The Operations Manager

Whilst re-compiling and re-deploying your entire .Net website application is the “safe” solution to avoid any nasty version conflicts etc its also slow (and a sledge-hammer to crack a nut). If you are running a live website you often just want a quick patch to fix the issue at hand – often just a single assembly. If you are lucky (like I was) you have a good build manager to do all this for you… but I have found that people are not always aware of the options available – they just use the Visual Studio GUI to re-compile the entire solution every time. If you are using Visual Studio to do the build there is no requirement to re-build the entire solution (.sln) every time - you can just rebuild a project (.proj) within the solution so you get just the single assembly. Note that "Build" will only compile changes anyway, "rebuild" will re-compile everything whether it has changed or not. It's worth moving away from using the GUI (if you haven't already) ...

I put together this quick overview on web “user experience” KPI’s for a client but I thought it was worth re-posting it here for future reference… what they wanted to know what “how long did a given page request take on the website”, with the idea of defining certain KPI’s e.g. login must take less that 5 seconds, or saving your user profile less than 10 secs etc. “I had a look at some of the end-user KPI's that were requested for the web side of things so I thought I would drop you a quick email as I have a fair bit of experience in this area (when I used to run www.totaljobs.com website). There are basically 3 ways of doing this - external site monitoring, page tagging (javascript) and appliance-based. External site monitoring is basically where a 3rd party simulated a user page request every 5 or 10 minutes and records how long it took. Basically they "GET" a web page URL. Companies such as Site Confidence (UK), Gomez or Axzona are leaders in this area. "P...

This is a question I posed on the BCS Elite group on LinkedIn.. What ways to BSC Elite members ensure quality (and performance) in their outsourced software development projects? I have only worked with in-house dev teams and we ensured quality by having a top-notch technical architect, well developed coding standards/processes and a strong QA function at the end (not that quality can be "inspected in" but knowing that little was going to get passed QA ensured better deliverables end-to-end). But what is the best "formula" for an outsourced development project? I could see how you might split the project between different vendors (effectively like we did in-house), with someone doing the design, another the development and another the QA and each acting as checks and balances on the other but I suspect that this would be (1) a contractual nightmare and (2) a recipe for "finger pointing" if things went wrong. I am thinking in particular of SME...

Is the gap between "good developers" and "bad developers" getting wider? At one end of the scale we have people like my former colleague Glenn ( http://vanderburg.org/Blog ) who are doing such esoteric software stuff that I am not even sure what he is talking about anymore... things like "domain specific languages" i.e. to solve the problem, first write a new programming language optimised for that problem domain... okay... and at the other end we have the vendor who coded this: Select column1 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser Select column2 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser Select column3 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser Select column4 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser Select column5 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser which took 140ms to run when "Select column1, column2, column3, column4, column5 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser" took 15ms... Sure, rubbish code has...