In September I will be speaking again at the Business of Software conference, being held this year in Boston.

And finally, for something completely different, don't miss the Jam Session at Tech-Ed on June 3^rd.  Several of us minions from SourceGear are planning to take the stage and give our rendition of Pinball Wizard.  It'll be me on acoustic guitar, our development manager Jeremy Sheeley on bass, and our product manager Paul Roub playing the Evil Mastermind Schecter PT that will be given away later that week.

And BTW, none of us will be dressed as The Evil Mastermind.  This should be obvious, as The Evil Mastermind would never do something actually cool like a song by The Who.  Rather, he would do something like a Kelly Clarkson song and mistakenly believe it was cool.  :-)

1. Playing the 12^th hole at my regular course, I made a shot from about 80 yards out.  Unfortunately, it was for par.  :-(
   
   
2. This past Saturday I walked the Indianapolis half marathon in a personal record time of 14:57 per mile.
   
   
3. After setting up my new subwoofer, I put in the Return of the King DVD and zoomed ahead to the Minas Tirith battle scenes.  Seconds later, my younger daughter ran upstairs and cried, "Daddy, your movie is shaking the whole house!"

All three of these were moments of great personal satisfaction.  The third one was the only one to result in maniacal laughter.

Last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer blinked, but in a rather confusing way:

• The sensible part:  Ballmer claimed that they might reconsider their decision if that's what customers wanted.
  
  
• The confusing part:  Ballmer appeared to be completely ignorant of the multitudes of people publicly begging for XP to get a stay of execution.

Just want kind of customer feedback would Ballmer be able to hear?

It's really not that hard to find overwhelming evidence of large numbers of people who want to continue using XP.  A simple Google search for the string "save windows XP" results in over 200 thousand hits.

Oh yeah, I forgot -- Steve probably doesn't use Google.  Maybe the problem is that he just can't find any XP fans on the Internets?  :-)

Or maybe Ballmer is following the now fashionable trend of counting an Internet person as only 3/5 of a real person?

• Sure, Ron Paul has lots of fanatical supporters, but they're mostly just people on the Internet, and they don't really count.
  
  
• Sure, Barack Obama has raised truckloads of money, but he mostly gets it from people on the Internet, and they don't really count.
  
  
• Sure, over 170 thousand people have signed the Save Windows XP petition, but those people are on the Internet, so they don't really count.

Or maybe this is simply the most arrogant corporate decision in history?  Maybe Steve can hear all of these desperate cries but he simply doesn't care.

Power corrupts.  Every monstrously large organization eventually turns into, well, a monster.  The next step is for all these organizations to start borrowing each other's tactics.  Hey Steve, why not start waterboarding everybody who won't switch to Windows Vista?  Apparently it's legal.  :-)

The whole situation is most annoying to those of us who are running small software companies.  Unlike Microsoft, we actually have to listen to our customers.  When they tell us to jump, we ask how high.

Microsoft is telling millions of its customers to jump.  Out of principle, I am doing my best not to comply:

• I'm typing this blog entry on Windows XP.
  
  
• That instance of Windows XP is actually a VMware image running on my Mac.  I started using a MacBook Pro with Leopard a couple months ago.  And I love it.
  
  
• I just donated fifty bucks to the ReactOS project.  I'm figuring that in the long run, I've got a better chance of getting Windows XP from ReactOS than from Redmond.

Some of my readers are horrified at this blog entry.  "But Eric, aren't you a .NET developer?"

Yes, I am.  My overall posture toward Microsoft is still friendly.  I still use Windows every day.  I still love Visual Studio.  C# is still my favorite language ever.  Heck, I'm even a big WPF fan, so I'd actually prefer to see the world switch to Vista.  I've used Vista, and while I didn't find it to be a compelling "must-have" upgrade, I rather liked it.

But none of this means that I'm going to give my blanket agreement to every decision Microsoft makes.  In this case, I object to Microsoft's plan, not because Vista is so awful, but rather, because ignoring customers is so wrong.

If you are a software developer, there are a whole bunch of companies (including mine) who want to sell you stuff.

If you read any magazines, go to any conferences, or visit any websites, there is a good chance you've seen their (our) marketing efforts.

More and more often, the term you see in those marketing materials is "ALM".  Ever wondered what that term means?

It means "Application Lifecycle Management".

Don't you feel better now that I've cleared all that up?  :-)

Digression:  Dead-End Acronyms

So ALM is what I call a dead-end acronym.  Like all acronyms, nobody knows what it means until you see its expanded form.  But with dead-end acronyms, people can stare all they want at the expanded form and they still don't know what it means.  There's nowhere to go.  It's a dead-end.

We software developers have a tendency to create dead-end acronyms.  For example, SOA means "Service Oriented Architecture", but I still don't know what that means.

My personal theory is that dead-end acronyms get created when somebody forces the issue.  They create an acronym which didn't want to be created.  Indigo didn't really want to be WCF -- it just wanted to stay Indigo.

Dead-end acronyms.  Our special gift to the world.

No, really.  What is ALM?

Back to the point.  What is ALM?  Let's look a bit deeper.  The expanded form actually does hold a few clues:

• From the word "Application" (and from the overall context) we know that this is about "Software Development". 
• The word "Management" is fairly intuitive all by itself.
• The word "Lifecycle" tells us that we're talking about the whole software development process.  All of it.

So, we can translate "ALM" to "Managing The Whole Software Development Process".

I suppose it's obvious that "MTWSDP" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue like "ALM" does.

Worse, I'd have to say we still haven't made much progress here.  Isn't there some way out of this dead-end? 

What is ALM?

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I...

Starting from this point, attempts to define ALM usually go in one of two distinct directions.

1. The Trees (focus on the details)
1. List all of the activities in the whole software development process (idea, market research, requirements, design, architecture, implementation, testing, release, wild drunk release party, user support, postmortem, assignment of blame, sackings, regret over impulsive terminations, rehiring as contractors at twice the cost, lather, rinse, repeat).
2. For each activity, list one or more tools that support that activity (requirements management, modeling, compilers, automated testing, issue tracking, project management, dart board, help desk, time tracking, etc).
2. The Forest (look at the big-picture)
1. Talk about the benefits that software managers can get from looking at the whole lifecycle.
2. Talk about the integration between the various tools in the whole software development process.

I believe the essence of ALM lies in the big picture view, in the real benefits that software managers get from using a truly integrated suite of tools that give them the ability to deal with the whole software development lifecycle.  My definition of ALM proceeds from The Forest perspective, the big picture view.

Getting more specific

So far this piece is over 500 words long and it still doesn't say anything.  It's time to get a bit more specific.

Before I go any further, let me say that this particular article does not attempt to offer a complete definition of ALM.  For now I am going to focus on just one issue:  Traceability.

Let's look at an example.

The Mystery of the PersonCompanyAssoc Table, Part 1

Joe is a technical support representative for CrummySoft, an ISV that sells a CRM solution.  He is working with a customer who says they just upgraded from version 6.0 to 7.0 and suddenly everything became really slow.  In an effort to track down the problem, he goes to visit Sally, a program manager.

Joe:  One of my customers says version 7.0 is a lot slower than 6.0.

Sally:  How much is "a lot"?

Joe:  Loading their dashboard page went from 1 second to around 30 seconds.

Sally:  That's a lot.  How many other customers are complaining about this?

Joe:  I've heard of a few.  Maybe a dozen.  So far.

The detective work begins.  Sally opens her IDE and digs into the problem.  Looking into the DB schema, she sees something odd.

Sally:  Here's something odd.

Joe:  What?

Sally:  Somebody changed the SQL table schema during the 7.0 dev cycle.  In 6.0 and prior, each person could be associated with exactly one company.  In fact, the People table had a column which was a foreign key into the Companies table.  Sometime during 7.0, this changed.  Now we have a new table called PersonCompanyAssoc, which allows a Person to be connected with more than one company.

Joe:  OK.  So what's the problem?

Sally:  The problem is that there were lots of places in the code which assumed a Person would only be associated with one Company.  Somebody went through and tried to fix them all with a bunch of changes to indexes, triggers and constraints.  Not all of those fixes were done in a very scalable way.  Most customers will be unaffected, but I could imagine some situations where we end up with a major slowdown.

Joe:  What kinds of situations?

Sally:  Well, for example, I'm guessing things would get bad if the Locations table has lots of different entries for the same Company.

Joe:  Bingo.  My customer deals mostly with virtual companies.  Their database has one company which is scattered across thirty different states and five countries in Europe.

Sally:  That would do it.

Joe:  So doesn't this change seem kind of stupid anyway?  Why would somebody need the ability to associate one person with multiple organizations?

Sally:  I don't know, but there's probably a reason.  Let's look for more clues.

Sally brings up the version control history log to find out who made these code changes and why.

Sally:  Apparently the PersonCompanyAssoc table was added by a developer named Tony.  The checkin comment explains what he was doing, but there's no rationale for why and no mention of the spec for this feature.

Joe:  So hey, as long as we're here in the code, can you just put it back the way it was?  If this change doesn't make any sense and it's causing performance problems, why not just undo it?

Sally:  It would probably be better to understand the whole story before we just change it back.  Let's go find Tony and ask for more info.

Isn't version control enough?

Version control does give you some traceability, and that's a good thing.  But in many cases, it is not enough.

Version control will tell you about code changes.  It can answer questions like Who, What and When.  But the hardest question in traceability is Why, and version control often lacks enough information to give a good answer.  Even if the developer is supposed to give a checkin comment which explains why a change was made, the detective work tends to get stuck because the clues dry up.

• Why is this piece of code there?
• Oh, it was to fix a bug.
• Which bug?
• Oh, that one.
• But why was this a bug?
• Oh, the spec says it should work this way.
• But why?
• Oh, here's the rationale for that requirement.  It came from marketing research.

Very few developers write checkin comments which are good enough to solve the really tough mysteries in software development, and they shouldn't have to.  We don't need better checkin comments.  We need all the artifacts from the whole software development process to be linked together.

The Mystery, Part 2

Sally and Joe walk across the CrummySoft campus to building 71 where they find themselves in a seemingly endless room filled with cubicles.  The manager sitting next to the entrance at a mahogany desk with a nameplate identifying him as Biff.

Biff:  Can I help you?

Sally:  We're looking for a developer named Tony.  Is he here?

Biff:  Why do you want to see him?

Sally:  He made a code change and we need to ask him for more information about it.

Biff:  OK, let's see.  Tony.  Ah yes, he's in cubicle 19-346-B.

Joe:  19-346-B.  Where's that?

Biff:  I gather that you've never been here before?  Very well.  Cubicle 19-346-B.  Go to aisle 19.  Walk down to the 346^th cubicle.  Tony should be in the one on your left.

Joe and Sally eventually reach Tony's cubicle where they find him playing World of Warcraft.

Tony:  You need somethin'?

Joe:  Why did you add a PersonCompanyAssoc table during the 7.0 dev cycle?

Tony:  How should I know?  That was like nine months ago.  I've probably made at least two other code changes since then.  I can't be expected to remember details like that.

Sally:  Do you know anyone who might know?

Tony:  Ask Phil in QA.  Maybe there's some info in that bug tracking database I've seen him using.

Joe:  So where do we find Phil?

Tony:  Geez, have you guys never been here before or what?  Phil is in cubicle 61-842-A.  That means you go down to aisle 61, turn left, and walk down ---

Joe:  Yeah, yeah, we got it.  Thanks.

Sally and Joe meander their way across the cubicle field to find Phil.  Along the way, Joe pauses at the intersection of an aisle and a row.  The walls in all four directions are too far away to see.  Continuing on, they eventually reach their destination.

Sally:  Phil, any idea why Tony added a PersonCompanyAssoc table about six months ago?

Phil:  Yeah, I think we did that to fix a bug. 

Joe:  Which bug?

Phil:  How should I know?

Sally:  Well could you look it up?

Phil:  Fine, let's see.  Oh yeah, it's bug 8675309.

Sally:  Does that bug have any information about why the change was made?

Phil:  Not really, but there's a comment here by somebody on the sales team.  Did you talk to them yet?

Joe:  Aha!  Let's go ask the sales team!

Team Size

ALM tools are often associated with very large projects and enterprise development.  This is just intuitive.  The more people involved, the more complexity to be managed.

Imagine trying to solve a mystery and you get stuck.  You need more clues, so you start canvassing the neighborhood looking for people who might have seen something suspicious.  Now suppose that "the neighborhood" is a software development division with 5,000 people in it.  Those interviews are going to take a while.

But chaos usually takes over long before a team gets that large.  Traceability may not be as important for a team of 50 as it is for a team of 5,000, but it can still be pretty important.  People forget why things happen, and that forgetfulness is not a function of the size of the team they are on.

You may be thinking, "My team is small.  We shouldn't have these kinds of problems, but this mystery still sounds familiar.  Why does this kind of detective work happen when we've only got 10 people?"

Are you sure you are counting everyone?  :-)

How about your customers?  They are part of your story.  When a customer asks for something, very often it triggers a sequence of steps.  And somebody will probably want to trace that sequence back to that customer.

SourceGear is a pretty small company.  We've got less than 50 people on our staff.

But our flagship product, Vault, is used by about 50 thousand people.  Sometimes we have a mystery to solve.  And very often the detective work leads us to one of those customers.  Our customers add to the complexity of our software lifecycle, and increase our need for traceability.

The Mystery, Part 3

When the plane arrives in Grand Cayman, Sally and Joe are greeted by a dozen beautiful people with perfect tans who escort them to the main company sales office, where, as always, a party is in progress.

Joe:  Who should we talk to?

Sally:  Let's find Bill.  He came to the company headquarters once for a meeting.  I think he'll remember us.

Weaving through the crowd, they eventually find Bill, martini in one hand, cell phone in the other.

Bill:  Do I know you?  Oh, wait.  Don't you work at the HQ back in Minneapolis?  I think we met last summer when I came up for that golf outing, er, I mean, sales training.  So what brings you all the way here to visit the sales team?

Joe:  We're trying to solve a mystery.  Between 6.0 and 7.0, somebody changed the database schema to handle multiple company associations per person.  Any idea why?

Bill:  Can I offer you a martini?

Sally:  Seriously, Bill, this code change is causing a lot of problems.  We want to just rip it out, but we figure we should understand the background first.

Bill:  Yeah, yeah, whatever.  That wasn't my deal.  Ask Marty.

After a bit more searching and stopping briefly to slide under the limbo bar, Joe and Sally find Marty in the corner of the room speaking intensely into his cell phone.

Marty:  Don't worry, you can count on me this time!  I'll have the feature in version 8.0, I promise!

Sally:  Hey Marty.  We're trying to track down some information.  Somebody changed the DB schema during the 7.0 dev cycle to allow multiple companies to be associated with each person.  Were you the one who requested that feature?

Marty:  Yeah, that's me.  I needed that tweak to close a deal.  Is there a problem?

Joe:  Yes!  That was a lot more than a "tweak".  It may seem simple, but it involved hundreds of code changes, and all kinds of things got messed up!

Marty:  Can I offer you a martini?

Sally:  Seriously, can you tell us why this change was necessary?  Why would anybody need to keep track of multiple companies per individual?

Marty:  One of my accounts is using our CRM product in selling to a network of consultants.  Those consultants have loose company affiliations.  One day they might be representing company XYZ, and the next day they're working for company ABC.  The assumption of "one company per individual" just wasn't flexible enough.

Sally:  Was it a good deal?  I mean, was this worth the trouble?

Marty:  I think so.  The deal was quite lucrative, and it opened the door to half a dozen more like it, three of which I have already signed.  Look, I'm sorry somebody screwed up this code change, but the business case behind it was solid.

Sally:  Alright, fine.  Thanks for the info.

The Whole Team

The full story of every significant software development project includes many different people.  Most of them are not writing code.  Tracing an issue backward can mean more than finding the bug report that motivated a code change.  We may need to go back further, back to the spec.

We might need to go back even further, back to the market research or the sales engagement or the customer support ticket.

A truly comprehensive approach to traceability would archive, index and link everything:

• Requirements
• Version control
• Issue tracking
• Marketing research
• Wiki
• Email, discussions
• Tests
• Help desk tickets
• etc

The challenge of an ALM tool is to support traceability across all stages of the software lifecycle.

The Mystery, Part 4

Joe and Sally head back to the airport to catch a flight back to the Twin Cities.

Sally:  So I guess this code change needs to stay.  But now we've got another mystery.  This code change caused a bunch of problems.  Why weren't those problems found in testing?

Joe:  Let's go back to that QA guy and ask him.

Returning to the main company headquarters, they find their way back to cubicle 61-842-A.

Phil:  Whazzup?

Sally:  We talked to the sales team and got some rationale for that PersonCompanyAssoc table change.  Now we're trying to figure out why the resulting problems weren't found during testing.

Phil:  Hey, don't look at me.  I just do what I'm told.

Joe:  Whatever.  So the product supports multiple locations per company, right?

Phil:  Yeah, I guess so.

Joe:  Do you guys have any tests which verify behavior for that case?

Phil:  I don't know.

Sally:  You don't know?  Why not?

Phil:  I just don't.  The tests aren't really organized like that.

Joe:  Well how are they organized?

Phil:  By number.

Sally:  And what do the numbers mean?

Phil:  Well, nothing.

Sally:  So is there any way to find which tests are designed to verify which features?

Phil:  Uh, well, no.  You could always open an individual test and read it to find out what it does.

Sally:  Great.  So you've got a bunch of tests and no way of linking them to anything?

Phil:  Exactly!

Sally:  OK, I think we're done here.

Forward Traceability

Traceability can do more than just help you figure out forgotten details of the past.  Sometimes we want to trace something "forward" through the software lifecycle, to see where it goes.

In this case, what we want is the following artifacts to be linked together:

1. Requirement:  The system must support multiple locations per company.
2. Test (validity):  Verify that the system can support multiple locations per company.
3. Test (performance):  Verify that in a situation with multiple locations per company, the dashboard load time remains approximately constant.

This kind of traceability is most helpful in finding things that are simply missing.  If the performance test above does not exist, our ALM tool should be able to help us notice that.  If a Requirement is dangling, with no links to anything, it was probably never implemented, and our ALM tool should be fussing about that.

Traceability:  Connecting Everything Together

The ability to connect everything together is called traceability.  It allows us to look at the entire software development process, even though it involves

• lots of different people
• doing lots of different things
• at lots of different times
• in lots of different locations
• for lots of different reasons.

In a good ALM system, every item is linked to all of the other items related to it.  Code changes are linked to bug reports.  Bug reports are linked to help desk items.  Tests are linked to requirements.  When it comes time to do detective work, just follow the links.

You can't get good traceability merely by having one tool for each lifecycle stage.  You can assemble all of your favorite tools, but if those tools don't support outstanding integration with each other, you won't have traceability, so the result will not be ALM.

So is that all there is to ALM?  Just traceability? 

No, ALM is more than that, but traceability is a critical ingredient.  To have ALM, you've gotta have traceability.

Why to use a good ALM system

If CrummySoft had deployed an efficient ALM system with complete information, Sally and Joe could have solved this mystery in minutes, without the need to run all over the company and ask people questions.

Why not to use a good ALM system

If CrummySoft had deployed an efficient ALM system with complete information, Sally and Joe would not have gotten a free trip to Grand Cayman.  :-)

Today is my 40^th birthday.  Like most other days, I started by walking the dog and making a To-Do list.  However, today's list has a special item:

• Decide whether to have a mid-life crisis or not.

:-)

I'll confess I am not entirely thrilled about being 40.  It doesn't seem that long ago that 40 seemed far away.  Now that it's here, I realize that it's not what I expected.  I thought my life at 40 would be different.

Many who know me would assert that I have nothing to complain about.  And they would be correct.  My life has been filled with blessings of all kinds, for which I am truly thankful.  I am a published author.  Most would consider me financially successful.  I am in a career where I enjoy my work.

But still...

As the old saying goes, nobody lies on their deathbed wishing they had spent more time at the office.

Like most everybody else, when I was 30 I looked ahead ten years and formed a picture in my mind.  My life today doesn't match that picture very well.  Examples:

• I thought by now I would be more solid in the quality of my relationships with my loved ones and in the practice of my faith.
  
  
• I thought by now I would be a better guitar player.
  
  
• There's a messy pile in my study that has been there for ten years.  (Yes, we moved six years ago.  The heap moved too.)  I thought it would be cleaned up by now.
  
  
• I always assumed that by 40 I would have learned to exercise regularly and stop eating junk food.

I go could on.  And on.  But you get the idea.

I am tempted to think about my regrets, the places where I took a wrong turn, the places where I would have made a smarter choice if I knew then what I know now.

But this whole line of thinking doesn't seem at all conducive to good mental health, so today I will choose to focus on two things which seem more constructive:

1.  Tapestry

One of my favorite Star Trek episodes is called Tapestry.  It is the story of someone given a chance to re-live a pivotal moment in his youth so that he can avoid making the unwise choice he made the first time.  But it turns out that his reckless moment was a critical ingredient in his later successes.

Today I remind myself that there are no do-overs, and I'm not sure I would want one anyway.  For every mistake I have made, there were negative consequences and positive lessons.  I can't expect to avoid the former and keep the latter.  They come together as an inseparable package.

2.  Life Calculus.

Back in 2003 I wrote an article called Career Calculus.  In a nutshell, it says that at any given moment in your career, what you know is far less important than whether you are learning.

Today I remind myself that the same principle applies in life.  I am confident in my first derivative.  Whatever I am today, I think I will be a better person tomorrow.

So if I'm still blogging when I'm 50, I expect I will be able to report progress on some of the items mentioned above.

And just to be clear, if that heap of junk on the floor of my study is still there, it will be larger than it is now, and I plan to report that as progress.  :-)

Fortress 1.1 and Vault 4.1

We like to use trade shows as a public debut of new products.  Last week we shipped "dot one" releases of Vault and Fortress.  SD West will be our first opportunity to talk with customers in person about these new versions. 

Interactions like these are a big part of what makes a trade show trip worthwhile for us.  The business of software can be so impersonal.  Software flows out our T1 line.  Money flows in.  I love trade shows because they're a place where customers are not just rows in a database.  People stop by and tell us they love our product.  We thank them.  People come and tell us we disappointed them.  We listen.

But mostly, people come and ask us what's new.  We show them.  And their reactions are some of the best product feedback we get.

Fortress 1.1 and Vault 4.1 have some cool new stuff.  Here's a shot of the new "tag cloud" feature in Fortress:

Come see us in booth 308 next week and we'll show you.

T-Shirts and Comic Books

Continuing our Evil Mastermind theme, we have arranged to have a comic book placed in the conference bag for every attendee.

We also have a new edition of the Evil Mastermind T-shirt.  We're bringing a thousand of them to give away in our booth.

Beat Jeremy at Guitar Hero

The other tenants in our office building don't have any idea what we do.  They refer to SourceGear as "that company with a pool table up on the top floor".

I wonder what those folks would have said about the company HORSE games we used to have at our previous location.  :-)

Anyway, I strongly believe that a little recreation is a critical part of the culture of any good software company.

These days, the popular place to be at SourceGear is the room with the video game consoles hooked up to the plasma TV.  It turns out that our development team lead is pretty darn good at Guitar Hero.  In fact, he will be taking on all challengers in our booth at SD West next week.  We'll give a 5-user Fortress license to anyone who can beat him.

Evil Mastermind guitar

And if we're going to play Guitar Hero, why not have the real thing as well?  On the last day of the show we will have a prize drawing for an Evil Mastermind electric guitar.  It's a Schecter PT, and the customization work was professionally done.  I saw this instrument yesterday, and it looks really sweet.  For more details, see Paul Roub's blog.

My panel session on Friday

Friday morning at the conference I will be moderating a panel discussion.  It's in the Business of Software track, and the topic is Private Company Exit Strategies.

The Jolt Awards

We are honored that SourceGear DiffMerge has been chosen as one of the Jolt Award finalists this year.  We'll be there at the announcement ceremony March 5^th.  The competition in our category looks really tough, but somebody's gonna win, so we're hoping it's us.  :-)

A couple of weeks ago, Trolltech announced that they are being acquired by Nokia.  I decided to simmer for a couple weeks before making any comment, but my perspective has not changed.  I just can't see this as good news.  Bluntly, I assume this will be the death of Trolltech.

And that would be a shame.  Trolltech is on my short list of software companies that I admire.  Their product, Qt, has an amazing reputation.  Technologically, it seems to be the top dog in a space which is crowded with lots of people trying to offer solutions to a very tough set of problems.  Trolltech plays well with both the open source world and the commercial world, and they make a heckuva lot of money doing it.  I'm impressed.

(But I still wish they would put the pricing back on their website.  Yep, the unnamed company in my Sales Guy Tantrum last month was Trolltech.)

I have no affiliation with Trolltech (or Nokia).  I am not even a customer (of either one).  As someone who is very interested in the business of software, I just hate seeing a good software company morph into a bad one.  Nokia is a great company and I'll be happy to see them prove me wrong, but in general, when a software company gets acquired by a non-software company, it immediately begins a steep and steady decline.

Managing a software company, especially one that sells to developers, is not like anything else.  It's just different, and that's that.

• If you're great at the business of software, there's an excellent chance you would be incompetent as a business manager in any other field.
• Similarly, anybody who is excellent in another field is almost certainly going to struggle if they take the reins of a software venture.

Nokia is a great cell phone company.  None of their skills are going to apply very well to the development, maintenance, marketing and sales of a C++ portability framework.

So maybe I'm jumping the gun a bit, but I like to beat the rush.  I'm ready now to mourn the loss of Trolltech, yet another great software company destroyed by a BigCo who assumed that managing a software business should be easy.

If I'm wrong, tell me why.

This problem is currently one of the most controversial issues in the United States.  Ever since September 11, 2001, we have been wrestling with the question: How afraid of terrorism should we be?

• We all agree that terrorism is really bad.  What happened on 9/11 was awful.
• But it's also really rare.  I personally have never met a Muslim who wanted to hurt me.

How afraid should we be? 

• Some people are very afraid.  They focus more on the "really bad" side of the issue.  Many of these folks are willing to give up their own civil liberties just to feel safer. 
• Others are not afraid at all.  They focus more on the "really rare" side of the issue.  They prefer to spend their resources and attention in other areas.

This blog entry is not the place for me to take a stance on any of these issues.  For now I will simply say that I understand both perspectives.  This whole situation is simply the most obvious example of my point, which was:

It's hard to decide how afraid to be of something that is really bad and really rare.

Issues like these are like an icy ski slope.  Some people stand at the top.  Some people stand at the bottom.  Very few people stand anywhere else.  It's too slippery.

It is perhaps interesting to note that these issues can be equally polarizing when the context is far less important, like the digital world.  Granted, the underlying topics are far less weighty.  When discussing things like terrorism or child abduction, the definition of "really bad" is quite different than it is when talking about music piracy or vandalized Wikipedia entries. 

Still, the polarizing effect looks exactly the same.  It's hard to decide how afraid to be of something that is really bad and really rare.  Some people stand at the top of the slope.  Others stand at the bottom.

Wikipedia

I don't know anybody who has lukewarm feelings about Wikipedia.  Folks either love it or they hate it.

My daughter's school teacher hates it.  Wikipedia can provide no claims of accuracy.  There is no good way to be sure that the information is correct.  When it's not correct, there is either no one to blame or no way to punish them.  All of these are crucial attributes of a traditional encyclopedia.

I understand this perspective, but on this particular issue, I'm standing at the top of the slope.  I love Wikipedia.  The principle is just very appealing:  The distinction between reader and writer is largely removed.  Anyone can add or change the content.  Since the good guys far outnumber the bad guys, the result is a body of content which is constantly growing and improving.

(It's kind of the same principle as Career Calculus, except for an encyclopedia.  Focus on the first derivative.  Instead of worrying about how good the encyclopedia is now, worry about whether it is getting better and how that's happening.)

I admit that there are obvious risks.  Since anybody can edit a Wikipedia page, it is always possible for the content of a page to be incorrect or even vandalized.

But the tradeoff seems to work well in practice.  I probably use Wikipedia every day.  The information I find there has been consistently helpful.  I like Wikipedia better than a traditional encyclopedia.  Much better.

But maybe this is because the threat isn't very real to me.  Personally, I have never encountered a vandalized Wikipedia article.  Occasionally I find an entry which is lame, but I don't remember seeing one that was blatantly wrong or intentionally damaged.  Most of the time, the content in Wikipedia is excellent.

But the fact remains:  Every time I use Wikipedia, I am taking a risk.  Since I have never gotten burned by that risk, the peril doesn't seem very real.

The Peril is Real

Wikipedia currently has an entry about me.  This morning, my 10-year-old daughter told me that she tried to edit that entry.  Suddenly my entire perspective on Wikipedia changed.  This was the first time I had to confront the idea of a vandalized Wikipedia entry in any sort of real way.

As it turns out, she didn't succeed.  But she's a very bright young lady, so I'm sure she'll figure it out soon.

As a matter of principle, I refuse to edit my own Wikipedia page.  So, I have a favor to ask of my readers.

Sometime soon my Wikipedia entry is going to change.  Any content about SourceGear, AbiWord or Spyglass will be deleted.  The new version of the article will focus primarily on my atrocious failings as a father, evidenced by my ongoing refusal to allow my youngest daughter to get a hamster.

When this happens, could one of you folks fix it for me?  Thanks.

Thanks for considering (product name deleted).  Please write back to me with your phone # or call me at the # below -- we can discuss pricing as I learn about your application and how you plan to use (product name deleted) for development.

So I sent an email with the following response:

Hi (name deleted),

OK.  Please bear with me for just a moment while I vent.

#ifdef FRUSTRATED_RANT

First, I hate the fact that you guys don't put pricing on your website.  I looked up the old version of your site using archive.org, so I've got a ballpark idea of what the pricing was around six months ago.  Mostly I just want to know if anything has changed.

Second, it's absurd that when a customer asks for pricing, you won't give it to them.  Instead, you answer the question with a question.  I'm not even the slightest bit interested in telling you about our application and how we plan to use (product name deleted) for development.  I just want to know your pricing and your license terms.

And for the hat trick, it's incredibly frustrating that you want to do this by phone.  I hate phones with a passion, especially when they're completely unnecessary.

Bottom line:  I'm interested in buying your product.  The only obstacle in my way is YOU.  If your product didn't have such a great reputation, I would give up right now.

#endif

OK, sorry about that.  I figured if I get all this off my chest then I'll have a much better chance of getting through our phone call without saying anything rude.  Please call me at 217-XXX-YYYY.  I promise to be nice.  :-)

--

Eric

Fortunately, my "vent before the call" strategy worked out very well.  The sales person called me and we had a very pleasant and cordial conversation.

I am a University of Illinois alum and an avid fan of college sports.  The Illini football team had a great season this year and will play USC in Pasadena on January 1st.  In fact, this is the just the second time in my lifetime that Illinois has made it to the Rose Bowl.  For those of us here in central Illinois, this is a really big deal.  Who knows when it will happen again?

So last week when the University started selling tickets, I placed my order.  A few days later I received confirmation that I was going to actually get the tickets I had requested.  That email said:

"tickets will be shipped to the address listed above via UPS Overnight Delivery"

I laughed out loud.  UPS Overnight?  I live right here in Champaign-Urbana.  The University of Illinois Athletic Ticket Office is less than two miles from my office.  Surely I could just go over during my lunch hour and pick them up?

No, I suppose not.  These folks are trying to process orders for over 25,000 tickets and they have very little time to do it.  They probably just want to have one standard method of handling them all.  Dealing with the special cases would slow everything down.

The next day I got email from UPS with a tracking number for my tickets:

Sure enough -- my tickets were being sent 1.8 miles by "Next Day Air".  At this point, I fully expected that this envelope would be traveling across town by way of O'Hare.

Much to my surprise, UPS actually figured out that it was already in its destination city:

So, let's review:  Both the University and UPS faced a situation which was somewhat of an exception to their normal workflow.  One of them treated the exception as a special case.  The other one did not. 

And in my opinion, both of these organizations did exactly the right thing.

I think one of the toughest parts of running a business is dealing with all the exceptions.  These things never get much attention at the genesis of a company.  We write our business plan and we try to figure out how we're going to handle everything from customer issues to staffing issues to bugs to parking.  But then life hands us a diversity of circumstances we never expected.

• One of your staff needs to have surgery but they've used up all their leave days.
  
  
• Your biggest customer wants you to add a special feature that won't be useful to anybody else.
  
  
• The policy says anybody who purchased on or after June 17^th will get the upgrade for free.  The guy who bought at 10:00pm on June 16^th is on the phone.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to handle the situation as a special case, even if doing so takes extra time.

And sometimes, it's best to just shove everything into the meat grinder and let sausage come out the other side.

But how do we know which approach to use for a given situation?  The issues in play can include fairness, cost, ethics, focus, and so on.

And when is the time to realize that a certain kind of exception is happening often enough that it's worth defining a way to handle it?

I don't have any silver bullet answers for these questions.  In entrepreneurship, there is no substitute for good judgment. 

Just keep in mind that exceptions are going to happen, and how we navigate them can be a major definer of our success in business.  Pay attention, and use common sense.