Wayne Allen's Weblog

Together Developer for Visual Studio.NET

Borland has released a version of Together Developer that integrates into VS.NET. Check out the screen casts. I'm thinking that Together combined with ReSharper from JetBrains could be one killer combination.

Perspectives: A User Interface Approach Appropriate for Agile Methods?

Scott Came turned me on to a UI concept called "Perspectives" that is well implemented in Eclipse. The project has some documentation and an overview that is an interesting read.

From the overview:

In the Eclipse Platform a Perspective determines the visible actions and views within a window. Perspectives also go well beyond this by providing mechanisms for task oriented interaction with resources in the Eclipse Platform, multi-tasking and information filtering. In this article the concepts behind perspectives are examined. The process for perspective definition, extension and instantiation will also be covered in detail with coding examples and sample scenarios.

A perspective is a visual container for a set of views and editors (parts). These parts exist wholly within the perspective and are not shared. A perspective is also like a page within a book. It exists within a window along with any number of other perspectives and, like a page within a book, only one perspective is visible at any time.

When I first looked at this it seemed very attractive and I thought it had the potential to solve some of my then client's issues surrounding "beginner" screens and "expert" screens.

My second thought was that this might provide a way to iterate the UI. The concept of iteratively developing a user interface has been the subject of much discussion on the XP list and has it's own mailing list.

One of the biggest issues of concern is UI churn if you have a fairly rapid release cycle. It seems that perspectives could alleviate this churn by adding new perspectives that support the new features of the release and only change or remove the pre-existing perspectives when absolutely necessary. Of course this introduces some other problems such as informing existing users about the new perspectives and how to start using them, but it seems manageable.

From the technical side my biggest concern is since perspectives are not baked into any UI framework that I'm aware of (besides Eclipse) my team would have to build the plumbing. Iterating into a perspectives framework could be challenging and selling the value to the product owner might take some doing.

Anyone out there doing something like this?

HDD DVD to Spell the End of Big Media as we know it?

Combining Google Maps with CraigsList Housing - Cool Stuff

Greg Hughes turned me on to this site which combines the extremely cool Google Maps interface with the Craigs List housing listings in such a seamless way that it is hard to believe that the data comes from two completely separate sources. Check it out!

http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/

Build Servers - Love 'em & Hate 'em

The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin

Chefs, Contracting Officers, and Sisyphus: Musings of a Business Analyst

Fellow Guild member Matt Deniston has a great post on the difficulties of analyzing business requirements for an integration project.

So how do you arrive at the reality of the System? You need time. You need tact. You need tenacity. You need to either entertain and amuse, or you need very patient patients.

You need to talk to five to ten other equally seasoned users and get their variations and slants on the System. You don't meet with these users once, you sit with them many times over the course of weeks and echo back what they said last time and share gleanings from conversations with their colleagues. You iterate through models and illustrations of their System with them. You make sure they say the same thing three times in row before you act on it.

You will likely be surprised. Often what the user said last time was anywhere from not quite accurate to entirely incorrect. The real System often works differently than the user thought. The thing that never happens does in fact happen. The tool that only does this, sometimes does that too.

What I've recently relearned, so help me Sisyphus, is that if you apply the same, relatively rapid analysis approach proven in the kitchen to the contracting officer's cube, you'll likely end up with a really unthinkable mess.

Introducing Agile to a Legacy Project