.

In Part II I will write about the next big lesson, the rugby ball and the overcoat.

And now, please, share your opinion on the above. Do you agree? If yes why? If not, why?

Last week a Czech bank (Ceska Sporitelna) lost about 1 million crowns for a software bug. It’s not the first time when a software bug causes some financial damage, either directly – like here, offering bonds for the wrong price -, or indirectly, and it won’t be the last. And what is weird, that no penalty will be paid by the software company.

I don’t know any other industries where the the company, whose flawed product causes such a loss can wave a piece of paper crying with glee “See, I wrote it here that it is your own risk to use it, I owe you nothing. Tough, baby.” Sure, in every industry companies try to wiggle out of responsibility, but nothing like “I wrote it in the contract that whatever happens, I am not responsible for the results”.

I hope it will end soon, really soon. Maybe then the general quality of software products will improve. I doubt that after a company had to shell out a few million to pay for damages, the same company will eagerly rush into senseless deadlines and accept any and all offers, knowing that if he can pull it off without too many evident bugs, he is ok.

Maybe, if the software companies will have to take responsibility for the hurried, rushed, buggy work they deliver, then they will be more sensible, more mature and will be more restricted in accepting impossible deadlines.

Or, maybe they will simply work it into the price. After all, it’s not only the software companies who are guilty. The customers are just as guilty, wanting everything for yesterday, even if they know that the promise the supplier made does not mean anything,

So, I hope the Golden Age will end soon, and we will enter into a more sensible age, when if a software got delivered, you have a fair chance that it will work correctly.

What do you think?

It always amazes me how an actual project can go. I mean, after long months of testing we received the list of “bugs” from the customer. Pretty serious ones, like which label should be moved 2 pixels to the left, that instead of key ‘A’they want to move between fields with key ‘B’and so on. Oh, and they should only enter 6 digits of the 11 digits id, because the first 5 is provided by the system,

Based on? Oh, well, you know every city, or was that region or something else has this 5 digits id. No, we did not know that.
Ah, well, and you know we told you that Case A can’t ever happen? Well, thing is, if the system can’t support Case A, we can’t go live.

So, two guys sitting in the lobby, they are just talking you see. Nothing important. Life is simple. Nothing to see. Move on.

To be honest, I suspected that dumping hundreds of tasks with aggressively scheduled deadlines on someone does not make him think faster, actually, not even suspected, I experienced and saw it happen time to time.

Of course, all the quick and dirty solutions are temporary – it will have to hold until monday only -, and are corrected and replaced with a better, streamlined and lemon scented solution as soon as there is time, which means they stay in the product forever plus a day.

Time pressure and stress kills creativity and think-time. But we all know that software development is not about creativity.

I like these books. Really, I like Peopleware, I like Slack, I like Inmates are running the Asylum. I like all the books where they tell me how good software development could be.
One question though: If it works so well, how come that not a single coproration, company, whatever works on these principles?

Mind you, I have not seen even one company where software development is not a chaotic, omg we gotta finish by NOON
process. All these companies have are smiling project manager people with nice charts and checkboxes and they tick happily
away while the deadlines are missed.

If these ideas work so well, why not a single company ever tries them?