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Tag: Gary Sherman

Drowning in waterfall documentation

April 23, 2007 I'm currently working on a customer project. They started off by sending me a Functional Requirements Specification document, then a Technical Design Specification document (and multiple revs of said doc), and before I've even had a chance to digest those docs, there's now a Change Document. The Change Document is the same size as the Technical Specifications document. Ugh. We haven't even written one line of code yet!  It really makes me appreciate my internal projects, where everyone is co-located in the same room, story cards (which are NOT specifications - they are simply placeholders for conversations), and our focus is on working software. Update 4/27/07:Today I received an updated version of the Technical Specifications document. Only this time it was in PDF format, which meant there was no way I could compare it to the previous MS Word version, so…

We're a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner again

April 12, 2007 We retained our Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status for another year by passing the competancy requirements for: ISV/Software Solutions Custom development Solutions Data Management Solutions      As part of our certification process, Dovetail Rulemanager was tested and Certified for Windows Server.

Turning blog entries into customer experiences

John Ragsdale points out a new product that allows companies to monitor what's being said about their products and services in the blogosphere. We've been talking a lot about this here at Dovetail, specifically how a post on a blog or forum can be turned into a customer experience. I've mostly thought about identifying problems that customers may have posted about, but John points out another interesting aspect, identifying expert users who are very knowledgeable about your products, with whom you may want to align. Very cool. A negative blog post about your company, product, or service can automatically create a support case, and the company can reach out, hopefully turning a negative customer experience into a great one. Proactively. Nice. John also talks about identifying new content sources, which I completely agree with. I pointed out in an earlier post that there's…

Wired magazine discusses the See-Through CEO

April 9, 2007 Wired magazine has a very good article this month titled the See-Through CEO. Interestingly, two members of our technical team forwarded this article to me this morning. A few gems from the article: The new breed of naked executives also discover that once people are interested in you, they're interested in helping you out - by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles. Customers become working partners. Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won't work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it - or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your…

Dovetail employees speaking at Austin Code Camp 2007

The Austin.NET User Group is sponsoring Austin Code Camp 2007 on May 5th. Last year's camp was excellent, and it's not too late to register for what's sure to be another great code camp. There are multiple sessions being led by Dovetail Software staff:  Bret Pettichord from Dovetail Software Scripting Web Tests with Watir and Ruby - Learn how to write automated acceptance tests for web applications in this hands-on tutorial. We’ll show you how to use the Watir testing tool and the Ruby scripting language to create tests that drive Internet Explorer. By the end of the tutorial, you’ll have written several tests using an open-source tool popular with agile teams. Bring a Windows laptop with W2K, XP, or Vista. We'll provide the software. No knowledge of Watir or Ruby is assumed. (Level 200) Kevin Miller from Dovetail Software MonoRail Introduced…

Corporate transparency and accessibility

March 30, 2007 I wrote a blog post a few months ago on our internal blog server (before we had external blogs): A lot has been written recently on the business value of transparency, and it's really struck a chord with me. I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, and it's a consistent theme in his blog and his books. Companies being transparent with their customers, prospects, and employees. Bloggers being transparent about their product reviews. Examples of the power of transparency, as well as the effects of being non-transparent, are everywhere. Dell publicly acknowledging their shortcomings, and openly discusses what they're doing to improve. Apple doing the exact opposite. Etc. I saw a new level of transparency today at Wesabe: Talk to Jason. Right there, on the front page on their website, in a very prominent position, is a phone number, email…

Dovetail Software is Hiring

March 29, 2007 Dovetail Software is now hiring for the following positions: Clarify Developer Technical Support Engineer/Junior Developer Agile Software Developers   Clarify Developer We're looking for talented, motivated individuals to contribute to the development of our existing Clarify-based applications. Experience with Clarify/Amdocs products is required, and experience with Dovetail/First Choice products is preferred. Web development experience is required, including ASP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Email us and tell us why you’d make a great addition to our team: tech-jobs@dovetailsoftware.com   Technical Support/Junior Developer We're looking for individuals who are committed to wowing customers on a daily basis to be part of our technical support staff. Our support is one of our strengths as an organization, and a big part of our reputation. In addition to support responsibilities, you will have the opportunity to work with other members of our development staff to enhance our existing product…

How the source code of our website affects recruiting

March 26, 2007 I was recently on an initial phone screen with a candidate for a developer position here at Dovetail, and towards the end of our conversation, I asked him if he had any questions. After a few standard ones, he asked me about our web development standards, especially in the area of HTML standards, use of CSS, etc. I answered, especially gearing my answer towards how we approach these topics in the current web application project that we're working on, and explaining how we've worked especially hard over the last year or so at improving our development methodologies and work product. He noted that my answer didn't jibe with the code on the dovetailsoftware.com website. He noted that the site makes heavy use of tables (for non-tabular data), lots of embedded styles (as opposed to CSS), bad class naming (class="table3", class="style15"),…

Trackbacks are good

March 23, 2007 Once again, Hugh MacLeod's hits another one out of the park with a cartoon drawn on the back of a business card. Hugh: Blogging is not about creating yet another sales channel. If you don't read Hugh's blog yet - what are you waiting for? Just subscribe already.