Project Management Stack Exchange Launches Public Beta

Project Management Stack Exchange is now in public beta, meaning that anyone can now join the Q&A site and contribute by asking questions or posting answers.

The site is in need of more expert level project managers. Many questions are basic questions, but I'd like to see more questions asked that are more advanced. Most basic information about any field is available in droves; it's the specialized, expert-level information that is oftentimes more difficult to obtain.

With three years in the field, I'm no expert, but I'm also beyond many of the basic questions about the definition of change management, for instance.

However, some individuals have posted some thoughtful questions, such as How to approach a project given to new PM during execution with vague requirements?. The question involves a specific experience by a project manager and not a random what-if scenario.

The site is still in it's infancy, and it's success will be defined by it's early members. If you have experience with project management -- no matter if your field is software, construction, engineering, or some other project management field -- create your account today at Project Management Stack Exchange.

Project Management Stack Exchange Begins Private Beta

On February 7th, 2011, the Stack Exchange network launched the private beta of the Project Management Stack Exchange website, a Q&A site run by the community to address questions regarding the field of Project Management.

The site is a place where professional project managers can go to ask objective or subjective questions regarding their field. The people who run the site encourage participation by professionals who either have a problem they seek the answer to or who would like to help other project managers improve their skills.

The Stack Exchange network works on a voting system, similar to Yahoo Answers. Users who ask really good, helpful, well-written questions will be rewarded with upvotes awarded by other users on the site. Similarly, users can vote on answers given by other users.

Upvotes and downvotes affect users' total reputation score, which represents how well the community trusts the user. As a user increases his or her reputation, the number of priviledges on the site increases. After reaching a score of 10,000, a user pretty much has access to the same tools as the moderators.

In short, this means that you, the user, runs the site. With enough reputation, you have the tools and community trust to close questions that are off topic or spam, edit questions and answers to clean them up, see vote counts, create chat rooms, and much more.

Out of the 57 total questions as of the time of this writing, here are a few of the questions asked so far:

How To Resolve Leadership Conflicts In The Project?

One of My Projects Was Cancelled Very Early. Will This Be Deterimental To My Career?

Do Technical Leaders Compete With Project Managers?


The Stack Exchange network consists of 44 different Q&A sites spanning from Programming, IT, Website Management and other technical topics to music, cooking, and parenting. It began as a single Q&A site, Stack Overflow, as a place for software engineers to ask objective questions.

New sites first go through a proposal phase where the community picks examples of on topic and off topic questions. After the proposal phase, the site undergoes a committment phase where a certain number of users must commit to asking at least 10 questions or submitting 10 answers in order to help get the site started.

After the committment phase, the site enters a private beta phase. The purpose of the private beta is to seed the website with some really good questions and answers, so that when the site launches the public beta, it already has some really strong content to attract good, professional project managers.

Although the site is still in private beta, anyone can view the current questions and answers by following the link to the Project Management Stack Exchange Site.

Why I will Never Use Spring Tag Libraries in my HTML

The Facts - Web Design and Web Development Involve Completely Different Skills

I work with a team of developers and a team of designers. The designers I work with know Photoshop like they know the back of their hand. They are experts in writing clean, standards based, cross browser compatible HTML and CSS. They design and produce high-quality, beautiful, $15k websites for our clients. Their code validates with W3C validators. The results are amazing.

Our web developers know Java. They can pound away at any server-side problem and produce a solution. They use Struts, Spring, Restlets, JSP, JSTL, Velocity, they can configure Jetty and Tomcat, and they can look at log files and solve problems.

However, if you give them an HTML document, they'll give it such a severe beating that it becomes unrecognizable by it's original creators.

The beautiful HTML turns into a 3 headed monster with unclosed tags, numerous validation errors, and no IE support. The developers struggle for days with guesswork of adding a tag here, removing a tag there, editing a CSS rule here, and who knows what else there.

Of course, the designers are unable to help because of the code soup that results from mixing JavaScript, Java, and HTML into a JSP page.

The resulting web application looks great on the outside, but under the hood it's an absolute nightmare! Ask the designers to go back in and make a design update, and their faces go blank. A 4 hour change takes weeks! The developers can't make the changes because they barely got the HTML integrated with the backend system.

So developers and designers sit side by side trying to understand all of the complexity. The designers can't determine what the application is doing with the HTML, and the developer can't understand what modifications to make to the HTML. Logic mixed in with the HTML is of course overwhelming and makes the code completely unmaintainable.

In summary, designers and developers just plain have different skill sets, at least at my company, and it's foolish of us to think that designers and developers can use the same tools. People do better at what they specialize in, and to try to force that change is wasted energy.

How do I know this, you ask? Because I've fought this fight for years and have continued to lose miserably. "Eclipse is a software development tool, not a design tool", they tell me, "and we're not using it". End of discussion.

Of course, I have convinced a designer or two to try it out. In the end it just slowed both them and me down because Eclipse would inevitably break, and I would end up having to help fix it. Afterwards, we both silently agreed it was a bad idea. The designer stopped using it, and I stopped asking questions.

Light at the end of the tunnel - Keep Content and Behavior Separate

Recently, I took on the project of testing out a new Google App Engine feature and put together a prototype of Google's new ChannelAPI using Google App Engine SDK 1.4.0. Since we have chat designs, I used this as an opportunity to experiment with some new ideas regarding HTML integration with a J2EE application. Below are the details:

• The HTML exists as a static HTML page. My rule for this experiment is no JSP pages!


• I use JQuery to bind all my click event handlers dynamically, which leaves my HTML free of pockmarks and other markup that would bind it to the framework.


• Chat applications involve inserting data in a message window. I used the concepts of manual templating to inject the messages dynamically, without mixing HTML and JavaScript. I'll describe more on this below.


• My application sends messages to the server using AJAX. Calls to the server are made through the bound click event handlers. No tag libraries! Only client-side code!

I've observed designers over the years, and I've also observed developers. Our designers put placeholders in the HTML they create to mark where the dynamic content would go. The pages can be loaded as static files, and look just like the final result except the fake data. Below is an example of the body of an HTML file, with the placeholder in bold:

<body>
   <input type="text" name="alias" value="James" />
   <button id="join" value="Join Room!">Join room!</button>
   <button id="leave" value="Leave Room!">Leave room!</button>
   <button id="test" value="Test Message receive!">Receive Test Msg!</button>
   <div id="messages">
      <div class="message">
          <div>
              <span class="name"></span>
              <span class="timestamp"></span>
          </div>
          <div class="text"></div>
      </div>
   </div>
   <textarea id="messageBox"></textarea>
   <button id="sendBtn" value="Send">Send</button>
</body>

Now, my development team would normally be tempted to solve this problem by pulling out the bold HTML and placing it in the JavaScript callback method as follows:

// create the div for the message
var message = "<div class='message'><div><span class='name'>"+name+"</span><span class='timestamp'>"+timestamp+"</span></div><div class='text'>"+message+"</div></div>";

// inject the div onto the page
document.getElementById("messages").innerHTML += message;


When our designer needs to add a new feature to the chat application, he'll have to study the HTML that's inside the JavaScript to figure out where to make the changes. Instead of focusing on his area of expertise, the front-end, he'll have to become an expert on the actual application's inner workings. He'll need to understand Comet, JavaScript, and how the application works. As you can imagine, this is an extremely inefficient use of his time.

A better approach would be to use a templating engine, such as Velocity or Freemarker:

      <div class="message">
          <div>
              <span class="name">${NAME}</span>
              <span class="timestamp">${TIMESTAMP}</span>
          </div>
          <div class="text">${MESSAGE}</div>
      </div>

This is better, but it's still based on old ideas that still suffer from the same problems. I can't give a JSP file to a designer who knows nothing about Spring, Tomcat, Jetty, Eclipse, JavaBeans, and other technologies that bind the document to the framework. In addition, even if he did understand these technologies, he doesn't have 4 hours to spare to setup his development environment for just a 2 hour change. Even with templating, the files can't really be loaded outside of the JVM and outside the context of the framework.

Velocity and Freemarker are marketing ideas that in practice are failures. Anything that involves a developer mixing non-HTML markup with HTML will create more problems than it solves.

Instead, I took the approach of leaving the fake, empty HTML-valid message in the HTML and using it as the actual template:

var template;
$(document).ready( function() {
chat_template_read_only = $('.message'); // store the original template from the HTML (in bold) for later use.
};

Now, in my callback method, I do the following:

// make a copy from the template I saved earlier
var message = chat_template_read_only.clone();

// now use JQuery DOM methods to inject the content in the appropriate places in the copy.
message.find('.name').html(name);
message.find('.timestamp').html(timestamp);
message.find('.text').html(text);

// dynamically inject the new message into the HTML.
$('#messages').append(message);


Here you can see I'm accomplishing the same goal. I'm placing the dynamic content in an HTML block and injecting it into the DOM. Now, if in 6 months the design team needs to add a department header and maybe a response time to each chat, we can give them the current, live, HTML file and they can load it outside the context of the web framework, code their changes, and then send it back to the development team.

We can integrate new changes simply by making changes to the Jquery CSS selectors in the JavaScript files! There is no need for the web designers to understand anything about Eclipse, Java, Jetty, Tomcat, how to configure the application, or any of the applications inner workings.

Let me repeat that one more time: The HTML document is not bound to the framework and can be loaded outside the framework. It can be loaded from an Apache server, it can be loaded from the desktop by clicking on the file. It can be modified by the designers without needing to look at any Java, JSP, or JavaScript.

Spring Taglibraries

I was looking at Spring's JSTL tag, which is used to bind server-side data to an HTML form element so the form can be rendered with a session ID and any preloaded data from the server. The server-side tag generates an HTML form tag.

The benefit here is that web designers are supposed to be able to work with these tags, or at least that's what they say. In practice, in all my years of software development and programming, I have yet to ever see this magical unicorn walk out of the shadows and into the sunlight.

Where are these mystical organizations that operate in this manner? I'd like to meet one of these developers. Are they human? Do they eat and breathe like I do or are they just mere fiction?

This tag is useful in cases where a developer needs to pre-load the form with data from a persistent object. Although I'd love to just ask the developers not to use it anymore, but that's just as difficult as trying to set the web designers up with Eclipse! It just ain't gonna happen!

The problem with these templating languages and tag libraries is that they completely alienate the web designers while simultaneously encouraging the developers to trash the HTML. These frameworks make it impossible for designers to use their own tools. Although these templating engines claim their goal is to allow everyone to work together, they fall way short of the mark. These frameworks were obviously developed by programmers who have absolutely no clue about design.

JQuery Manual Templating

While looking at a <form:form> tag, I thought to myself: "Now wouldn't it be nice if I could use some tool on the server-side to bind my data to that form dynamically, without having to actually make any changes whatsoever to the actual HTML document, just like I did on the client side with JQuery?

Then it hit me! Java doesn't have anything like this that I know of, but since JQuery can run in server-side JavaScript, perhaps Rhino or Claypool is the answer! Imagine using JQuery to manipulate HTML documents on the server side without ever having to modify or template the code.

What I picture is a form of binding server-side tags dynamically. If we can use CSS selectors on the client side, why not create a method of doing so on the server side. I picture a solution such as this:

Import server-side JQuery into our JSP page:

<script type="extjs" src="server-side.js"><script>

// server-side.js
$('form').replace('form:form');
$('input').replace('form:input');


Now, instead of editing the HTML directly, we can bind our server side tags dynamically. When the designer needs to update the page, he can load it completely independent of the Spring environment, make modifications to it, and give the file back to the developer.

There is currently no solution out there for this, but I would greatly appreciate any advice from anyone who has ideas/suggestions for how to get this concept started!

Google, Pacman, and the Enemies of Fun

You might think Google dropped a bomb on some small country or fed small kittens to snakes. Today, there is a lot of noise about Google's method of celebrating the anniversary of Namco's Pacman, which today turned 30.



I'm glad I don't work with all of the naysayers and complainers and whiners on the Internet who obstinately declare that they're now changing their search engine to Bing! What's funny is that deep down inside in the depths of their subconscious, they've had this burning desire to do so all along.

Microsoft has really been beating Bing into our skulls. Whenever I turn on the television, I see references to it in pop culture. On Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, and other television programs on the CW, the main characters made several references to it and even used "Bing" as a verb. This is what savvy marketing people refer to as "brand awareness" while in reality it's just brainwashing.

You people that are complaining about Google putting up an interactive widget aren't really angry at Google. You're angry at yourselves for being too stupid to understand how to use a computer, and as any psychologist will tell you, you're using displacement to redirect your anger at yourself onto Google for actually thinking that something that was meant to bring joy was a virus. You're using this moment as the excuse you've been looking for to run to Bing.

Brainwash successful!

To the complainers out there, the world isn't going to wait for you. It's moving on with or without you. I'm warning you now, you'd better catch up or you'll be standing in the unemployment line in 10 to 20 years, complaining about how your job went to India or China or someone much younger and with more drive than you, and you'll be bitching about how both your life and the the government both suck.


I am really exited to hear if the grass really is greener on the other side in Bingland. As for me, I'm sticking with Google. I'm staying on the cutting edge where life is more exciting. Why, because you can't please all of the people all of the time. If you want to be spoon fed and treated like the whiny infant that you sound like, then go to AOL or Bing. Good riddens, I say! Google's products and services will only get better if they market them to people with open minds who are willing to experiment. They're better off without you.

As for anyone coming out of college or anyone looking for a job, here is some unsolicited advice:

• You can tell a lot about an employer by looking at the tools they use. If they support Google and openness and get really excited about new technologies, chances are you're really going to enjoy the environment and the people you work with. In that organization, you'll be important, and you'll make a difference in the world. Most importantly, you'll have a lot of fun while you do it.



• Now, if they support Microsoft or ban a specific technology because of some ridiculous moment of hypoglycemia, lack of sleep, and confusion, then I suggest you run the other way. Well, unless you are the enemy of fun and like working with a bunch of stiffs who get hypertension because they spent money on virus software today instead of spending it on taking a computer class like they should have years ago.

In summary, I really enjoyed the Friday break. So did many of my coworkers. I feel really sorry for all of the people who were offended by something so non-offensive. Go back to your stone knives and bearskins.

Revolutionary Testing Tools for AJAX Applications

Revolutionary Testing Tools for AJAX Applications

http://blog.browsermob.com/2008/12/faq-how-do-you-compare-to-selenium/

A few years ago, we used JMeter to try and load test a chat application we were building. Since the chat application used Comet and AJAX, I knew that the JMeter test was going to be grossly inaccurate. However, we did the best we could with tools that clearly weren't right for the job, as nothing was out there that could simulate an AJAX or Comet load test.

A few weeks ago, while working with some other consultants on a project, we discussed the use of Selenium to run some functional testing on a Firefox Extension that inserts signatures into an email. We needed a tool that could automatically send an email using Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, and verify that the signature was still injecting. From my days writing HTML Reply Signatures for Gmail, I knew that this was indeed important, as any change by these third parties could have a drastic effect on the tool's ability to insert a signature.

Today, one consultant and I worked to try to insert an email address into the "To" field of the Gmail Compose window using Selenium. I've done this already in the Firefox extension, and anyone who has ever written a Greasemonkey script or Firefox extension that works with Gmail 2 can attest that this is not always an easy task if you are working outside of the API exposed by Gmail. Google engineers have put lots of effort in writing server-side code that ensures that all the id attributes in the Gmail application randomly change each session. Their creativity has sparked our creativity, and we have solved this problem. With enough time and patience, any problem can be solved.

Anyway, with Selenium, one must locate elements in the HTML of a web application by using XPATH queries. Armed with my trusty Firebug tool, I inspected the element in question and worked my way up the tree one element at a time, writing down the element tag names and positions at each step. Like a complex code, we ended up with long XPATH queries, a seemingly endless series of div[1]/div[2]/div[1]/div[1]. Although I would have preferred to just use JavaScript and a good for loop or regular expression to locate what I wanted, being a code cracker and approaching this problem from another angle was an eye-opener, XPATH is perhaps the way to go!

So that's a little background on my experience so far with testing tools. Selenium isn't a load testing tool of course, but it's a great tool to automate functional testing. It's almost like a macro recorder, similar to iMacros. Our plan is to set our test up on a VMWare image and configure this to run automatically every day. We'll get emails with our signature if it's successful, and broken or no email if it's not successful. We're also configuring it to be really loud and obnoxious if it does detect that something is amiss, just so we don't gloss over the automated emails.

Selenium can do functional testing, but what about load testing? Sure, Selenium can do load testing as well! Selenium uses real web browsers in testing, but it's up to the person doing the tests to go out and purchase the hardware to run the tests. In other words, if you want to do a 100 user load test with Selenium, you need to have 100 computers in your lab and 100 people to all click "Run" at the same time.

This is analogous to a symphony with you as the conductor who tells everyone exactly when to click "Run Test".

Of course, coordinating such an event can be costly, so one of the developers of Selenium Remote Control founded BrowserMob. BrowserMob solves this issue by providing the hardware. They claim to load test your web application using Selenium scripts and N number of real web browsers! I would be really interested to know how this was accomplished and how the costs have been kept so low.

To start, they probably use VMWare and Linux, which is one way to reduce the amount of physical hardware while still trying to simulate real hardware. They say they use Firefox 3.0, which is available on Linux. Finally, if Selenium Remote Control launches Firefox browsers to simulate functional tests, then my guess is BrowserMob is controlling a series of Selenium Remote Control instances, all running on VMWare Linux machines, and allowing BrowserMob to monitor the load.

While there are some costs associated with BrowserMob, I imagine one could use Selenium Remote Control installed on several VMWare images to run a small load test. If anyone has experience with either Selenium Remote Control or BrowserMob, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the two products!

Break out the Country Crock

I read an intriguingly funny article tonight. The reason it's so funny is that it's very applicable to me at the moment. My brother and I have been burning firewood for heat this winter in Portland, Oregon. We've actually obtained our fire wood from many different Craigslist advertisements, such as the one featured in this article's screen shot, and we have made some extra income selling our surpluses to people who are either in need of heat or just want the ambiance provided by a nice warm fire.

Seasoned wood does not in fact refer to seasoning the wood with pepper and salt and Italian spices although the idea does create some interesting mental pictures. For those who don't know, seasoned wood is wood that has been aged and naturally dried so that it will burn well. In order to be seasoned, most firewood must be aged for at least 1 to 2 years.

Although seasoned wood isn't seasoned in terms of teeming with lemon-pepper or garlic and oregano, burning the many different kinds of wood does indeed produce a plethora of different uniquely enticing and delicious smells. Black walnut is perhaps my favorite. Sit a piece in front of your fireplace just inches from the transfer of potential to kinetic energy. Watch the blue flames emanating from a few well-seasoned, dry chunks of maple as the walnut slowly heats up. After awhile, it smells like freshly baked bread and makes you want to go break out the Country Crock and dig in. We did that one night and the wood smelled so good I felt I could almost take a bite out of it!

With a fireplace, who needs Dish Network. It's all the entertainment I need.

Dreamhost Hosting Special

I work with a client who uses Dreamhost as the hosting provider for a new web application. My client works with several other contractors besides myself. Some have been only temporary contracts while others have been more long-term. For the initial phase of development, all development was done on local servers, and there was only one hostname for the website.

One of the newest consultants spent just a small portion of his time in setting up some tools that would not only make development more efficient; but also, these tools will help prevent catastrophic mistakes that oftentimes can occur. Manual, repeated tasks are prone to error, and it's not a matter of if a failure occurs, but when will the failure occur.

The consultant set up several domain names for us to use in the deployment process. Previously, the site was deployed to the server under the www subdomain. While this is fine for code that has been tested on the hosting platform, it's not fine when deploying live. We now have a "testing" subdomain and a "stage" subdomain where "testing" is where untested code can be tested using a separate build of the website. "Stage", of course, mirrors whatever is deployed live and acts as a staging ground for final tests of changes to ensure that they are indeed production ready.

The consultant also set up Trac, which is an open-source wiki, bug tracking package, and project management platform all rolled into one web application. It integrates with the Subversion repository, which the consultant also setup and configured using Dreamhost's web panel.

Dreamhost offers these features as part of the standard hosting package, all for the low cost of $5.95 per month, depending on the length of your committment. Of all of the hosting providers that I've looked at, Dreamhost is the best for new startups looking to establish a web presence using PHP, Perl, Ruby, and some other popular programming languages. You'll never have to worry about running out of databases, as Dreamhost will supply you with an endless supply of MySql databases!

Some of the things that really stood out to me were things like the Jabber Chat server, a full Unix shell, the Debian Linux operating system, and IMAP access so you can download your email to a mail client. There is a one-click install feature for installing many popular packages, such as Wordpress, Moodle, and Joomla. In addition, through the shell you can install other applications, such as Trac!

To make this deal even sweeter, you can get unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth if you sign up now by clicking on the link in the left section on my website! This leaves lots of room for growth, and this perhaps may be the last hosting package you'll ever need!

The only catch, there are only 1111 slots left open for unlimited disk space and bandwidth, so sign up today!

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