The end for NeHTA?

A recent review of PCEHR produced a number of recommendations. ITNews has a good summary of the key findings, one of which is the dissolution of NeHTA.

Defining Requirement Types: Traditional vs. Use Cases vs. User Stories | TechWell

Defining Requirement Types: Traditional vs. Use Cases vs. User Stories | TechWell:

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This is a great article and substantiates my thoughts that corporate IT is not capable of rigorous SW development methodologies.

I have a purple carrot (var. atrorubens) in front of me. This epitomises the SDLC for SW engineering; it is as expected, uncomplicated and readily available. It is considered the norm since the dawn of time, or at least carrot recorded history ( <900BC). Having developed and tested telecomms and OS SW for years with detailed specifications covering protocols, standardised user interfaces and messaging systems, it seems common sense to me that systems should be clearly specified in a business benefit, then technical manner.

However, over time, once the introduction of fashionable orange carrots (var. sativus) appear around C18 the appearance of a purple carrot seems unpalatable for most customers.

This is Agile.

Having come across countless end users and business representatives, who apparently are the gatekeepers to an application go-live, and have no accumen in the definition of business requirements, it makes perfect sense that corporate IT has lent towards the advantages that Agile affords; an approach that advocates regular consultation with a customer that hasn't got the time, notion or training to deal with detailed requirements.

This might seem harsh, but so many projects have proven just that; the end user representatives are both the ones most qualified to determine if the new system changes are congruent with the proposed business changes, but also the least capable to dealing with detailed business and functional requirements. They don't like purple carrots.

Ideally, the business, or end user representatives want orange carrots; they were eating something else nice and tasty for ages, and while the new fangled carrots were interesting, it was only until they became mainstream (read IT systems delivering something useful) that they became useful.

The business wants orange carrots; no BPMN, no UML, in fact, no detailed specs. We can sort out what it's meant to do once you've built it. Agile is for the IT illiterate end user.

This shouldn't be seen as a shortcoming, but rather as a take on how Agile must be used by IT staff to engage the business.

The business DO NOT CARE how nicely your UML diagram looks; they don't have the time nor inclination to understand it. It isn't outlined how they would do it (a quote from someone not 3 months ago), they don't have time to read the specifications anyway, and do the BAs really understand what we need?!

So, if your business stakeholders are not SW engineers, erm, don't treat them like SW Engineers. SW Engineers like the thought of purple carrots, as it reminds them of vi. The business wants something they can eat now, so give them microwaved carrots.

Death and birth of data and disks

Western Digital Community - How To.

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This has just saved my data. As a firmware update had bricked my WD ShareSpace, I thought it would be a cinch to mount one of the RAIDed disks and copy the contents over to a temp RAID until I find a long term solution; I was wrong. I thought I had the disks in RAID 1, but it should be easy grabbing the data off them right? hur dur.

While I thought it would be a simple case of getting an EXT3 driver for either the Mac or Win7, the RAID caused problems on the disks.

I tried:

• MacFUSE 2.0.3 with fuse-ext2 0.0.7 - nuttin'
• OSX Fuse 2.3.4 with fuse-ext2 0.0.7 - I was able to mount sdb1 but not sdb4
• explore2FS 1.07 - could read the files off the partition with the data (sda4 or sdb4), but couldn't copy them
• ext2explore 2.2.71 - nada
• ext2fsd 0.51 - could read sdb1 but not sdb4
• linux reader - no
• vv 0.7 - nein
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial off USB in Mac OS X Lion - non
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial off DVD in Mac OS X Lion - niet
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial on PC Win 7

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Yay!

The link on the WD website had a nice simple run-down on the commands to get the RAID going. I didn't follow exactly and got the RAID volume going in degraded mode only using one disk. This was in case it all went wrong; I still had one disk left, see!

Once I had the Win7 notebook working and had mounted both the old RAID disk and a new drive to copy the contents, it only took 9 hours to extract the data. 

Color Palette and the 56 Excel ColorIndex Colors

Color Palette and the 56 Excel ColorIndex Colors:

almost everything you ever ever ever wanted to know about colours in MS Excel.