Getting #$@! Done

Wow, what a couple of weeks! Even with missing a few days in between from my jaunt to Florida it's been a pretty productive 10 (oh, okay 8) working days. To get cliche, I love it when a plan comes together. As a program manager few things are more satisfying that coming to closure on open issues, especially when you get feedback that eveybody involved feels like, "yeah, that's a good solution."

The week before last Steve Setzler, one of our developers, was in town. Why do I even mention that? It's because normally Steve resides in central Illinois. He is one of the original BAO employees that still works on the product. When Microsoft acquired BAO Steve decided not to accept the offer to relocate to the wonderful Pacific Northwest, preferring instead to bake on the summer Illinois plains. However every couple of months he packs his portable harddrive and hits the road, showing up bright and early on a Monday morning. (After all, for him it's not that early.) Steve has worked on just about every part of the product and, at least as long as I've been on the team, has tried something different with every new version. Right now he's working on our camera system and we had a lot to discuss when he arrived. In all I think we spent about 3 hours just in meetings with other developers and testers going over where things stood and what still needed to be done. I generated one-and-a-half whiteboards worth of notes with the outcome to of discussions. Most of the discussion revolved around user issues: "How is the user going to discover this? What's the simplest way to do this? How would an average user expect this to work? What's the right default setting for this?" Fortunately we actually had working code to try out to help answer some questions. I felt like we got a lot accomplished. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to transcribe the notes before I had to leave, so to give Steve a record to work from our Test Manager Brent just took a digital photo of the board and emailed it to him. Quick and dirty, but effective! In future posts I plan to cover some other tools we use to help get answers to questions such as dogfooding and usability testing.

This week had a similar energy but it was focussed more on processes than features. I got us caught up on code security status and signed up for a threat modeling class on Monday, met with the folks working on our next-gen antipiracy technology, arranged a meeting with our lawyers to go over privacy statements and license agreements, met with our rep from Autodesk about gmax, and attended other people's meetings where issues were raised, action items identified and owners assigned. Go forth and sort it out, team!!! It doesn't get much better than that!