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I am not an organised person, I like clutter and chaos and last minute, seat of your pants working, I like putting stuff live and seeing what happens, I like it when things go wrong and problems need to be solved.
Somehow in recent times we have moved towards being unable to do anything without plans and committees and time, lots and lots of time.
Everything has to be planned and agreed and discussed and agreed and planned again, exit strategies have to be in place, risks have to be assessed, forms have to be filled out, testing has to be done from end to end, releases have to be synchronised and out of hours and tested before the users are allowed at them again.
I've just had a request for a new field to be added to a mobile app, data to be captured and fed back into the DB of a office system. No schema changes needed, just a couple of lines of config, the new field added to a form, a little bit of validation, and an extra couple of lines of code to send the data captured back.
An hour of work, stick it on a test system get the bloke who requested it to test, he's happy, can we put it live?
Well that would require me to edit a small procedure, run it, the file DLLs then get put on the server and the mobile apps will download them when they next connect.
We've been releasing to this mobile system like this for 7 years or so.
So, can we release it to Live?
Yes.
There is a release window scheduled for September.
Don't tell anyone, but it might just find its way out by accident.
Life is already far too sanitised, takes all the fun out of everything.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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September? That is far too far off. The apocalypse could be here by then.
I think you need to challenge your managements core values/expectations. Sounds like they are not fit to be leaders, but more worried about protecting their own asses.
Do you think big systems, I'm thinking the FBs / The Googles size, got there by being slow coaches.
Facebook: Move Fast and Break Things[^]
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DaveAuld wrote: but more worried about protecting their own asses.
Fear rules now. It is getting to the point where they are so scared of doing something wrong nothing gets done at all.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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I beg to disagree, in two points:
- The "not-organised" way tends to be very effective when high-skilled people are involved. The Agile manifesto says "people over process", but I always add "yes, when people know what they are doing : high-skilled people over process", otherwise you get _real_ chaos.
This also does not scale well. The more people involved, the more process are needed.
- There are other points to be considered when releasing, not only how easy something can be implemented : I have already blocked "easy fixes" or "new features" because too close to release date, so risk was too high, or because they were not financially justified, e.g. the customer does not pay for it.
The fact that "it has been done like this in the past 20 years" has never been an argument to me. I bet people were OK to use light bulbs, even if mankind had several thousands year experience with candle light.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
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Rage wrote: This also does not scale well. The more people involved, the more process are needed.
I am the only developer for this application, I also provide all the support for it.
The bloke who requested the change is the manager for every user of the application (around 20).
Until this change goes live one office based employee is going to have to look at a map that has been drawn on by one of the mobile users, calculate the length of a line drawn on it, type that number into a field in another system. He is going to have to do that for every submission from the field by the 20 mobile users.
The reason given when the change was put to me was "because we've got to work smarter than that".
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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chriselst wrote: am the only developer for this application, I also provide all the support for it.
Is development a cost center? Thus you (your actual salary) is based on other departments moving their money into your department? If so then maybe they are protecting your job by pointing out that it really does take time for them (the department and you) to do the work.
chriselst wrote: The reason given when the change was put to me was "because we've got to work smarter than that".
Who exactly said that? Your boss? The manager of the other department? The CEO? The IT guy? Some those matter more than others.
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Have you considered kneecapping? PM's can be persuaded to alter The Plan with surreptitious application of a mallet to the patella.
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Nagy Vilmos wrote: surreptitious application of a mallet to the patella.
That's a rather kneee jerk reaction, don't you think?
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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Looks like you have too much process your process is broken. We run an agile shop that's well planned yet allows for late-breaking low-risk changes to be rolled into the current release.
/ravi
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Quote: Somehow in recent times we have moved towards being unable to do anything without plans and committees and time, lots and lots of time.
Hope it pay's well 
With friendly greetings, 
Eric Goedhart
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Eric Goedhart wrote: Hope it pay's well
Unfortunately it does 
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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Hi,
I think you have a great job, lots of time and well paid
I personally wouldn't bother since it's there procedure they are following and how (management) they want it. In a formal organisation its just the way it goes. The only thing a programmer can do in such a situation is to look at the next task that has to be done and do it, and so on...
As long as you like solving the tasks presented I think its a nice job, if you are bored by that I would look for a better (paid) job that challenges you more
With friendly greetings,
Eric Goedhart
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I've never seen the movie, but the clip fits perfectly! 
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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It's definitely worth watching the movie. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Yeah....cutting the red tape sometimes is nice. But it depends on the project. Where I work we do not plan things out enough and it's a big problem because we have dozens of different components that all work together. So someone sneaks in a change and twelve things break and we have to drop everything and fix them and we get yelled at and complained about and fall behind on our regular work because we're so busy fixing things. But if you're working with stand alone stuff that no one else touches....sure.
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"Just stick it in there and release" is fine if and only if your product is fully tested by automated tests i.e. unit, integration, system and if applicable UI tests.
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chriselst wrote: Everything has to be planned and agreed and discussed and agreed and planned again, exit strategies have to be in place, risks have to be assessed, forms have to be filled out, testing has to be done from end to end, releases have to be synchronised and out of hours and tested before the users are allowed at them again.
I went to a "taster" for how Holacracy[^] works by giving people autonomous authority but with responsibility. So, for example, if you have the role of "release manager" with the authority to do the release, then you can do the release whenever you have completed your responsibilities, which are clearly defined, such as communicating to other department people, etc.
One of the neat things is that, as one works with this process, very clear statements can be written as to what the role's responsibilities are, which cuts through time-wasting meetings, "opinions", and so forth. I was very impressed by the scenarios that we worked through with the facilitator.
Marc
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Well, at least the release window is on this year...
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Hello all,
If you were me... what would you install at home?
Avira Premium + Malwarebytes?
Norton 360?
The OS is a Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bits.
Any other suggestion?
Please try to give your reasons too 
Thank you!
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On Windows 8.1 I just let the OS deal with it, works out of the box.
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Nothing, Windows Defender seems to be pretty good and well supported. If you have a decent firewall (again, the OS one is up to scratch, and your router should be configured to reject incoming requests anyway) and don't set out to visit places you might get a virus, you don't really need third party software. Most virus software is so aggressive in terms of scanning files in use and disk access that it slows your life down more than getting a virus would ...
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Bob's correct, some of the packages are overly aggressive. I have to use Xp in a VM, and we all know that Xp should no be used any more, gasp, it's not supported. So, my Defender updates stopped. I only due development in this VM, no surfing at all, but I'm paranoid. I installed Avast and have never been so frustrated. Kept having false positives for my application targets - shoving stuff into the quarantine folder, and on an on. Even if I told it to ignore things, it keep happily deleting files from my delivery tree.
Uninstalled.
Defender has worked quite well over the years....
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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