One thing I would suggest if you think the owner has the patience for it, is to ask what are his favorite things about the mockup the designer did. I've done this for a few mockups and sometimes been astounded at what the responses are. The favorite thing may be that she used so much orange that matched the company logo or that the buttons have rounded corners that the owner thinks look more modern than the legacy system. I'm not kidding. I've gotten responses like this in the past that had nothing to do with how the system worked. Finding out what makes this design a success in the owners eyes will help you know what is important to preserve and where you can suggest changes.

Add lots of logging until you are sure you understand what the real problem is (although sometimes you have to take your best guess or add code to fix the symptoms without finding the root cause in a truly complicated system). I worked on an automated conveyor system at one time. One customer kept having their box counts off and the shipping company was so aggravated they threatened not to ship for the company any more. The programmer tried lots of things to fix the "faulty sensors". The problem was finally solved when he was at the company late one night and saw a bored employee playing with the blinking lights. The employee had no idea it was throwing the shipping counts off. Production always seems to come up with some combination of circumstances you don't think of.

Judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. :) You did the best you could at the time. Now you have better ideas. It's a sign of growth. :-D

I have two 27" screens plus the laptop screen. That's usually enough but sometimes I think about adding another one.

Trying to get through to the new developer why source control is a good thing and why editing code on the production server is a bad thing

His earlier book was great. I'll have to pick up the new version!

The media seems to love to be able to report the "first of" in any category. There was recently a story about the "first charity pub" in the media. Nope. Sorry. We've had one here for a while. Not that I'm God's gift to Wisdom but my 2 cents is that people who overcome actual adversity make good positive role models. My father was one. He grew up so poor he'd wake up with snow on him where it had come in the roof. Thanks to his company he was able to put himself through college while working full-time after he already had a family. He did well enough to provide us a very nice middle-class life. To him education was the way out of poverty and it wasn't "if" we were going to college, it was "where" and "for what". That's a role model. There are many, many others who have started out with less than ideal situations who through hard work and talent have overcome what they started with. They just get it done. Those to me are the people who need to be shown as role models.

I guess I look at the lower pay statistics and the "consciousness" with some degree of suspicion. 1. Is this true in the software profession? 2. IF women in the same job as a man are being paid less - do they have the same years of experience? - did they put in the hours to work the hot projects? - have they published/spoken as much? - did they constantly pick the projects that would expose them to the latest high paying technology? - etc. I think it's pretty hard to be really sure you are comparing apples and apples. I'm not saying discrimination doesn't ever happen. I've occasionally run across it. But I find it pretty hard to buy as a systemic thing. I don't personally believe in "Women of" programs or "X of" programs of any type other than accomplishment. If you want to have a Developers of Excellence program or a Chamber of Commerce Business Person of Excellence program, more power to you. Replacing the "good old boys" network with a "good old girls" one does no one any good. We've moved past that, let's not go back. I'd submit that those with the experience and leadership to mentor newer members of the profession should do that regardless of anything except talent and willingness to work hard. It may as a cultural thing turn out that more often women choose to take on family duties but as some of our colleagues pointed out above, that isn't always the case. I think being a single parent is a very tough thing regardless of your gender. My hat is off to you for pulling it off. My 2 cents

Sorry I wasn't clear. I was referring to someone who had been in another profession a year previously being made an MVP by another program, not a CodeProject MVP. To me MVP is someone who has leadership and experience to offer to people in the profession. I don't see how someone with a year's programming experience can offer that.

I wish you and your daughter luck. Hopefully common sense will win out over the marketing

LOL

Thanks for the advice but at this point the kid is 22 LOL. Raising a gifted, learning-disabled kid meant both of us couldn't be on the hot projects. Mostly because getting him through school was a job unto itself. I'm happy with the choices I made and the choices we made as a couple. We've had a great marriage for 25 years and still going strong. It sounds like you've found peace with what life has handed you as well. Good for you.

Fair comments - in our case it probably started more because I didn't have a travel job and my husband was working as a consultant and on the road a lot. A fairer thing would probably have been to say give help to parents in IT for the work/life balance

Rant on - I've been in the software profession for a very, very long time now. I started as a real-time concurrent programmer and these days wear a web developer's hat. I am female. I have been bombarded lately by articles, emails, etc. telling me how to succeed in this industry as a female. It's simple (and hard) - figure out what the business needs, keep on top of the technology and write software that meets those needs. I don't need to know how to dress for success as a woman (code project!), join any woman only IT groups, listen to a newly-minted MVP who's been in development for a year (drove me batty to see that one), etc. It reminds me of when I went to buy a pickup truck and the sales guy tried to show me the makeup mirror. Geez! Just let me do my friggin job without telling me how it is impossible for me to "succeed" because of my gender. The only thing that is a lot harder in this profession as a woman is balancing work with kids because let's face it as enlightened as we all like to think we are - if you both have equally challenging jobs somehow the wife still stays home with the sick kids usually and deals with the school. I think this is where a lot of the women who start in IT go. It's really tough to keep that balance and be on the hot projects too. I don't need a special hand up to succeed. I am perfectly capable of learning what I need to know to do the job like anyone else. Enough already! - rant off

konate wrote:

However, in a large-scale complex software project with many full-time developers, Test team, Product Manager, Requirement Engineer, Configuration Manager, Project Manager, in short a project that requires a full blown development team you have no choice, but to put implement a good methodology like Agile, among other things. Just emails tracking won't do it.

Amen!

jschell wrote:

The fact that someone is smart doesn't of course translate into efficient, organized, cost-conscious nor even capable of looking at the big picture.

LOL very true I'll take another look at SCRUM perhaps I've gotten the wrong impression Thanks!

Greetings from another old web developer :) I started out in realtime concurrent :-D Good luck getting this sorted out. I do have to admit I have occasionally punted and thrown a table in to make a deadline :-D

These seem like they have potential to provide value where I work. I'm wondering if anyone is or has used them and how it went for them? Thanks!

Thanks to all of you for the replies. They have been very interesting so far. First off, I'm probably touched in the head but I actually like working here. These people do acknowledge they are shifting us around and what it does to schedules and deliveries. So I'm not planning to run - just looking for things to make small improvements. I'd settle for starters to even get a to-do list together that we are all seeing and is always accessible. And maybe I've answered my own question on the first step :) Also, we have extremely short project schedules most projects are done within a couple weeks, many are a couple days and the "huge" ones take 2-3 months. I was considering SCRUM but it requires an agreed upon list that doesn't get changed until delivery. I mentioned it to my boss and he said he thought trying to do SCRUM here would be like going to Disneyland and getting driven around in a golf cart but not being able to get out and ride the rides. LOL I have worked on projects that were very formal with documents at each step of the waterfall and mandatory code reviews of all code (which had a DOD B-1 rating) to places where the only process is the one I follow myself :) While I can't change the culture here single-handedly and I believe the study you mentioned, I'm still thinking there must be something I can do to start making at least a small step towards a more structured process. My current hat is web developer for a marketing organization - front and back end - html, css, CMS add-ons in asp.net, integration with back end CRM and web service between the CRM and another server. In the past I've done real-time concurrent, automated equipment, drivers and desktop apps and managed Quality Assurance. I've been in this business longer than I want to admit LOL but I'm still searching for what's out there that I might not have heard of yet. This is a business full of very bright people, I keep thinking someone has come up with a way to start the change at the grass-roots level. :-D

I was curious what methodologies people think work well in environments where priorities change extremely frequently. I'm talking the kind of environment where even the top priority gets shifted before it is delivered because someone higher up in management suddenly announced a new project or task. I've worked with several different methodologies but most of them seem predicated on being able to agree on a to-do list of at least a couple of items and sticking with that list until it is finished. So what's a good methodology for taking that first baby step out of chaos?