Selfelected

Microsoft team foundation bug management

A minute ago I reported two bugs for a project and noticed that the GUI for bug reporting in TFS inside Visual studio still sucks.  It sucked 5? years ago.  It still does.

It was a flashback because I 1) didn’t remember exactly how user unfriendly the form is with edit fields all over, hard (partly impossible!) to navigate with keyboard and bad overview.  There wasn’t a clue 5 years ago that a bug had an attachment.  There still isn’t.  2) didn’t remember how awfully slow it was.  Reporting bugs might inflict some stress to me because there is so much I want to tell but text and images are so limited and I want to get it all out before it flees my mind.

Now I can see that the overview of bugs is still lousy.  I have read that it has improved but from what?  To Microsoft’s defense I must say that they have done a good effort but it all smells like one-department-for-testing with dedicated-testers and one-department-for-developers and so on.  To me development, testing, operations, architecture is all the same.

So even though I like the symbiosis of TFS and VS and the whole test rig with virtual machines one can buy from Microsoft I won’t sell the bug management tool to any client that isn’t already deep into it.
The licensing model, as I remember it last time I checked, also bothers me but that is for another article.

Shanzhai

In the west we are raised in a strong belief that everything can be owned; written text, images and even land(!)  With this belief as our Pen and money as our Sword we push this way of thinking on the rest of the world so as to keep our wealth.

Not everyone has this same belief and are happy to invent and reinvent former inventions and constructions instead of protecting the old.  One word for this is plagiarism, another is Shanzhai.  I am afraid a new word will be “economic terrorism”.

If I claim that others follow my rules then I should be prepared to follow theirs; I am not automatically right because I have a bigger gun.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123257138952903561.html

Postpone decisions

Delay the decisions until they solve themselves or disappear. Sometimes postponing is futile and a decision has to be made. Then make it, but not earlier than that.

Sometimes one need more balls to not decide than to decide.

( And or course… not making a decision is also a decision… )

No information is better than wrong information

With no information you have one task.
1) deduce the right information

With the wrong information you have to:
1) understand the information
2) find out that the information is wring
3) deduce the new information