Artful Matchmaking

Fanning the spark of an idea for an IT project is always a tricky, precarious task. Somewhat like internal marketing, a Business Analyst is selling a vision. More than this however the analyst mentally surveys the capabilities and availabilities of everyone he knows and attempts to match this to a vision that he can impute to the desires of management. So it feels very much like matchmaking, except in the business-to-project realm.

To the managers you are selling an investment. Your job is to convince them that they will get an honorable and lucrative return on their investment in equipment and manpower. To the software developers you are selling professional advancement, knowledge enrichment, and a reasonable amount of job security.

And similar to romantic matchmaking sometimes you have to use a bit of deception in order to get the parties together despite their different opinions. Many times you will actually have a deeper awareness of the best interests of the managers and programmers than either party will know alone. Hence a bit of artful promising goes a long way. Is this unethical? Not if you're careful to make sure that the ends justify the means.

It's all about some balance and possibilities and getting folks over the hump of their current comfort levels to move them through a low spot to finally arrive at a new, higher comfort.

When an idea is just a concept -- before it is even a glimmer in a manager's eye -- when it is just a spark of "I wonder if it might make sense..." or "maybe we should look at..." the Business Analyst combs the psychic brainwaves of the company's employees and decides what is Possible.

Artful Independence

If you design things from the start with testing in mind, then your finished system will be both stronger and easier to maintain. One way to accomplish this is to provide a "testing" checkbox (or menu pulldown) in your user interface. Doing so causes a complete design cascade in how you think about development.

It sort of provides you the same comfort level as if you were slipping behind the wheel in a Driver's Training car. It feels like authentic driving but with the added safety that if you forget to step on the brake you actually won't damage anything, as the instructor is watching out for you anyway.

It also allows you the wonderful opportunity to test production interfaces with a development-version of the backing database. Using this practice also promotes looser coupling between components. Of course, make it abundantly clear on the interface (say by changing the global form background color) when the client is in test mode.

This design method does incur some additional logical overhead. Usually you will set a "Testing" Boolean and have places where you evaluate it to set, for example, the database connection strings. This means you also have to provide both the production and development paths and parameters in your config fie.

The saving grace with this approach is that it pretty much clears you from the embarrassment of the all-too-frequent mistake of accidentally copying the development parameters into the production installation. So declare your independence from installation woes: code for testing from the outset and make the development configuration selectable from the interface.

The Art in Two

I've found that you can add a considerable amount of value and "cleanliness" during construction by designing and developing your software on two separate computers. Not simultaneously, but rather in an occasionally alternating fashion. The main point of this is to assure that you have enough of the referenced dll libraries in your project (along with any ancillary files) without constantly cranking around the older useless modules.

Make a full copy of your project folder, clear out the post-compile (and debug) junk, and then zip it up. Mail it to your other computer. Now on the receiving end unzip that puppy and see if you can compile it into something reasonable.

If you use two vastly different computers for this process, say a laptop running Windows10 and a wide screen desktop running Windows 7, you'll get the added quality checkpoint of verifying that your interface is presentable across platforms.

Yeah you need to install your development environment on both computers but this has some subtle advantages as well. Go ahead and square off your development: use the power of two!