Every day, I glance at our operational dashboard.  While I won’t share full screen-shots yet, I want to share some of the graphs I use every day to ensure the company is doing well.  Consider this graph.

“BD” stands for “big dial”.  We have 3 big dials we glance at every day.  If we don’t like what we see, we have some “smaller dials” we can look at.  We use the analogy of a plane cockpit. There are a few things pilots always glance at, and then there are smaller, more detailed ones that are consulted as the need arises.

This graph shows us our utilization breakdown in the categories that are relevant.  Here are the categories:

• Personal Time: holidays, vacations, dentist appts, etc.
• Assigned Time: Department meetings, 1x1’s, stand-up meetings, etc
• Bench Time: Time without available project work (doesn’t show because it’s zero)
• Other Time: Unplanned unproductive time, such as having a flat tire on the way to work
• Sales Time: Mostly used by the sales department: work to acquire a client
• Billed Time: self-explanatory
• Unbilled Time: Working for a client, but not charging
• CI Time: Continuous Improvement time:  We expect that our people are working to improve.
• Client Time:  sum of billed and unbilled time.

You will notice the big dip during the week of 4/7.  We had our Q1 quarterly off-site during that week.  We spent 12% of that week to use as a fun off-site where the entire company toured Inner Space Cavern hundreds of feet under Georgetown.  It shows up on the dashboard because it affects the performance of the company.  As an executive team, we decided it was a good investment in the future productivity of our staff.

You might have also noticed that 4/7 was a Thursday in 2011.  How can it be the week of 4/7?  We use the concept of “moving weeks” instead of calendar weeks.  We used to use calendar weeks, but the last data point of the graph was always skewed because it didn’t represent a full data point until people logged their time for Friday.  By taking data from a moving week, when I look at the data on Thursday, it pulls data from the previous Thursday through this Wednesday (yesterday).  That way, every point on the graph represents exactly the same size of a data point.  We do the same for months, quarters and years.

There is a big problem with pull metrics by calendar month (for 2011):

• January has 21 business days
• February has 20 business days
• March has 23 business days
• April has 21 business days
• May has 22 business days

You can see how using calendar months can wreak havoc on the comparability of month metrics.  We expect larger months to pose better numbers than the smaller months.  On the financial side, we have to accrue the payroll appropriately as well in order to keep net income from becoming skewed.

To deal with this, we use the concept of a moving month.  There are 13 moving months in a year.  Each moving month is a 28-day time period from yesterday to 28 days before yesterday.  In this way, every data point will be exactly the same size as the other.  There are also 4, 13-week moving quarters in a year.  The following graph is our 2nd big dial shown by moving month.

Before moving to moving months, the calendar month line was consistently misrepresented by the larger months.  Where the line moves, we need to know why.  We made the switch so that every curve of the line was meaningful.  We didn’t want our data communicating falsehoods or April-fools jokes.  You think I’m kidding, but April always looks bad coming straight out of March, which boasts 2 more full business days.  In professional services, a business day accounts for a significant amount of revenue.

Using Big Dial 1 and Big Dial 2, we can keep the ship on the right course.  As long as our staff is billing a consistently high percentage: we shoot for 78-79%, and our hourly margins are high enough to account for our unbillable staff (sales, marketing, corporate) and our fixed costs (facilities, supplies, etc.), our company will remain healthy.

These dials are tactical, not strategic.  The next dial is strategic.

This gives us a view into the structure of our company.  We have hired at least 7 new employees since November, 2011.  With that, it’s important to keep tabs on how we are changing the structure of our company.  When we hired Chris Missal for the operations department, we expanded billable staff.  When we hired Mary Chauvin for marketing, we increased non-billable staff.  Keeping the right balance is important.

You can see that our % of Operations staff to the rest has dipped a little bit over the last 7 months.  We have done that while growing, and we are re-leveling the organization now.  To level out the organization, we need to add about five more people to the Operations department.  This graph, while very high level, gives critical insight into how the other two graphs affect our income statement.

Using these three charts together, I have a very good sense of what I need to do to improve the financial performance of the company.  Right now:

1. I need to hire 5 more great .Net developers
2. I need to keep Client Time at the level of Operations % plus Contractor % (since both types bill)

I hope that this helps some developers understand how different types of reports can give answers and perspective to managers.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, shouldn’t more of our reports be pictures?

Reference: Wikipedia

I was having lunch with a recruiter colleague, and I was learning about the QA requests from lots of customers.  Most defined the QA role well within the “Testing” oval as shown in the picture.  From my questioning, it appears that the agile movement has done little to alter this SDLC.  In fact, this process is still alive and very will, even within agile teams.  The difference is in the batch size.  Rather than doing analysis on a batch of 50 features and then moving that full batch to design, the agile movement has reduced that batch size considerably, and in some cases reduced it down to a batch size of 1.  Lean agile teams are likely to use a batch size of 1 and continuously pull features through the lifecycle.  As an aside, I find that even when working on a single feature, this cycle is still in play, although the feature is more likely to jump backward and redo a portion of the phase before if new information is found.

The reason for the reflection on QA is that my recruiter colleague still predominantly  receives requests for QA folks to fill the roll of the testing phase.  This means that the QA involvement happens after analysis, after design, after implementation, and only when defects can no longer be prevented.  They can only be discovered.  Inspectors at the end of an assembly line are powerless to prevent defective parts.  They can only discover them through inspection and serve a Quality Control role to prevent defective parts from being shipped.  The same is true in software, and many others have written the same.

I shared a very successful project where we incorporated what would otherwise be a very traditional QA Manager into an agile process and yielded great results and a very low defect rate.  When crafting the team’s process, the QA Manager worked in between the analysis and design phases of a given feature to understand and then define the test cases.  That is, based on the current understanding of the feature, how will we test it?  The work required to create the test cases was sufficient to find analysis gaps early and force them to be filled.  The additional information and context contained in the test cases added the design activity as well and yield, in my opinion, a more robust design that was less prone to defects of oversight.  In this project, we saw the time spent coding reduced to less than 50% of the overall project effort.  In fact, at the beginning of the project, programmers were about 50% of project staff, and half-way through, the programmer staff had been reduced to 1/3 of overall project staff.  By crafting a process that pulled thoughts of QA to the beginning of the process, we modified the environment to one in which it was hard for defects to be created in the first place.  In the end, we found no need to create a defect tracking database, and the team was applauded for its quality.  The production launch, which always carries some risk, was a trivial affair, and the system is currently being used by many to perform their daily job.

Our industry stills see QA not as assuring quality, but merely controlling quality through inspection.  Some savvy development managers already have changed traditional QA job descriptions, but there is a long way to go before these notions reach the mainstream of the industry.

What are your experiences with QA?

I’ve been overwhelmed by the traction this pattern name has enjoyed.  Folks from all over the country have written about and have talked about the pattern.  Some of the ones I’ve noticed are here (please comment with more – I welcome it).

• Ayende Rahien’s opinion on Onion Architecture
• “Cunning” Clinton’s view
• Tony Sneed’s view and code sample
• StackOverflow questions on Onion Architecture
• Matt Hidinger’s Chicago .Net User Group video presentation on OA
• One interesting StackOverflow question.

Back in 2008, I defined four tenets of Onion Architecture:

• The application is built around an independent object model
• Inner layers define interfaces.  Outer layers implement interfaces
• Direction of coupling is toward the center
• All application core code can be compiled and run separate from infrastructure

Although there has been significant adoption of this pattern, I have received countless questions about how to implement it in various environments.  I mostly get asked about how it relates to domain-driven design.  First, onion architecture works well with and without DDD patterns.  It works well with CQRS, forms over data, and DDD.  It is merely an architectural pattern where the core object model is represented in a way that does not accept dependencies on less stable code.

CodeCampServer was an original sample of onion architecture, but it also grew as a sample of how to do ASP.NET MVC in various ways, how to use Portable Areas, and how to use MvcContrib features like input builders.  If you are just looking for onion architecture, it has too much going on.  I have pushed a much simpler solution that represents onion architecture concepts.  I have intentionally not included a UI input form or an IoC container, which most people associate with onion architecture.  Onion architecture works just fine without the likes of StructureMap or Castle Windsor.  Please check out the code here and let me know if this presents a simple approach – that is the goal.

When there is enough interest, I will continue this series with more parts.  CQRS definitely deserves some addressing within this architecture, and so do object models that support task-based UIs.

Get the code here at my BitBucket repository.

This is my first Lightswitch application.  I just installed the software, ran it, defined a table structure and a few screens.  It’s really simple, and I see that i runs a desktop version of Silverlight.  It feels like Access (I have done some of that programming earlier in my career) because you just define the tables and queries, and then ask for screens that work off the data.  You can customize the screens to some degree, and you can write code behind the screens, just like you can write VBA behind Access screens.  This is my first time looking at Lightswitch in a serious way since it was just released.  I will be looking at it more because it belongs in our toolbelt at Headspring.  There are plenty of clients who have Access and FoxPro systems.  These systems have tremendously useful built-in functionality that is prohibitively expensive to duplicate in a custom way with raw WPF and C#, but Lightswitch provides a possible upgrade path that won’t break the bank.

In case you are wondering what it looks like to develop this, here it is.

Notice that there is a Solution Explorer, and you are in Visual Studio with a new project type.  I was really pleased that I could write code easily.

I tried some ReSharper shortcuts, but they didn’t work.  I guess we’ll have to wait for ReSharper to enable this project type.  Here is my custom button that shows the message box.

I think Lightswitch as a lot of promise for legacy system rewrites, upgrades, and conversions.  Because it’s 100% .Net, you can mix and match with web services, desktop, SQL Server, etc.

We know from just a little reading that the ViewBag property on HomeController is a dynamic object – using the new .Net 4 dynamic capabilities.  Merely setting the Message property on the object creates the property.  It is not completely obvious how to create a new method on the object, though.

Usage

If I were to want to use a method in my Razor view like this. . .

. . . then I would need to figure out how to get the GetCurrentTime() method onto the ViewBag.  The following is the solution to that problem.

Solution

There are two technical capabilities of C# 4 that provide the ability to accomplish our new method.  The first is that I can create and set any new property on the dynamic object.  The second is actually a feature of .Net 2 – delegates.  I will create a method and then wrap it in a delegate and assign it as a property of ViewBag.

.Net 3.5 brought us the Func<> and the lambda expressions.  These make delegates so much more concise to write and read.  I have now create a method, assigned it to a object and set it as a property on ViewBag.

The only thing left to do is to dereference the property and invoke it with ().

For those of you who have been programming for a while, you know that I technically haven’t create a method on the ViewBag object.  That is correct.  We have to think back to why I asked for the method in the first place.

Why do we need methods?

We need methods in order to retrieve values that are resolved at run time.  For instance, if I need to pass in some view-specific value to my ViewBag for evaluation, I need a method. If you were ever tempted to pass a reference to the controller to the view just to be able to execute a method on a value the controller owned, this is your ticket to accomplishing that.  Because the method/closure/delegate in the controller has full scope access to the controller memory space, the ViewBag now holds the gateway to the controller’s state that is necessary.

When ASP.NET came on the scene, this posed a problem.  MVC required web application projects, not the web site directory.  Visual Web Developer was enhanced a few times along with the way, and now it is a much more usable package.

Capabilities of Visual Web Developer

First, you can install Visual Web Developer for free using the Web Platform Installer.  In real terms, don’t try installing it by itself.  You will find yourself tracking down NuGet, SP1, MVC toolkit refresh, etc.  Just go to this link to install.

After you install and run for the first time, go ahead and create your ASP.NET MVC 3 project.  I selected the “Internet Application” project because it wires up forms authentication for me and gives me a start controller and view.

You can see in this picture that I’m looking at the home controller’s index view that uses the new Razor syntax.

You can also see that the Solution Explorer supports class library projects.

Another new feature of VWD 2010 is that is supports “Extensions”.  This is an extensibility point.  The NuGet package is implemented as an extension.

There are many other extensions that can be installed to enhance the capabilities of VWD 2010.  Unfortunately, ReSharper is not one of these.  (By the way, if you haven’t yet installed ReSharper 6, you should do that now.  It provides fabulous support for ASP.NET MVC and Razor views).

At Headspring, we still use the full Visual Studio 2010 for custom application development because we really like the extra capabilities, but if you are looking to get started with MVC websites on .Net, go for VWD first.

In the beginning

I started my professional programming career as a programmer at the local school district. Some of my software is still running today, and one of their websites for teachers and high school counselors is still online and serving their needs. It’s written in ASP Classic, but it works well. My first applications used Internet Database Connector technology with ODBC data sources and HTX templates on IIS 2 running on Windows NT 4 servers. As far as I know, this was the birth of the “code nugget” in ASP.NET (<% %>). Microsoft still supports this technology.

As my career progressed and I became more senior as a programmer, I vowed that I would never enter management. After all, I enjoyed coding all day, and I saw some examples of bosses that didn’t understand the underlying complexities involved in software.

After a few years as a Senior Software Developer, I became interested in not only programming the software that was the solution but also in performing the analysis work to look at a situation and decide the overarching solution.

The switch

Later, I became interested in business, and now I am the Chief Operating Officer at Headspring, LP. Headspring is a custom software company in Austin, TX. We help companies compete by helping them get greater value out of their existing custom software investments as well as creating new custom software assets for them. I can see on a daily basis the real operating dollars generated and saved by our software solutions we have deployed for our customers.

My view of the industry has changed quite a bit now that I am a manager. Because Headspring is a custom software company, I still program (everyone does), but I also do the following:

• Grow our people
• Close out monthly financials
• Perform financial and operation briefings for the company
• Recruit new technical staff
• Set compensations levels and promote staff
• Manage facilities
• Manage vendors
• Help set company strategy

Professional development

We have a learning culture here at Headspring. Everyone is given time for and expected to foster what we call Continuous Improvement. In fact, CI Time is one of the things we track on our time system. Because we are a professional services company, we bill by the hour; therefore, we track every hour.

In January of 2011, I began a new initiative in my own quest for continuous improvement. I started the MBA program at the Jack Welch Management Institute. JWMI is a 2-year MBA program started and authored by the long-time CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch. After reading Jack’s book, Winning, I knew that I could learn a lot from him, and I jumped at the opportunity to apply to be in his Masters of Business Administration program. I have already learned so much about business communication, leadership, strategy, and people management. As a manager, I am seeing that people management might be the most important topic covered in the program.

What’s next?

As a manager, my success depends completely on the work of others, not myself. The only way I succeed is if others succeed. That’s the big difference between hands-on work and management work. People decisions can make or break an outcome. I have learned a great deal since entering management five years ago. I also know that I have so much more to learn. I am grateful for a terrific staff. They constantly challenge me to find other great people they can work with, and I do that to the best of my ability.

The more I learn, the more I discover how much there is to learn.