If you thought your job as an application development person is difficult, try being a consultant. I love my job as a consultant because I am able to affect change, that is, when people want it. The most dreaded phrase a consultant can hear is “that’s the way it is”. Those words have no rebuttal, no further review. It’s the organization’s way of saying “talk to the hand”! My job is to find gaps in code or process and bring them up to the client. Often times the client has fallen into way of doing things that are counter productive, or more likely, have not changed since the process was in place. A case in point, I was having a discussion with an architect about code review. I noticed that they had the Legacy style user, date, and change comments at the top of their classes. I made a review comment that they weren’t necessary, because Subversion tracks the changes for them. It was due to their work process that comments would be lost by Subversion on multiple merges. I mentioned that several high profile companies use Subversion and don’t seem to have a problem. The architect said that research was performed and it doesn’t, and if I have a better solution, I should do my own research before making a comment. I told him that software does indeed improve, and that if research has been done, it should be reviewed periodically to see if the issue had been fixed. I did research the issue, and Subversion did have bug but was fixed, and my client could use comments in their merged code. The key here is that the staff complains that changes don’t get done, but when they are in a position to make it better, they don’t do it. If anyone investigates a new technology or work process it should be DOCUMENTED AND REVIEWED! I don’t know if it will be investigated because it seems like a trivial issue, but the main problem is that the application development people complain that nothing changes. It’s our Culture. Culture is people, and all people, especially application development people can change culture. If there are deprecated methods and TODOs in production code, bring them up in your code review. I don’t accept “that’s the way it is” as a reason. You can’t change a decision for business reasons easily, but you can fix how things get done. If I don’t like the way that it is, I make it better.
I have been writing a lot about phones recently. What application development person wouldn’t be excited about the new smart phones? I will talk about that later, but first, the news! My colleague Aaron Whitenberger has been interviewed about his role as a Certified Business Analysis here at STAR BASE. If you didn’t know there was such a thing, you should read it now. I wrote my take about Google VS Viacom. Google spent 100 million dollars to defend their right, and it didn’t even go to trial. Vicacom is appealing, of course. The price of freedom is very steep.
Now on to my phone questions! A Java application development peer my client site refuses to get a Android phone because of “market fragmentation”. “I like that iPhone is walled off, but it’s on ATT”. He loves his blackberry, so maybe he doesn’t need it. This post from Slashdot seems to support his case. My questions to you are why did you get a smart phone? Did you consider the operating system when you got your phone? Which would you rather choose, a fragmented but open system where you can get any type of app but could have bloatware, or an operating system ruled by a “benevolent dictator” which strictly controls your hardware and software, but you are free of bloat issues? I choose Android because of its openness. I do have the technical skills to root my phone to remove bloatware if I need to. Some people can’t or don’t. I think Apple went down this road before, and I think you will see Android be the market share winner. Let’s see if Google can do better than Microsoft in maintaining some control of the platform, but still give 3rd parties the tools to innovate.
There are many skills needed as an application development person to be successful, but none more important than communication. In fact, that is point of our job, to be able to communicate to our peers, partners, and customers. I believe that most organizations make money in spite of the immense lack of communication. Most of the application development people I know complain more about the policies and procedures than about anything else (although it’s always something!). Aren’t policies and procedures communication? Certainly, but it’s the internal communication that enables and drives the external communication. Everything we do has an impact on our ability to communicate. Say the wrong thing to a journalist, and you will be removed. Miss that deadline, forget about the promotion. Governance is important for the security of communication, but when do these rules get reviewed? Ask any software development person or manager why, and the answer usually is “that’s how we do things here”. The real answer is that someone set that restriction to an event that happened long ago, and nobody is willing to change things. If communication is the life blood of an organization, why would we restrict the life blood arbitrarily? If this sounds like your organization, maybe you need to review how you are handling your communications. If you need help, STAR BASE Consulting has years of experience triaging your life blood, and making it flow easier, better, and stronger.
For those of you not following geek things, there is a lawsuit going on between Youtube (owned by Google), and Viacom (CBS, Daily Show, Colbert Report). Viacom is angry that some of their content was posted on Youtube. Apparently, there was 63,000 separate items on Youtube that were copyrighted by Viacom. Viacom has been supported with a “Friend of the Court” brief by NBC, BMI, and ASCAP (Basically the RIAA). Google has similar briefs by EBay, Facebook, Amazon, and Yahoo. How does this court case affect me as an application development person? Well, it could determine your web application development. There are many interesting issues here: fair use, piracy, site owner responsibility. The key issue here is for the very soul of the Internet. As you probably know, the Internet was created to share information amongst researchers around the globe. This communications device allows us to share voice, text, audio, and video. This makes it easy to share ideas, even if those ideas weren’t ours. A part of that communication is the same kind “water cooler” talk that everybody has done for years. “Did you see what that talk show guy said last night”? The only difference is now you can post it. This song expresses how I feel, and I have added some pictures to show how it has affected my life.
The media outlets want the site owners to control the content on their site. They claim that Youtube is a content provider, and thus are “stealing” their content for gain. This would be analogous to suing the U.S. mail for getting a threatening letter. We have fair use, so any signal sent through the airwaves is free for anyone take and use. This meant that anyone who broadcasted, the content could be consumed by anyone. The content providers made money by placing advertisements in the content. Since that time, content providers have been using congress to side step these boundaries by changing the length of copyright, putting "digital" rights on formerly analog content, and pushing for laws that allow content to be controlled by the provider. The large media companies ignored the Internet because there wasn’t any correlation to their business. When companies like Google started to compete for the same advertising dollars, the large media outlets saw the Internet as a threat to their business model, and are now looking to destroy it.
No one is trying to deny content providers money. It was agreed long ago that your work was yours, but eventually it would be owned by the public. That changed when media companies are entirely built upon their own content (just look Mickey Mouse at Disney). Do people take content that doesn’t belong to them? Yes. Are people just posting items broadcasted to make their point, or to inform? Yes. We have to decide as a society whether the Internet is place to allow copyrighted material as a form of communication. NBC found it distasteful that their shows were on Youtube. That’s why they created Hulu.
What do you want the Internet to be, a free (as in liberty) communication device, or a pay-per-view broadcast medium?
I am finding out things at my current client that everyone, including application development people knows; having a process is only half the battle. I have been to organizations where business workflow processes were not in place, and the productivity gains were huge when implemented. But over time, those processes stop getting followed. There are many reasons for this; the IT culture rejects the change, the processes don’t get reviewed in a timely basis and become a burden, and the players forget their role.
My client has a decent development workflow in place. Analyst get requirements from the business units, architects turn the business requirements into technical requirements, and application development people execute the requirements. Managers should manage the process, making sure that the resources are available when needed. I always wondered why top technical guys get passed over for management in favor of PHB (Pointy Haired Bosses), and now I know. It’s that PHBs know their role. Managers are managing the PROCESS, not the solution. Often, technically savvy managers want to work the issue. Software development is a very fluid process, and what works now, may not work three years from now. If you are manager for more than six months, you probably don’t know the correct solution. Regardless, your role is to make sure application development staff are available for the solution designed by the architects. Managers have a right to review the design during the design phase, but once finalized, let the architects and application development people do their jobs.
The same is true for consultants. Yes, they are using older technology, and yes it’s a pain to use, and yes it needs to be updated. Your job is to help resolve those issues within the framework of their organization. Unless you are brought in as a CIO consultant, the choice is probably not yours to make. It may be that the business has urgent needs that supersede modernization. They may not have the technical people to maintain the new code. The organization could be planning to replace the system with a prepackaged application like SAP. Or it could be that the technical staff knows their role, and is waiting patiently for their opportunity to upgrade.
I have a new client in Cincinnati. New clients are always interesting because you never know what issues and opportunities you will find. My client seems to have their act together. My application development friends will appreciate their setup; Maven 2 projects with built-in JUnit tests, a code coverage dashboard that show code complexity, code coverage, and Find Bugs reports. Things seem great, them why do they need a performance engineer?
The reason is common; who defines the duties of ITsets the rules. IT and the business need to be aligned to work on the common goals and increase productivity. If IT is too dominant, there is too much focus on technology and the business doesn’t get the tools they need to be productive. If the business unit is dominant, only projects that have a tangible return get done. In this case the business is more dominant, so projects like refactoring code, or cleaning up errors found by software like Find Bugs has a much lower priority. They do happen only if performance is an issue to the business. The performance team is set up like a clean up crew that comes in after the fact, to make things work better. There are coding style forms and best practices, but is up to the each developer to follow them. Since the focus is getting the project done on time, the developers are concerned on getting code that works,not what works best. The performance team is used to fix the worst performance offenders.To be fair, I have been at clients where IT treats the business units as a nuisance. The best tools are there, but little support for the business.
What’s the solution? IT needs select a technology that best suits the solving of business problems. The business should prioritize their issues, but work with IT to plan for fix releases. IT must utilize the tools that they have and encourage the usage of them. If you have the tools, use them!
Of course, a one-page document is not what we experience in our IT Business Solutions projects today. Instead, we have what Chris Gurney wrote for BA Times as the “Big Freakin’ Requirements Document”. Chris outlines the various reasons that our requirements document has to be so freakin’ long:
- To Communicate to all audiences
- To Validate that Needs are Met
- To Ensure Everything’s within in Scope
- To Manage Changes to Requirements
- To Meet Regulatory and Corporate Obligations
- To Define Requirements Collaboratively
It has become common place in over the years to try to accommodate everyone with one document. So language is included for executive staff. Then we translate the requirements to a more detailed level for developers and testers. We turn on “Track Changes” feature to retain the history of changes to the document; which then leads to descendent versions of the document.
What Chris is trying to point out in the article is that a Word document is no longer sufficient for collaborative development of requirements for our IT business solutions projects. What you can expect to see is many vendors rush to provide software solutions to these shortcoming
s. Currently, there are some solutions out there to address these issues. I will not promote any current software solutions here, but you can expect to see more solutions from new vendors in this area. You will also see great improvements in features in the solutions that are already on the market. When business organizations migrate in groves to these solutions and away from Microsoft Word as the standard for “document” development then you will see this market grow rapidly. Large organizations with large IT staffs and geographically dispersed enterprise application development teams should be first to make the move. I think you will see Business Analysts within those organizations leading the charge, but with all “organizational shift” changes, convincing those that hold the purse strings of the value and need for new tools will be their greatest challenge.This post may shock you... the Java Rocker is going to talk about legacy iSeries and AS/400! Before you panic, and call it the end of the world, let me continue. This post is about running all of the cool new Web 2.0 things on your IBM hardware. Really! Even in Cincinnati! Many people, (myself included) thought the old IBM hardware was only for RPG and COBOL (shudders). It turns out that IBM has been adding functionality to run Linux on the box. That means Wikis, Ecommerce, blogs, and web applications are now there for iSeries-AS/400 people. The catch is that your iSeries needs to be up to date, which sadly for most organizations is not. My IT consulting colleagues at STAR BASE are good with taking your tired old hardware and doing the maintenance necessary for the modernization piece. They get your hardware and software cleaned up and ready, so I can help you with all of the cool new application development projects that I have been talking about.
But you are sitting there saying we are a small to medium size business (SMB), my entire IT staff is 10 or less, I do not have a Business Process Orgranization (BPO) or Project Management Office (PMO); where should the BA fit into my organization?
SMBs need to utilize the BA role within their project delivery methodology. If the role is not being fulfilled then there is higher risk of failure of the project in that it does not meet the needs of the business. I have worked on many small-to-medium IT staffs and can attest to the fact that when resources are few that people wear many hats. There were projects where I served as the project manager, business analyst, developer and trainer. On smaller staffs, where only one or two of the people will be doing the duties of the BA, it is even more important to make sure that those people are easily accessible by the business units that they support. Have them sit in the vicinity of those business units instead of in the IT Department. I still feel that the BA is an IT function and should report to IT management as opposed to business management, but making the BA readily available and accessible to the business adds value to their role and gains buy-in from the business people to assist the BA with their duties.
So when making the organizational chart keep the BA in the IT Department; but when divvying up office space, make room for the BA near the business unit(s) that they are to support.
1. Think TCO, not ROI
To the CFO, return on investment is how much money you’re going to give back to the company. Let’s face it. Most IT projects — no matter how compelling — don’t bring “return” to the organization like an additional sales person, a new marketing campaign, or a new product launch. Preach total cost of ownership (TCO); repeat it until you are blue in the face. Whether business application development, web application development, IT infrastructure investment; you can demonstrate “fiscal stewardship” through cost reduction or increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Cloud Computing
CFOs like what they hear about cloud computing as a cost saver. Don’t fight them on it.
3. Green IT
Are you surprised when the CFO is not willing to pay a premium to keep the environment cleaner? The reality is that no green projects exist unless they have a better TCO. So whether to upgrade your IT infrastructure, better IT infrastructure cooling, or saving space for your IT infrastructure you can build a strong business case of the decreased TCO and community relations intangibles of being an “environmentally conscious” firm.
4, 5 and 6. Virtualize, Virtualize and VIRTUALIZE
“This subject takes up three spots because there are three key virtualization targets -- servers, desktop and storage. But again, the key here is how to justify and how now NOT to justify.” Again build your TCO case for virtualization, but be realistic in your cost savings estimates. Many times virtualization projects are viewed as unsuccessful because they did not meet the upfront cost estimates. Be sure to include high traffic times such as end-of-month close periods.
7. Adopt IT-Centric Business Continuity
Over the years responsibility for business continuity have been put on IT management. This needs to change. Organizations need to understand that there are three phases to a business continuity plan; event response, disaster recovery and business continuity. With the financial impact on the organization of disaster recovery and business continuity, business management must be involved and responsible for these areas. It should not be IT management’s responsibility to determine which business units are most important.
8. Align with the Big Picture
Along with TCO, build your requests showing how the request aligns with the business objectives and goals of the organization.
9. Proactive Cost Reduction
Boy does that sound like another way to say TCO to you? Take a proactive stance on reducing cost. The article showed how to reduce cost of document retention.
10. Reduce Data Center Costs
The organization’s data center is usually the center of the IT infrastructure, both in physical space and cost. Just as in application software development, modular building of a data center can cut cost of the IT infrastructure through avoiding construction cost, reduced cooling cost and reduced capital expenditures.
“While the relationship between CFO and CIO can sometimes have more debits than credits, it is definitely worth the investment in time and effort to highlight IT projects in terms the CFO will understand.”
What is not reported on the evening news is how an army of geek volunteers from the private sector is supporting that relief effort. Leading the way are organizations like CrisisCommons, Ushaahidi, the International Community of Crisis Mappers and InSTEDD, according to an InformationWeek artical. Application software development gets into the mix, undertaking such tasks as developing ways to help locate U.S. citizens and provide information online about Haiti and how to donate money, developing a timeline of events and a wiki of information online, a GPS-compatible street map of Haiti, an English to Creole dictionary for IPhones and Android mobile devices, and a system to use Twitter messages to ask for or offer assistance to those in need. "We've been working a lot at Sunlight Labs to get application software developers to organize and work together in volunteer communities. Developers may not be competent with a saw, but are starting to realize they have a skill they can contribute," says Clay Johnston, director of Sunlight Labs. "The tools are available, and methodologies like agile project management have been popularized that can facilitate this."
In light of the reports of the failings of the coordination of relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina and the reports of the relief effort in Haiti, it is clear that it is IT solutions that have been put into place to better support humanitarian relief efforts worldwide and that technological advances has clearly moved into the 21st century in support of those efforts.
First, sorry for the tardiness of my posts. Between the holidays, coming back from the holidays, a cold, and a secret project (for now), I haven't had time to blog.. until now. My current focus has been a Facebook game application. Well it's still in the alpha phase, but I wanted to get the architecture up and running. There's nothing worse for an application development person than to finish your application, then find out you need to rewrite it (or worse) because of the architecture doesn't support it. Even without Zembly, setting up a Facebook application is pretty easy. Since I had most of the defaults already in, the only thing I need to do is to tell Facebook where my application resides. Since I don't have Zembly anymore, I have to put on my application development and network administrator hats on set up an application server.
My first test was to deploy the application into my local Tomcat. NetBeans does a great job of having the files available to you, but the thing you learn quickly is that there isn't a simple deployment piece. Tomcat needs a WAR file, so I tried to use the JAR command to WAR up the files in the dist folder. No dice. The war file needs a proper web.xml file to work properly. Rather than use workarounds on workarounds, I created a web application project in NetBeans, linked the jar file from my JavaFX project, and copied the JNLP and HTML files to my new project. I now have a WAR to deploy. Tomcat loves this file. I run and... “FILE NOT FOUND?” was heard all throughout Cincinnati. Your JNLP file that was created points to a servlet called internally by NetBeans. Make sure change the following lines:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jnlp spec="1.0+" codebase="http://your server.com/app path/" href="SBWarsTest_browser.jnlp">
<information>
<title>SBWarsTest</title>
<vendor>STAR BASE </vendor>
<homepage href="http://your server.com/app path/"/>
Once I made the change to localhost, everything was fine. Now I wanted a real application server, so I downloaded and installed Glassfish V.2.1 on one of our servers, changed the JNLP file and we are in business. I tried to hit it from my machine, and no dice. After some extensive research, I found out the the Java 7 EA JRE does not play well with JavaFX. I uninstalled it (which reverted to JRE 1.6.18), and it works. In Facebook, you need to set the canvas callback URL to your host application path. The result is the pretty picture you see at the top of my post.
According to ComputerWorld, web application development remains top dog by far in the top IT skills to have in 2010. Specifically, companies will look for developers with knowledge of .Net, Java, Web development, open source and portal technologies. The article goes on to suggest that combining web application development skills with business analysis or project management skills is a big plus. ComputerWorld lists the remaining skills to have for 2010 in its top six as: Help Desk/Technical Support, Networking, Project Management, Security and Business Intelligence.
I feel ComputerWorld did not put enough emphasis on Security; this without doubt will be the biggest challenge for IT executives in the coming years. Open-source software may be an innovative money saver, but IT professionals still have concerns that networks could be vulnerable to viruses, cyberattacks and other intrusions.
According to InfoWorld, a new survey from Forrester Research found that 58 percent of large companies have security concerns about open source. In addition, 57 percent of small and mid-sized businesses expressed concern that open-source software would be "complex and hard to adopt".
With the advent and increasing usage of open-source in the business world, expect to see demand for IT security related skills to grow. According to the FLOSS 2020 roadmap presented at the Open World Forum in Paris, 40 percent of jobs will be related in some way to open source by 2020. You can expect application development and security to comprise a great majority of these jobs.
When I went to JavaOne this year, I had some friends who went to the Google I/O conference a few days before. Besides getting a new G2 phone (lucky), they were raving about Google Wave. Google recently released Wave into beta, and I have had a chance to play with it.
For those who do not know, Google Wave is a new type of communication software that allows real time collaboration. I know, it sounds all buzzwordy, but it is real cool. Think of Wave as email, SMS, and a working SharePoint all in one. To start a Wave you select new and a text area displays. Select from your contacts to add people, write some text and press send. Sounds like email right? Well, what if after some correspondence, you need to bring other people into the loop? And those late comers are now asking new questions? I don't know about you, but I get confused trying to read emails with lot's of history, and getting new emails based off of some of that history. Google Wave fixes this because everyone is updating a single thread in real time. If you are added late, there is a play button to show the order of the messages. Since it is in real time, all response are shown when entered. You could follow a meeting while listening to a conference call, and ask questions during the meeting, instead of having a second meeting to discuss the first meeting.
Collaboration is the key aspect of Wave. I am using Wave to let some people in Brazil help me test my JavaFX application. As a Cincinnati based application development person, this already saves me time and money. I added a zip file, and instructions on how to use it. I can get their feedback, and update the zip file. I think all application development people can see how useful this is. I can update my code to my users, and have a history of feedback. This will work well for those “confused” management types who “forgot” their feedback.
Google Wave is also a development platform. You can create your own widgets to run on Google Wave. The widgets provided by Google are a poll widget, collaborative Sudoku, and emoticons. I have used the poll widget, and works nicely. If you have a yes/no/maybe question to ask, it really is useful. I have an idea of using TTS to create “talking” Waves.
The one thing I would like to point out is that you will be able to run the Google Wave engine on your boxes. That means you can have a “private” Wave and a “public” Wave. You can set access restrictions on Wave, so you can have control of who uses Wave. Now that it is in beta, look for an invite and get riding!
I recently read an article about the state of the IBM “i” and the amount of complaining by IBM application development and business partner folk. I know several RPG application development folk, and it sounds familiar. That made me think about my Java Application development and career. Are there things to complain about, and uncertainty about the future? Yes, but there are 2 reasons why the Java community is in a better place; the business model and the community. Before the IBMers call for a holy war, I said COMMUNITY! I am not talking about the strengths or weaknesses of the hardware or software. The business model for IBM is that they make the hardware and software, and partner for the sales and service. I think that is a viable model until IBM competes in the sales and services with their partners. If a lead is brought in by a small partner, they are awarded by giving the business to someone bigger. This sets up a confrontational relationship between IBM, the big partners, and the little partners. IBM can also decide whether or not you are worthy to be a partner. Why does this affect the software application development team? Because most consulting firm are selling SERVICES not HARDWARE. If they are not seeing business because of political fighting, they don't have to sell it. There are viable options on other platforms, where interference does not happen. IBM never fostered a community, they created a hierarchy with themselves as the head.
Certainly Sun has done some things that made myself and others unhappy. Besides, complaining, we actively pushed to remove barriers in our path. We do have an open source Java. Is there a IBM community that can work with RPG to make it work for them? I also think its about scale and timing. It's not like IBM software developers have their own AS/400 at their home. It's easy for me to create and use nearly any kind of application at my home in Cincinnati, and pretty cheaply. It makes it fun to tell non-technical people about my application development. Nobody but accountants want to hear about accounting programs. Java, and newer languages have grown up with the Internet. I have friends from all over the globe that have similar interests. If I have a problem, I can go online to a forum, friend, or web page to find what I need. I can read and write blogs to voice my opinion (like now). These things are not ingrained in the Legacy community, and in fact, have been actively campaigned against. It is my belief that any software, hardware, or service will die when there is no vocal community to support it.
People outside of Cincinnati may be shocked to know that I work with languages OUTSIDE of Java! I don't know any application development person, especially one who does web application development who doesn't use several languages. I have recently been working on Magento. What is that you say? Magento is an Open Source PHP ECommerce application based on the Zend Framework. You don't need to download Zend, just the Magento PHP files. We actually have Magento internally setup with a LAMP package, but I already have MySQL and Apache on my local machine, so I thought I'd tackle and individual install. The verdict? Well after a couple of small hiccups (don't use the Windows install for PHP, just unzip, and localhost needs to be a virtual host), setup was a breeze! Fortunately, STAR BASE, Inc. has enough experience to over come these issues. Magento is easy to customize products and catalogs, and would be a good choice for organizations to create their own ECommerce site. Magento is easy enough to implement without an IT Consultant, but an experienced consultant can save you time and frustration.
As I wind down from my client in Cincinnati, I have been reflecting on the job of technical consultants. In my previous posts, I have reviewed my knowledge and understanding of code. But there’s more to my job, and really all application development members’ jobs than code knowledge. A technical consultant needs to know the internal political climate, the processes in place, and the personnel. The client may be risk averse to technology change, or open source software. It could be a corporate edict, or it could be that your client doesn’t know the benefits of the new technology. The processes may be flawed, but are flawed for a reason. A good consult needs to work within the existing process, move that process to a better one if needed. People are always initially wary of technical consultants, because they fear that they will be replaced. Conversely, technical consultants are keenly aware that they are replaceable, and that they should be replaced, if they have done their job right. A good technical consultant knows the trends, but also knows to read people. Which ones need assurance that their job is not in danger, which ones should focus more on their job, and which ones are ready to pick up new ideas. A good technical consultant has confidence in his abilities, but isn’t afraid to learn new ideas from others. I consider an assignment a success if I have left my client in better shape than when I arrived. I am many things, including an application development person, but my job is more than code.
I am finishing up with my client in Cincinnati. I am trying to clean up code from the vendor, when an interesting error occurred. That’s when I decided to poke around and look at some place for better coding practices. As any Java software development person knows, "Effective Java" is about the best book there is on Java. It’s a must have book. On The web, I have found this site that has some great coding practices. Technology, and specifically Java, is a fast moving animal. What was valid 5 years ago, may not apply, or even exist, now. Searching the Internet is great for information, but you have to be careful too. I try to avoid any article written before 2006, unless it directly applies to the subject matter. Take string concatenation for example, common wisdom says to not use the "+" for concatenation. Use a StringBuilder object. If you are on 1.4.2, you don’t have that object, you have StringBuffer. Well performance wise, which works best, and what kind of performance hit do you get? The only real way to tell is to write your own test class, and call JavaP. JavaP allows you to see the byte code operations. Sometimes you may have only a few operations which would be unnoticed by your users. If repeated often enough though, you could have a real performance problem.
I have noticed that many application development people, and really all people, find a fact that they have read, and use it in their daily job. Facts, like technology change, and the best way to know is to prove it yourself. I have come to write little test classes to work out code I haven’t done before. That way I can understand just what is going on before I introduce it into my application. I have been applying that same concept to accepted performance practices. Profiling applications is also a great way to "see" what your code is doing. The best thing for application development members to do is never assume anyting works as planned, and never stop learning.
I have been and continue to be a strong proponent for IT certifications. Even since I obtained my CBAP® certification last year the application process has changed. The exam itself is now based on version 2.0 of the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK)®.
I have heard that CBAP® applicants are rejected due to the IIBA® reducing their documented hours for tasks or deliverables that do not qualify as business analysis work. Such reduction of hours left them short of the 7,500 hour requirement. Some applicants are unaware of the new 900 hour requirement in four of the six knowledge hours, again leaving them short of the requirement.
First of all I believe that the application process itself is more rigorous than the exam. It is part of the whole process of obtaining the certification. The IIBA® , by putting all applicants through a rigorous review process, protects the value of the certification. A couple of tips I can give you in applying for the CBAP® certification:
- Document more than the minimum 7,500 hours of business analysis work. This ensures that if your hours are reduced in the review process that you will still have enough hours to qualify to sit for the exam. This goes for total hours as well as hours in each of the knowledge areas. I personally documented 9,000 hours on my application.
- Put the language on your application in the wording of the BABOK®. By putting your work tasks and deliverables in the language of the profession it is less likely that the hours will be discounted in review.
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