Archive for May, 2008

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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

I know. I have not blogged for a few months now. The same goes for most of my friends. It seems that being away from school does drain the very soul out of us. Everybody must be busy with something and has lost interest in blogging. Let me list some of the things you can be busy with:

  1. Aimless browsing of Facebook
  2. Ignoring the hundreds of Facebook requests that you get daily
  3. Spamming your friends with Facebook requests
  4. Playing a Facebook game
  5. Reading Digg, Reddit, Engadget, or Slashdot
  6. Starting/engaging in a flame war on one of the aforementioned sites
  7. boys/girls at the office
  8. your boss’ hot secretary
  9. your boss/your boss’ hot daughter
  10. game consoles (and games) for which you finally have the money
  11. overtime work
  12. cooking (because you are living on your own now)
  13. laundry (same reason as above)
Pretty much everyone has been slacking off as far as blogging goes, except Jawaad, Skrud, Spiro, and Kevin.
Hall of Shame:
  • Nadia - has not blogged at all for almost 2 whole years now;
  • Terry - lost his domain name to some domain squatter.
Eric is clever, updating his MSN Space with sets after sets of pictures instead of writing.
I know all of you must have made new friends. I have, too, even all the way in Japan. But gee, try to give sign of life from time to time and not forget about TSG and everybody else from Concordia.

Posted in Life | No Comments »

Mobile development sucks - Prologue

Monday, May 12th, 2008

It’s been six months since my first full-time job has begun. The first month was spent in learning two products, of which I never got involved in any project. My boss finally decided to let me pick up a product development project that has been going on since before I joined the company. I must say that it has been a great learning opportunity so far and I want to share what little wisdom I have found.

Let’s start with some basic information:

  • The product is a software application for smartphones;
  • We are trying to support 5 smartphone platforms. I’m not talking about phone models - that would have been trivial. I’m talking about something more in line with a situation like Mac + Windows + Linux + Amiga.
  • As much as possible, the application is written in native code on all supported platforms (as opposed to Java, which would have been easier to port);

If you think that this is starting to stink, it gets better:

  • There is no vision document; the only available material that’s close to a vision document is a bunch of PowerPoint presentations;
  • There is no software requirements specification, not even an informal one;
  • There is no software architecture document, again, not even an informal one;
  • There is no software design document at all, again;
  • There is an overly simple blackbox testing checklist;

You probably saw this coming by now:

  • The programmers had started coding the damn thing and submitting test builds already.
If you think that this point above puts the final nail in the coffin, I am sorry that I must disappoint you. Read on.
  • There are, not one, but two versions of the product, with two different product activation models. Not only do you activate the two versions in different ways, but the sets of features that are disabled due to lack of activation are also different;
  • The two versions were being developed concurrently.
I suppose my dear reader has a good picture of the stage in mind now. I’ll let you sleep on it for a bit so you can imagine what can go wrong as the story unfolds itself.

Posted in Software Engineering, Software Project | No Comments »

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