Tag: Corporate

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Its a bit strange. Some time ago I thought, the work which can be done by a team is almost constant after a while. And if you take away some members then, the others have to take over their work.

The work to be done should stay constant or be a bit less (because of course less team members).

Instead it seems that the less people we are in the team, the more we have to do in whole.

I’ve been chosen to take over the configuration and release management from a team member which was pulled to that other project some time ago. Until now he almost everytime had some minutes left if we needed him for something but now his stress has reached a level where he can’t do that much things at once anymore.

And the documentation stuff also bites back again. We’ve got some assistance by a technical writer, but it’s quite a hard time to explain him why we can’t deliver documentation of the level he requests. It would require too much detail and would take several weeks to write it. Time we don’t have, the documentation should be delivered tomorrow.

I think the difficulties with documentation also have to do something with our current approach to make it. There are some corporate templates in Word-format and the documentation has to be delivered in .doc but we (developers) have some difficulties with that. Many of us have a Linux computer, and OpenOffice is not a solution for these templates. We are much more used to textfiles, manpages or HTML-pages.

The technical writer also has much work with Word-files. He has to send them out to every developer, then every developer makes changes in the file and sends it back to the TW. The TW then has to review ALL documents again and merge them into a single file again. This process has quite an overhead, don’t you think?

So I’ve offered to make a proposal to perhaps switch our whole documentation system to TWiki, a system which is already in use some time internal for different purposes and has been quite handy there.

Currently I’m thinking about pros and cons for both the old (Word-) way and my new approach to write documentation to perhaps switch to TWiki some time in the future. Although we would loose some comfort and formatting possibilities, we surely can improve and speed up the documentation process because all people work on the same collection of topics at the same time without disturbing each other.

With the TWiki-skins and different TWiki-plugins we can generate documentation in almost any format the customer wishes, just faster and less error-prone than now.

Hm… When I think over it, it seems to me that I spend a good time of my work on doing things for projects or processes I invented in spare time which I crotched from project-worktime. Now the tools have proven to be useful and I should improve them… It’s odd. For example TaskZilla, All-In-One Demo Center Live CD or <a http://kosi2801.freepgs.com/2004/04/23/busy_busy_busy.html”>this internal tool which I initially wrote to find errors in our other product.

And I’m currently thinking again of a tool to aid me with my new job of configuration and release management. I In my head, the UI has taken quite concrete shapes meanwhile, but when do I find the time to write it? And does it generate more work again, if others get aware of it?

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Next week there will be a second try to update our software at one of our customers systems, which failed last time. My colleagues have fixed the most probable cause of this and I have also improved my software-part for more stability although it didn’t have any stability-problems. But who knows how long this release will be running until the next (hopefully very major) update, I don’t want to have it fail under any circumstance.

We’re quite sure that this time the release will work as expected and without problems appearing after it.

Well, for us it just has the look of a "service pack" because currently our software has improved quite much since the last install there and we just made some changes, bugfixes and minor improvements to that old version.
It’s also already running at the upper third of its capacity because although there are only slightly more clients using it for which it was initially designed, some of these clients use it through a "proxy", so one client generates as much load as several dozens of normal ones.

Our current software already has many design and capability improvements to handle a greater load and offer greater stability and flexibility on the clients side.

Hopefully THIS version gets installed the next time and not another update of the old piece. Maintaining the old version is more difficult every time.

Near the end of the last week, I updated our installation of Taskzilla with the new layout made by the designer.

Now people have been using it for several days, reported some minor bugfixes to me and everything was fine.

But today I recognized, that on the edit page of every task the category entries were completely misaligned. The category "Task Type" contained the entries from "Dev-Type" and some more swapping around.

It was also impossible to add more CC people, if there was at least one entered, because the entry-field was disabled in that case.

I wonder, why no one has seen this swapping before me. Perhaps this design is that intuitive, but I rather guess, that people are already used to Taskzilla. But why no one has recognized the bug with CC is a miracle for me… Does anyone actually use this feature?

Yesterday during a presentation for some of our developers/managers, a demo-center which runs entirely from CD was promised for upcoming Friday…

Nice that I’m at least informed during a presentation, that I have a target date for my Knoppix-based CD.

Meanwhile more problems arose, I think I have to remove NTFS-support from the CD for now because it always locks up doing nothing during mount and I don’t have the time to dig into this until Friday.