[The static location of this piece can be found at this address]

Introduction

Work habits and conditions vary dramatically between software development groups.

At one extreme of the spectrum are productive, tuned development teams delivering solutions on schedule and on budget, staffed with passionate experts happily building their skills and careers while providing valuable cutting-edge solutions. At the other extreme lie dysfunctional, under-utilized teams. The latter group endlessly catapults magnitudes past estimates of time and money, with a revolving door roster of contemptuously-treated employees.

Most shops fall somewhere in-between -- imperfect, but continually working towards better, more efficient practices and process, all while trying to provide a rewarding, fulfilling, and career-building experience for team members.

This entry is targeted at that continually-optimizing audience, and is written largely for development group managers and team/group leaders, though it's still informative for the general development community (lateral and upward management is critically important, and is the force that drives most process change).

These observations are gleaned from my experience with teams of varying sizes and types, acting in a variety of roles including management, team lead, developer, process consultant, mentor, mentee, and technology consultant. I have directly participated in, or observed, the development process in small, tightly-knit engineering groups stocked with professional electrical engineers, to mega corporations with walking-dead teams awaiting the next executive shuffle to mete out some doom on their orphaned projects.

I've learned from the successes, but I learned even more from the failures.

I've focused on best-practices that are optimal in virtually any team, and which are frequently evident problems, while avoiding those that are more likely to vary significantly between teams and organizations. Work environment, for example, is very subjective and context specific: Some developers and teams work optimally in private, quiet offices with comfy chairs and scheduled communications, while others thrive in hectic, noisy open offices, interfacing directly with the "customer" throughout the day, eagerly setting up development kiosks on whatever can serve as a seat. Some organizations need armies of BAs and BSAs and QAs and UAs, with layers upon layers of heavy process and checks built atop a traditional waterfall development model, while other shops work best with a highly agile, frequent delivery model, completed by multi-role development resources. It isn't possible to declare universal best-practices within those domains.

I also appreciate that most real-world teams have budgets, and that feel-good lists of .COM-style excess aren't realistic or helpful in the current IT climate. Every developer doesn't need every tool available, or every electronic toy on the market, to do their job effectively. I haven't tried to pander to the development community, blowing smoke about how entitled and empowered they should be, beyond the level that is actually beneficial to their career and the role.

On to the list!

Optimizing Software Development - Executive Summary

• Customize Your Development Process - Choose standards and processes that fit your team
• Use Source Control, And Use It Properly- Source control is a requisite of good development
• Formulate Written Standards- Don't rely on by-example or word of mouth standards
• Mandate Regular Status Updates- Have daily status updates
• Organize Your Information- Standardize your information archive structure
• Allocate Appropriate Time For Research- Research appropriately, or enjoy wasted effort and redundancy
• Accurately Track Development Time- Build valid historical data, and time accountability
• Focus On Your Competencies- Now when to outsource tasks to stay focused on your competencies
• Focus On Results Instead of Effort and Sacrifice - Sacrifice and effort should only matter when they yield results

Customize Your Development Process

Select processes, practices, and standards based upon your particular type of organization, type of project, and workforce, and then customize them for your specific needs.

Of course this suggestion seems ridiculously obvious, yet this is an industry rife with groups foolishly mimicking the process of those who appear to be successful.

Whether it's the previously agile vertical-solution shop trying to act like they're a bank, overloaded with process and CMM levels far beyond necessity because that looks like what the "big boys" do, or the banking group trying to adopt XP practices and frequent deliveries because it's the hip new trend that all the blogs are talking about, when their product only requires bi-yearly deliveries under a heavy layer of checks and balances: What works for one type of organization doesn't necessarily work for another, and adopting those processes under the wrong environment will bring defeat rather than success.

Don't act like you're developing life-critical flight control software when you make a P2P app, just as you shouldn't do the opposite. Don't pretend that you're an ISV, or assume that much of what's right for a retail software vendor is transferrable, if you're actually an in-house IT development shop.

This sort of cargo-cult mentality exists at a lower level as well. During the .COM boom, success apparently came from stocking up on Aeron chairs -- Get the chairs, and you'll do well. After the collapse the idiocy continued, with the same chairs now being demonized: Now they could only bring doom, and had to be removed post haste. It's a chair people. In the grand scheme of things, it really isn't going to make that much of a difference, positive or negative.

The same could be said about foosball tables; catered lunches; big, corporate-style meetings; having big cozy offices for everyone, or tiny open plan offices for everyone. Someone seemingly did it to their success, so therefore it was perceived as an applicable practice for everyone.

Just because someone else benefited from it doesn't mean that it would benefit your organization. It could very well hurt your organization.

Use Source Control, And Use It Properly

Source control is the foundation of good coding practices.

Not only does source control keep your code centralized (facilitating organized access for developers, along with easy backups and automated integrity assurances), with the proper use of branching and labels it can greatly increase the agility of your team: Having the comfort of making major changes in a code branch, while retaining the ability to revert to a labeled release or trunk, is liberating, reducing developer paranoia and ameliorating the risk of change.

Whether you're using Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe, Perforce, CVS, or one of the countless other available source control products, it is a critical component in your toolset. It's critical even if you're a single developer working alone in your one-man software development shop.

Source control is also invaluable for change management and auditing, historically tracking how much has changed, and where, over a given period of time, which is a benefit that often pays off handsomely years later. For example auditing the code history to determine when an errant algorithm was introduced to gauge how long it's been screwing up the calculations.

Adequately trained quality assurance teams can even use source control to determine what has changed between releases to tightly focus their testing efforts without relying on the often incomplete word of the developers.

The technique to use source control properly depends upon the tool that you're using, and the standards and needs of the group: Some groups use source control only to check-in production releases, while other groups check code in frequently, with every developer checking in multiple times per day, merging branches at convergence checkpoints. Ensure that you know the feature-set of your source control package inside and out, and that you're following a rational, best-benefit standard of use for your scenario.

If your usage is non-optimal because of limitations of your SCM tool, consider a product change. It really is that important.

Tip: Frequently perform project builds on a clean machine with limited network access by following development environment configuration instructions, and then getting and building from source control. During this process many teams discover hard coded paths, missing dependencies, and solution defects. It's better to detect it early than for development to grind to a halt the day before a big release when the corporate IT department decommissions that old server that supposedly wasn't in use for the past year.

Formulate Written Standards

Standards can be extraordinarily detailed, or as simple as noting which industry standards a team subscribes to (e.g. "All .NET coding will be done in conformance with the Microsoft .NET Design Guidelines"). It could even be the formalization of the lack of specific guidelines in a certain realm (e.g. "Put the braces wherever you'd like, and either tabs or spaces are fine"). Documented standards should cover all aspects of development, including development environment, tools, accepted languages, best-practices, check-in behaviour, naming guidelines, and so on.

Of course standards should be living documents, with occasional reassessments leading to the removal and addition of new points.

If, on the other hand, your standards are word-of-mouth, or "by example" (usually with many conflicting examples throughout the organization), you don't really have standards -- more likely it's acting as a demotivating, inefficient confusion for newer developers to the team, and a constant political skirmish between the veterans of the group: While good developers will happily adapt and conform to the idiosyncrasies and preferences of a group or project, it is frustrating and unproductive when they have to constantly go back and rename tables and rework classes because of unwritten "standards" that exist only in the minds of a few. When developers lose confidence in their code because of uncertainty over trivia such as spacing standards, something is seriously wrong, and people are focusing their care and concern on something that should be thoughtless.

As an added benefit, the process of documenting standards is often a time for rational debate, when "that's the way we've always done it" standards have to be legitimately rationalized and justified, or rightfully discarded. Many teams have improved their process, finally jettisoning unjustified legacy standards, during just such an exercise.

Having concise, documented standards (which can be the documented absence of standards in a particular realm) saves everyone from having doubts about whether they're conforming, eases new developers into the fold, and increases the percentage of good standards while removing the excess baggage. It also facilitates external assistance more smoothly.

Mandate Regular Status Updates

Every project, and every team, should have a daily or bi-weekly status updates by every member to their team leader or manager, or better still to every other member of the team (including from the manager to the team). This is regardless of your development methodology.

This can be a scrum, or a simple daily email stating what work the person is planning for the day, and what they achieved during the past day/period. This practice not only keeps everyone focused on the task at hand, with better time accountability (just like everyone else, and possibly worse as a group, developers are procrastinators), but it also gives a transparency of development that let's the manager, leads, team members, and stakeholders see where impediments exist, providing them an opportunity to help, or to recognize and respond to schedule slip early on, before it becomes a crisis. This transparency is one of the fundamental goals of the CMM process, and the benefits can be largely gained just by frequent, scheduled, mandatory and accountable communications.

Optimally this information will also exist in an archived, centralized, widely accessible location, such as an audio recording of a scrum, or a centralized collection of update notes.

It is critically important not only that this information is conveyed, but that it's actually consumed and retained as well -- management and the rest of the team must pay it proper heed, and they shouldn't wallow over during the day to ask what was previously stated. That undermines the entire process when it turns into a wasted effort that no-one pays attention to.

Organize Your Information

Having lots of specifications, standards, code libraries, discussions, solutions, and examples strewn across the topology of the network is of little use to anyone, and can be detrimental. Outdated documents will continually reappear, and misinformation takes on an unstoppable life of its own.

Centralize and standardize, ensuring that everyone knows exactly where to find all pertinent information on a moment's notice. Everyone should know exactly where they can find, and thus where they can store, specific types of information.

As it is, many teams start off with the "dumping bin"-style repository when they begin a project, planning on sorting it out later, however soon enough there are GBs of files -- many of which have little or nothing to do with the product or project -- confusingly cluttering a massive mess of a directory structure. This puts a serious damper on productivity.

Documents can't be found. People have to constantly interrupt each other to ask where to find something or where to store something. Eventually an expensive initiative will have to be undertaken to separate the wheat from the chaff, at a time when most people have forgotten why all of the various unrelated information is there in the first place. Undoubtedly good data will be removed, and bad data will be retained.

Before you create the first project or product file, decide exactly how you're going to organize the information, planning for the long term. Who will have access to it, and what permissions will they have? How they will access it? What will be contained where?

Tip: Documents such as specifications yield the same benefits of source control.

Allocate Appropriate Time For Research

The first step of any project shouldn't be to hit the IDE, or even to start high level design work. The first step should be to research and understand all competing or similar products, and any and all libraries and tools that could be leveraged to empower your solution.

As I write this, countless teams are spinning their wheels reinventing the Microsoft Application Blocks, or they're developing a data transformation service that could be integrated in Biztalk or SQL Server Integration Services less expensively (and much more flexibly). Perhaps they're developing a web portal that's just an incomplete, second-rate clone of SharePoint, Community Server or Zope.

There are even teams duplicating functionality already existing in the .NET Framework or standard template library because they never spent the time to look.

For virtually any need there are libraries and existing solutions that could either replace the need for the project altogether, or more likely could serve as a foundation of a more robust, more capable solution. If you're in the solution business, the desire to propose and implement the best solution should trump any desire to code for the heck of it.

Developers can't complete that sort of competitive research in an afternoon, or as a footnote, nor should you rely upon off-the-cuff commentary provided in meetings by individuals vaguely aware of the options.

While it varies by project and industry, such research usually requires a significant upfront investment of time before coding begins, allowing the stakeholders and development group to all feel entirely confident that the project is justified and will yield the best possible results. Document every finding and decision to save endlessly having to explain why one decided to develop what seems to be a clone of Biztalk.

Accurately Track Development Time

One of the primary reasons why many shops continue to grossly under-estimate the time required for projects is that they have limited, or fictional, historical real-world time tracking to base future projects upon -- they might have half-a-dozen developers working full-time, but the best they can account for at the end of the week is that a couple of small app issues got worked on.

This is sadly very typical.

Where there is some form of time tracking system in place, often it is of little value: Developers, as a general observation, will try to find ways to under-report the amount of time they spent on a particular development problem or project, as it's a bit of a badge to claim to have "thrown together" complex solutions in a "couple of hours". Furthermore few shops properly partition times (e.g. by project stage and task), further blurring the value.

Implement a time tracking system, and coach your team to accurately and regularly post times (daily, if not more frequently. Any less frequent and accuracy suffers dramatically (as someone with the bad habit of filling out timesheets at the end of the month, anxiously looking at file timestamps to figure out what I worked on when, I say this from personal experience).

Ensure that there is enough granularity that the time reporting is usable. For instance that you can see that competitor research actually took two weeks, instead of the foolishly anticipated 2 hours.

Avoid tacitly encouraging false timesheet entries: Don't act concerned when real world values start appearing, and most tasks are much more time-intensive than originally thought. Adapt and accept that reality differs greatly from the mirage that most people imagine that they see.

Focus On Your Competencies

You have your team of six hyper-intelligent and eager software developers, overloaded creating the next great scrum-tracking application. Based upon some user feedback, you realize that a small percentage of your users may want to interact with the system in a minimal way using J2ME equipped cell-phones, but your team is entirely staffed with .NET experts. Do you a) add a J2ME developer to the team, and just try to expand the J2ME product line, b) let one of your existing developers try their hand at J2ME, c) outsource that non-core component. Most shops would pick b without hesitation, incorrectly justifying it under the guise that it's "free" because it's covered by the payroll.

If you decide to try your hand at it in-house -- despite the considerable domain difference -- the results will almost certainly be a second-rate solution, delivered more slowly and more expensively than just outsourcing the need. This is worsened in that a resource originally dedicated to the core product has been diverted to a non-core need, and will come back to the core product with a need to spend time reacclimating.

This isn't to say that this is always a bad solution: Sometimes it entirely makes sense to build such skills in the core team (if this is a component that will need regular modification, or if it's an expanding customer base), not to mention that the work diversion can prove entertaining and rewarding for a developer.

Undertake non-core competencies -- be it building a one-off data bridge to a partner, putting up a corporate website, designing logos and icons, or countless other non-core needs -- with eyes wide open, realistically assessing the cost to do it in-house. Estimation of the "knowns" is already notoriously bad in software development, but the situation is far worse for non-core competencies, where developers are prone to extraordinary underestimations.

Realistically consider leveraging external solution providers (or even other teams within the organization) where it can keep your group focused -- with appropriate communications, teams will understand that it enhances their value and effectiveness, rather than presenting a risk to their employment. [Note: My organization provides outsourced consulting and development, so I do have a conflict of interests. However we always go in with the intention of empowering and furthering the existing team, and never to supplant them]

Focus On Results Instead Of Effort and Sacrifice

Getting the team working on nights and weekends means little if it saps their passion to produce, expensively inflates the bug count, and increases turnover. Yet sadly a lot of managers work under the delusion that effort and sacrifice are worthy substitutes for results. Indeed, many management techniques are built entirely around deriving maximal effort and demanding complete sacrifice, inventing artificial deadlines and manufactured crises to prod the troops.

The results are invariable destructive and counter-productive.

This is rooted in basic human psychology. Just look at a famous cough syrup with a heavy advertising presence: Surely it must work better because of the sacrifice required to ingest it? Contrast that with the presumption of self-destruction that most attribute to activities that people find enjoyable.

If it's fun or requires little sacrifice, then it can't be beneficial. If it is unpleasant, then it must be doing good. These foolish and unfounded notions have sold a lot of snake oils over the years, and they've supported a lot of human folly.

Savvy Machiavellian developers know how to exploit this management myopia, under-delivering until crunch time, and then putting in some superficial extra effort to get the project done, yielding kudos all around for going "above and beyond". Just by finally delivering long overdue results that they could have achieved in the normal workday. This is especially the case in shops with limited time reporting, and no regular status updates: Show up early in the morning (sending emails as validation), grunt and groan and gripe, shuffle around regularly, and then leave late (again sending emails to validate how committed one is), maybe VPNing in during the middle of the night to again demonstrate great sacrifice.

In some shops that alone is a substitute for any results at all.

On the flip-side, the "slacker" that comes in at 10am, leaves at 4pm, and takes extended lunches somehow keeps generating the bulk of the product design and code, but his apparent lack of effort and sacrifice will be dealt with at the next performance review.

Many heavy and onerous processes are undertaken, and then maintained, not because they've empirically proven themselves to be useful, but rather because the effort involved gives a mentally cheap illusion of achievement. From volumes of documents that no one ever references or validates, to arduous signature gathering exercises. Most of the time they're the mindless completion of a task with no real benefit to the project or the process, but it goes unquestioned as a part of the flow.

Discard all processes that are mechanically completed with little actual benefit. Tweak those that require more effort than necessary, maximizing the results while minimizing the effort.

Effort alone doesn't make your quality better, software better, or team smarter. Focus on results, and welcome and encourage results that come with minimal apparent effort or sacrifice.

Conclusion

Building a top-notch, effective software development team is a lot of hard work, coupled with a bit of luck, but hopefully some of these points have given a bit of food for thought that might encourage some development in the right direction. This list most certainly isn't comprehensive, and I've stayed away from domain-specific practices, but it is a start.

Tagged: [Software Development], [Programming], [Software-Development]

Getting back into the flow after the holiday break.

In addition to branded software, yafla also provides consulting and custom software development (in the Greater Toronto Area), which has kept me extremely busy over the past while. That's an area of the business that I haven't really written about (primarily because I keep client project and platform details strictly confidential), however I have a case study where the client is interested in getting their name out there, and the need - and from it the solution - are really interesting and noteworthy, so I might start working it in.

As an aside - both the survey component and yaflaColor are currently broken (as of this writing). Both have been updated to .NET 2.0, and for some reason my third-party host has an issue where helper assemblies are being locked by an outside process, possibly due to synchronization issues with the NAS. This should be resolved shortly. I've let them sit broken for the day simply because they're non-critical and it lets the 3rd party solve the problems on their end.

Rearranged the shelves over the holidays, and re-read a few sections of Fred Brooks' venerable book The Mythical Man-Month.

It's an interesting read, though it is largely obvious: Adding more people on a project naturally means more administrative, communications, and coordination overhead. If, at a particular stage in the project's progression, you have more people than you have clean project partitions, they could actually hinder rather than help. 

Many developers can personally identify with this indisputable observation, recalling situations where a manager with excess human resources dumped workers onto their project, against their wishes, while it was in an unpartitionable design stage. A co-op student assigned to me in just such a situation, many years back, started informally tagging their assigned tasks "MWPs" : Make Work Projects (they were quite capable, and recognized and disliked trivial tasks). Given that I was in a critical, non-partitionable task, and all following tasks depended upon it, the best I could do with their help was to get them to do competitive research.

Such is the nature of some projects during some stages. To use the classic analogy, nine women can't produce one baby in one month. Of course it's a fairly bad analogy given that those nine women can of course produce nine babies in nine months, effectively producing a "baby a month" if you wait the minimum period, but nonetheless it is the common phrase.

The mythical man-month title refers to the fact that many project managers take a project's estimated work (e.g. 100 man-months), and then request or assign a set number of people (e.g. 10 men), dividing the effort by the workforce and considering that the delivery date (in this case 100/10, or 10 months to completion from the start). Of course that is incredibly naïve, and is a recipe for disaster from the outset, and when the project starts slipping more people get added, slowing the project even more.

Thankfully, most shops use proper project timelines now, with critical paths, dependencies, and task assignments.

A couple of Mythical Man-Month quotes that I found enjoyable:

An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."

...

An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint.

As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get sorted away to be used "next time." Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system.

The second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable.

If you don't own this book, you should at least get it to stock your bookshelf (it is a required pretend-to-have-read shelf stocker). If you already understand and believe the core message of it, it's debateable if it's really worth spending the time actually reading, though: Quite a lot of it is highly specific, unique observations about the creation of OS/360, and some of it are practices that are now considered questionable. For instance, few advocate the surgical team that the book promotes (with the book example humorously including a language lawyer and two secretaries).

Several of the presents our children received this Christmas required batteries. Not just any batteries, though, but the petite triple-A (AAA) sort.

Those batteries are, if you didn't know, the most expensive and irritating of the battery genus, often costing $8 or more for a tiny pack of 2. To add to the insult, they also feature a relatively short lifespan (given that they have less chemicals that their bulkier siblings), so they tend to run out quickly in high-consumption devices, further exacerbating the cost issue.

I'd write it off as space efficiency, but for the fact that all of the toys that require these tiny batteries are themselves physical monsters - a huge garage where the batteries power the sound and lights, and a huge train set, where the monster, forearm-sized remote requires 3 of them.

These aren't cell-phone sized television remotes, but huge toys that have no such need for space efficiency.

Two toys alone required 9 triple-A batteries. I hit the battery reserves to find that we'd stockpiled several dozen double-As, Cs, Ds, and 9Vs, but not a single unused triple-A was in sight.

An expensive trip to the department store later, the toys were operational, but I'm prone to suspecting collusion between the battery industry and the toy industry.

[The static location of this piece can be found at this address]

How Ridiculous

Rediculous - Results 1 - 10 of about 3,800,000 for rediculous.

It is ridiculous that such an obvious misspelling has become so prolific (correctness by repeated assertion), yet it's a great example of how contagious an incorrect spelling can be: Given that language is largely learned by example, it is inevitable that an endless exposure to malformed spelling will eventually infect the language of others, gathering a widening net of victims.

This is more of a problem now more than ever, given that many of us have supplanted - or entirely replaced - the professional writing in our lives (newspapers, books, professional papers) with the amateur writing of bloggers and forum posters: The "good" influences - carefully authored, carefully edited professional writing - have given way to carelessly hashed-out entries by time-pressured bloggers and marginally-literate forum posters, in a domain where the accepted rules of netiquette strongly discourage pointing out spelling or grammar mistakes.

Those who point out errors in grammar or spelling are quickly marginalized as "Grammar Nazis". Ignorance rules the day, and the social pressure encouraging good spelling and grammar has dramatically declined.

English Is Non-Trivial, But Spelling is Standardized

English is a very difficult language, with a tremendous array of conflicting influences, and a byzantine array of specialized rules and conditions.

It is, for instance, very difficult to conform to all norms of grammar given that many of them are subjective and conflicting (and many self-appointed gurus have themselves made embarrassing errors). I have absolutely no doubt that this entry, for example, has over a dozen real or subjective grammar problems: From the incorrect placement of a comma, to the overzealous use of a compound adjective, to the use of a colon where a dash would suffice.

I certainly make no claim of perfection. Where I find that I've made an error (and I heartily welcome emails to this effect), I try to correct them as quickly as possible.

Nonetheless, spelling is standardized (with minor regional variations), so unless one is intentionally trying to extend or adapt the language, some effort should be exerted to check the standards references to ensure that one's usage is conformant, just as one would ensure that their CSS or HTML was compliant with the pertinent standards.

The Cost

The impact of the continued exposure to incorrect spelling and grammar can be extraordinary to observe. I've seen people corrected dozens of times, yet rediculous is so ingrained in their mind that they just can't break the habit. Soon enough other participants are perpetuating the misspelling, with the forum slowly diverging from correct English into some bizarre forum-localized lingo-ignoramus.

It might seem harmless, but this incorrect spelling starts infecting their professional writings (emails, instant messages, documents, signs, business cards - a domain where the laissez-faire attitude of the online world isn't acceptable), making them look ignorant and careless. That's if the fear of the same hasn't discouraged written discourse altogether (which is sadly very common. I've encountered plenty of professional acquaintances who avoid the written word like the plague).

It can even reduce the comprehension efficiency of written materials, as the reader's brain tries to rationalize the correct spelling on the paper with what they have stored in their memory cells.

It reduces general literacy.

If a reader's first exposure to analagous (analogous) or ancilliary (ancillary) are in a hastily written blog entry or forum post, naturally they're going to adopt the incorrect variant, perpetuating it to other entries and posts. Like a virus the misspelling infects new victims.

Of course it should be noted that language is indeed a "living" thing, and it does evolve and change over time - the English we speak today differs greatly from the English of yore - but the sort of ignorance that I'm describing has nothing to do with extending or adapting the language. Instead it's simple contagious laziness.

Showing Regard For Readers

Good form or not, I am regularly going back and rewording old entries for improved clarity and readability, and occasionally even to correct spelling mistakes that made it under the radar (I have some eagle-eyed readers that very helpfully point out some of these errors. Rather than being irritated by the "grammar nazis", I am very appreciative to have the extra sets of eyeballs).

I do this primarily to ease consumption by readers: While the initial entry might have been rushed when too little time was available - but I thought the information or perspective were useful for someone - the entries live on and see far more traffic over time than at the outset. A correction here and there, and the refinement and rewording of a paragraph or two to make it more clear and concise, takes me a few moments, yet it saves dozens or hundreds of readers time in the future (and improves their comprehension of the content).

I consider the effort very worthwhile.

Furthermore, I try to run all entries through an up to date spell-checker before the initial publishing. To make the process more palatable, I have trained the spell-checker with all of my domain-specific terminology (the false-negative rate of spell-checkers is one of the primary reasons most people avoid them).

I don't want to appear ignorant by misspelling a common word, and I don't want to save myself a little time at the cost of every reader's time. I also don't want to pollute the vocabulary of readers with believable misspellings.

Industry Solutions

Just as one eagerly sticks a W3C validation banner on their page declaring their compliance with some level of specification, it would be intriguing to advocate a "spelling and grammar" standard mark. One that simply declares that the author actually cares, and does exert some effort to meet some minimal level of correctness in spelling and grammar. It would be a public sign indicating that they are open and thankful for comments and corrections regarding the same.

Furthermore, it would be advantageous if the major search engines - including blog aggregators and search engines - allowed one to refine results by grammar and spelling, optionally scoring academically correct content higher in the results. While sloppy spelling is no guarantee that the content isn't of value, there is a noteworthy correlation between the care and concern put into the spelling and grammar of an entry and the value of the actual content contained within: If someone couldn't bother spell-checking their entry, the factual content of their entry naturally has to come into question as well.

In the forum and blogging world, it would be beneficial if more tools supported convenient and efficient automatic spell-checking (the fact that no major browser has incorporated native TEXTAREA spell-checking thus far is a travesty. Any of them could have a killer feature if they simply added Word-like squiggly underlining of suspect words, with easy alternative corrections). As it is, many tools have nothing at all, and the few that do often host a ridiculously unintuitive, hacked-in partial solution.

Let's clean up English on the internet.

[TRAFFIC NOTE: This story, one of the few general interest posts I've made on here, has appeared on reddit, sending quite a few users this way. For those who've actually read this far, if you found this entry interesting I would appreciate if you could give an arrow up to it on reddit. Alternately if you think this is a dud, please give it an arrow down. Thanks!]

A very merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to clients, readers, and passers-thru.

Seeing family and friends, the wonderful arts (both live and on television), and the great food and drink really makes this my favourite time of year. Soon enough it'll be the marking of a new year of challenges and goals higher than before, and I'm looking forward to it, after a very satisfying 2005.

...is that they're often fact-deficient.

The rumor that's been making the rounds over the past 24-hours is speculation that Microsoft has bought, or is buying, Opera (the makers of the excellent Opera web browser). The source of this multi-hundred-million-dollar rumor, involving two publicly-traded companies, is one small, random, tech "ezine". Nonetheless it's been repeated on Slashdot, Digg, along with many other sites and blogs.

The indirect birthplace of the rumor - perhaps the source of the plot for someone's fiction - was John C. Dvorak's commentary yesterday that Microsoft should buy Opera, given that they're letting the IE browser rust on the Mac. Opera, Dvorak claimed, would provide Microsoft with a cross-platform solution.

The problem with Dvorak's hypothesis, among many other logic gaps, is that Microsoft doesn't want a cross-platform solution. Internet Explorer on the Mac wasn't abandoned because it was too difficult to maintain, and it certainly wasn't that Microsoft couldn't keep up. Instead, it was strategically abandoned because Microsoft couldn't rationalize spending the time and effort to create a browser for someone else's platform. It also brought Microsoft under additional scrutiny: It's one thing for the monopoly operating system vendor to use some of those profits to enable their own platform, but it's quite another to provide a free browser to edge out competitors on other platforms as well. Internet Explorer on the Mac undermined Microsoft's bundling proposition as well (the whole "it's a part of the operating system...that you can also run on other operating systems...").

Ultimately this rumor is so void of any logical foundation that it is an indictment of the group-think sites that it has gotten the attention that it has (though it got the originator website exactly what they wanted, which is a lot of attention). Once again I'm setting myself up for a hearty serving of egg-on-the-face, boldly proclaiming that it is very unlikely that this story is true, but that's exactly what I'm saying. At least the Google-buying-Opera nonsense of a month or so ago could be mentally rationalized to some degree, but Microsoft-buying-Opera is just over the top ridiculous.

On top of all of that, there are some legalities that are certainly going to start biting small internet papers and blogs that perpetrate this sort of rumor mongering: Making false statements about publicly traded companies in ways that can impact their valuations might seem like a harmless, fun way of boosting the hits, but there are legal restrictions on that sort of fiction. I'm not saying with certainty that this particular story is untrue, but it seems highly likely to be the case.

UPDATE: While scanning the discussion boards, I've noticed that a common technique to keep the hype alive is to focus on the mobile market as Opera's killer valuation: Opera has a micro-browser that runs on cellphones, therefore that legitimizes the purported buyout (as only the few true believers would think that Microsoft replacing IE7 with Opera is even remotely possible).

There are several problems with this.

• Microsoft already competes in the mobile space with the PocketPC OS, and a mobile version of Internet Explorer
• Even then, there is very little money to be made having your browser on a cell phone - this isn't IE versus Netscape of 1997. This is 2005, and the primary concern is to be the site that the micro-browser goes to, not the browser itself. In the case of cell-phones, there is little chance that the providers would allow Microsoft to direct it to a Microsoft property, so even that minor advantage is lost
• Many of Opera's customers (who are the hardware vendors - not Joe on the street) for the mobile browser are Microsoft competitors. They would dump it in a heartbeat if it was acquired by Microsoft

The mobile angle does nothing to rationalize the scenario.