Assignment 6

...please read this article and compose your thoughts on the lecture and the article in your blog...

I enjoyed reading this paper, and agreed with many of the points that the authors outline. From my own experience, I would much rather work with someone that has good interpersonal skills with working knowledge of something as opposed to someone that is an expert in the field, but is severely lacking in the communication skills department.

Part of the workplace culture shift of working collaboratively is knowledge sharing. If you work with someone who is unable or unwilling to share information, everyone is forced to rely on the expert for all questions and issues, large and small. All knowledge could potentially be held by one person. So what happens to the group if something happens to the expert? It doesn't have to be the tragic "hit by a bus" incident – What about vacation?

Conversely, in a culture where everyone is eager to learn and can effectively share information, it is possible to build a whole team of experts. As callous as it may sound, it's easier to convert a lovable fool into a lovable star than transforming a competent jerk into a lovable star.

One of the things I found most refreshing about the article was how the authors made mention of the importance of team building. Investing in employees seemed to play large part of corporate America during the dot com binge but has since lost focus with downsizing and budget cuts. Although spending money on teambuilding is harder to justify in a ROI based culture, I still believe it can go a long way.


On a semi-related note, in Monday's Free Press, a columnist talks about the importance of small talk in the office to build relationships which lead to effective networking.

-Kirk

Assignment 5

Read about the 24-hour Knowledge Factory and write up your thoughts in your blog. This paper is obviously about outsourcing, but I'd like you to also discuss your thoughts around integration and the very idea of a "24-hour Knowledge Factory".



The 24-hour knowledge factory is an interesting concept that seems to work well in theory, but I'm not entirely convinced that is entirely effective.

The whole premise of working a normal workday and then passing along your work for someone else to continue goes against everything that I have learned, both from experience and in my education. This mentality reminds me of the siloed waterfall (i.e., over the wall) development methodology that the majority of the information technology industry has tried to move away from. Collaboration and iterative approaches seem to be the better approaches to complete tasks. Simple hindrances to collaboration can be as simple as physical barriers like cube walls or offices. I would imagine being on the other side of the planet makes teambuilding even more difficult (besides the cultural differences).

The authors point out that success of a knowledge factory is based on effective communications. I wholeheartedly agree that good communication is important for any project or methodology. However, in my experience, no matter how good communications are at a handoff point, follow-up questions are always inevitable. In a serial development environment where one group is working in one area of the world, and the group that handed the work off is inaccessible (e.g., sleeping), follow-up conversations don't take place and then certain aspects of projects become "assumptions." While correct assumptions are fine, incorrect guesses can be disastrous.

The article mentions a few methodologies and technologies to help ease the communications gap. However, we all know that there is no communications tool more effective than face to face meetings and conversations. No technology can accurately convey facial expressions, body language, voice inflections, and whiteboard scribbles better than a meeting that you attend in person. In our diverse workplaces today, we must learn how to work with people that communicate and work differently than we do. I could only guess the additional difficulties learning to work with people across the globe that you never really meet in person.

However, I can see where the 24 hour knowledge factory has its place in the industry. For instance, if an application being developed was object oriented and its functionality could be broken down into multiple components, I can understand how pieces can be developed in serial or parallel, no matter the location. However, integrating the pieces would be best done in a consistent manner (i.e., by one centralized group), or else you would potentially get the collapsing bridge example mentioned in the paper. Although I'm not a programmer (but I play one for the class project), I honestly can't say for sure if even the object oriented example would actually work.

As for design, I do not believe the 24-hour knowledge factory would be effective. Designers (whether interaction or graphic) need to work collaboratively in order to develop a cohesive design that stays consistent throughout a user's experience. Otherwise, users could potentially encounter different interfaces, all within the same application.

As you can see, I'm not sold on the whole idea of the 24 hour knowledge factory. Maybe if I read more success stories I'd be convinced – but so far I'm not.

Assignment 4

Read the Nielsen paper on Heuristic Evaluation and the Advosys paper on secure web applications. Write a brief summary of your impressions on both papers in your blog.

Neilsen paper:

As information technology professionals, it is essential to understand the importance of usability. It affects many facets of our everyday lives, from a simple system login to the many applications we use on a daily basis. Unfortunately, there are still many individuals that do not see the value of spending time to ensure good usability and justifying the costs to do it.

However, proposing multiple heuristic evaluations seems to be an excellent low-cost start into usability. Anything with a 1:48 cost - benefit ratio is hard to dispute. The example from the article, “The cost of using the method was about $10,500 and the expected benefits were about $500,000.” With an average fixed cost of $4,250 per evaluation and $655 per evaluator, it is a relatively small cost within an average application development budget.

It is important to note that while heuristics evaluations are very effective and are comparatively unbiased, they should not be treated as a replacement for a traditional usability test. An application may go through many rounds of heuristics evaluation and revisions, but the true test will be when actual end-users interact with the application. It is not uncommon for users to interpret or interact with something completely differently than what you would expect.

If you’re interested in learning more about usability, there’s a few other websites you may want to check out:

• http://www.nngroup.com/
• http://www.ibm.com/easy
• http://www.jnd.org/
• http://www.asktog.com/
• http://www.useit.com/
  

Advosys paper:

This article was an interesting read for an insight into how nefarious people can do malicious things to a web application. Although some of the writings were above my technical level of comprehension (e.g., “taint checking), I was able to learn some security best practices, such as the recommendation to not put everything into the HTML directory and using absolute paths.

The biggest takeaway for me after reading was the recommendation to do field validation on the server. From a usability standpoint, I always prefer to let users know that there’s an issue with their input the minute they click off the field. When server validation is done and errors are presented poorly, it’s generally more difficult for users to go back and find what errors they must correct before proceeding to the next step. Therefore, to ensure security and a good user experience, it will be necessary to implement a combination of both client and server side validation.

The only thing that may be difficult is convincing the developers to do this…

There's something about Target.

I'm not sure how well the brick and mortar Target experience transfers to the e-commerce realm but here's a great article from the Detroit Free Press regarding shopping there.

The article discusses what Target is doing right to keep customers coming back.

-Kirk

Get your own WAMP.

Hi all,

If anyone wants to set up their own WAMP environment, here's nice 21 MB downloadable executable that installs Apache, MySQL, and PHP for you in just one step.

It's called WAMPserver if you want to find out more.

I've used it so far, and it seems to be working well - Just tested the php portion though.

You may also find this TinkerTech.net resource helpful.

-Kirk

Blaupunkt commercial.

Here's a different different "advantage" from what Porter may have had in mind...

(toilet humor alert)

View the Blaupunkt commercial

Assignment 3

You are being tasked with drawing, in a tool of your choice, a thorough and valid LAMP architecture... Please save your models as an image and post your answers to your blog with any assumptions or futher explanation in the extended entry.

Assignment 3


Hopefully this is right :)

There are quite a few resources on the web to set up the LAMP architecture - Main differences being what flavor of Linux you're using and different versions of software.

The sources that I consulted to build the drawing above:

• Setting up LAMP Platform - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
• Setting up Your PHP Envrionment Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP
• Dustin's Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) Guide
• Installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Linux

"There are two ways of using PHP with Apache: as a dynamic module that can be loaded into the Web server at run-time, or as a static module that is directly compiled into the Web server code." (source) - The articles that mentioned this fact preferred using PHP as an Apache module for maximum flexibility - Therefore, this is reflected in the diagram above.

A few other notes to narrate the diagram:

• Apache and MySQL are built upon Linux
• The web server and database server can be separate entities

Hopefully that should do it. Let me know if you have any questions.

-Kirk