At Northwest Cadence, we have created a work environment that emphasizes excellence, integrity, and out-of-the-box thinking. Our customers have high expectations (rightfully so) and we wouldn’t have it any other way! Our team of outstanding people consistently rise to the occasion. They think smart, work hard, forget the box and have fun exceeding expectations, both inside and out of our company walls.

The ALM Consultant will provide project support, various deliverables, and quality solutions on Visual Studio (including Visual Studio Team System), software design, and Application Lifecycle Management. Engagements will vary and will involve providing expert training, consulting, mentoring, formulating technical strategies and policies and acting as a trusted advisor to customers and internal teams.

The ALM Consultant position requires up to 50% travel. This is a full time position and will be based in the Kirkland, Washington office.

Basically the problems that we see with these new sites are the same problems we saw in the dot com boom era – unstructured processes, not well understood source code and a lack of quality assurance. Now granted, this isn’t the case everywhere but it isn’t limited to these newer websites either – sites like Google and Microsoft are also prone to errors (for instance, my latest favorite error with Google is Error #102. This is helpfully addressed by this message from Google if you go to look it up:

You’re encountering a known issue with Gmail. Our engineers are currently investigating and working diligently to find a solution.

In the meantime, please try signing in to Gmail through our secured interface, available via https://mail.google.com or by clicking here.

If you continue to experience difficulties, please access your mail from the older version of Gmail by clicking Older Version at the top of any Gmail page, going to http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1, or clicking here.

Not very helpful).

Anyway, the issue that I see in all of this is process which provides structure and control. IT organizations which dive headfirst into writing code without thinking of the consequences of not having an adequate structure and processes to support their business are looking for trouble. Some people may disagree with me and say that the “glitches” that I mentioned above are just growing pains of working with new technology. Well, if the technology isn’t ready yet, why is it being used to support $100 million+ size businesses? Doesn’t that seem kind of irresponsible? Wouldn’t you test out new technology before using it on mission critical applications? Or is it just me?

Many people have said that process gets in the way and they point to Agile development as a better way of doing things. I hate to mention it but Agile (what does that word really mean), no matter which methodology you use, is highly structured. And process never gets in the way – unless you have the wrong process. And there-in lies the problem with most IT organizations. They may have process, but it isn’t the right one so no one uses it. Good processes help support and nurish both IT and the business that IT supports. There really is a better way to do things…

 Maybe I’m just ranting, but I would like to hear your thoughts.

Dual quad-core Xeon chips with sufficient RAM seems like the obvious choice, but there are Opteron chips, too.  We’ll be running at least 3 production Windows Server 2003 installs, with additional 3-4 virtual servers (on occasion, for testing etc).  What type of server should we get?  Any recommendations?

Assign each area of functionality to a user who takes ownership of it. Preferrably this user is someone who knows the subject extremely well and does it on a day to day basis. What benefit does this provide?

• You don’t have to chase the user around for information – they want to provide it to you.
• They always show up at demonstrations because their co-workers will eventually be using the functionality they own.
• They always show up at demonstrations because they have pride in their work!
• They review the deliverables the IT team has for them because its’ also their hide on the line – not just the development teams.
• When problems arise because functionality doesn’t work the end-users, they don’t come complain to the development team, they go to their co-workers. Why is this a benefit?
  • There is usually better communication among co-workers then “outsiders” like developers.
  • From an IT perspective, it can easily be shown that no gold-plating occurred and no analyst took measures into their own hands and “guessed” at what the end users wanted
• It takes subject matter experts out of the primary role and puts them in an advisory role. SME’s know the processes back and forth, but they don’t work with them on a daily basis and don’t know the exact steps that users take to accomplish any given task.

And if the users don’t want to take ownership of a feature? Maybe the feature shouldn’t be in the software to begin with because no one cares enough about it. Take some time to think about this and you’ll see that it is a win-win situation for IT and the business.

Northwest Cadence has recently relocated to centralized offices in downtown Kirkland.  We chose downtown Kirkland, specifically on the Kirkland Marina, because it’s a fabulous location for our employees to work from and our customers to visit.  Bike in, drive in, bus in, or sail in - whatever is your pleasure.  Marina Park is a year-round marina with a beautiful park, lots of restaurants and shops, and breathtaking nature all around – plus, Kirkland offers Free Wireless in the park/marina/surrounding areas.  What beats that?!  Northwest Cadence is proud to be part of the Kirkland Business Community.

We look forward to having you visit!

 http://www.ci.kirkland.wa.us/home.htm

Why not? Well, most developers (especially those using TFS) work for organizations. The only way some things get done in large organizations is for executives to champion a cause and actively implement a plan for improvement. But this takes some type of ROI calculation – most executives will not plow money into an initiative with no benefit. Okay, seems reasonable you say but how do you actually convince them? This is where the catch-22 comes in. In order to prove the benefit of changing a methodology or using a new tool or even changing a single process you need to have gathered some kind of metrics. How many of you do that today?

The reality is that most organizations today do not effectively gather or evaluate metrics. I’ll give you my favorite example – do you track bugs and change requests? Mostly people track them in some way, but don’t consolidate them and don’t try to understand the root cause because that takes time. For example, a user comes to you and says I found a bug with feature X, it doesn’t do this (whatever this is) and it should. Is it a bug? Is it an enhancement? Maybe it’s a requirement that was missed? Try telling an executive that you need to institute a method for gathering requirements consistently or that the analysts need training without knowing anything about the changes that are being requested of you…

This is a personal crusade of mine so I’ll follow up with other thoughts and some easy (read inexpensive) methods for starting to gather this information.

For some brief blog introductions -

who we are…

First, foremost, and above all else – at Northwest Cadence, we value integrity, excellence, and out-of-the-box thinking.  These values make us who we are; chart our course, if you will.  I don’t believe one can create a company culture, but one can certainly influence it.  I’m thrilled to have had the chance to influence our culture by choosing to start our business off with a rock-solid, kick butt, call home to mama ’cause I’m so proud of ‘em team that thinks smart, works hard and (here’s the kicker) lives by values that align with our culture.   For some of you, this may be a lot of soft, mushy talk, and you’re (of course) welcome to skip ahead.  But, I’ve chosen to have this be the top topic on my first blog for those of you who are interested in what’s behind the scenes, what we’re made of, who we are.  After all, it’s paramount to the way we work with you, our customers, partners, and friends.  

 …now, for what we do!  

As you likely gathered from our website, Northwest Cadence is a Microsoft partner and we’re deeply committed to VSTS.  In fact, we’re Microsoft’s largest Northwest partner focusing exclusively on VSTS/ALM and all things related.  Our specialization ensures we stay deep in the technologies, agile in our approach, and responsive to our customers (all super critical things, am I right?!).  I’m pleased as punch to be part of such an excellent team and to have the opportunity to work with you – our fantastic customers and partners. 

So, you’re past experience with folks from our team means you have high expectations?  Bring ‘em on!  We wouldn’t have it any other way!  We’re looking forward to lots of joint successes in many years to come.