Archive for Software Development
I’m not Cool Enough for the Web
Posted by: | CommentsSince leaving my last company and getting into the wild as a consultant, I’ve been amazed by the divergence between the conventional wisdom prevailing on the Internet and what I see actually happening on the ground with clients.
The prevailing wisdom appears to be:
- Google is the world’s best technology company. Anything they solve they are the best at, and if you aren’t doing it their way you’re a dinosaur.
- Client / Server is dead. All new applications will be web applications, most likely delivered as a service.
We visit a lot of companies, both prospects and clients. Here’s what we’ve actually seen over the past two years:
- Outside of search, Google doesn’t have their act together. Pretty much everything else is an academic experiment. There’s nothing wrong with experiments, but there’s a big distance from there to running your business.
- Business are run on Client / Server. They’re still creating new apps this way – they may use newer technologies like WPF to do it, but if it is core to making the business work, it’s usually not a web app.
With a name like Google, it’s got to be good!
Our own internal experience mirrors this. We use Exchange and Outlook for email so I can’t say a lot directly about Gmail, however it’s clear from Google’s reactions to recent outages that their perspective doesn’t fit the enterprise because it doesn’t take into account the premium companies place on predictability and communication. Predictability meaning that things are consistent – you get a consistent experience so your users can get their jobs done. Businesses are change averse for good reason: Users will adapt even to crazy problems and discover the patterns that work to get their jobs done. When the patterns keep changing, they get frustrated. On the communication front, businesses prize feedback on knowing the true scope of a problem and how long it may take to get it resolved.
SalesForce learned this a few years ago and in response introduced Trust.Salesforce.Com, which went a long way to getting companies what they wanted to be comfortable with an outsourced critical solution. If you operate a SaaS, you would do well to model after this. Now, it isn’t necessarily bad that Google doesn’t do anything like this for Gmail – it just means it isn’t a solution for a large set of businesses.
The thing we use the most internally from Google is Google Analytics. It’s very pretty and easy to use, however we’ve noticed a lot of “what’s broken today?” experiences with it, enough that we can’t recommend it to anyone. Two of the sites we monitor appear to be chronically under counted by Google Analytics, and we can’t figure out why. And like most things Google – you’re on self support. Now, there are paid options however unlike email we haven’t been able to find a strong paid competitor that is actively competing with Google. It feels like most have left the field of battle, or are exorbitantly expensive (and aimed at large enterprises).
After much early on talk about how Google Docs was going to make Office obsolete, it simply hasn’t come to pass – and Microsoft continues to sell a lot of copies of Office. It turns out that making a great word processor and spreadsheet is a very hard problem to do through the web. Now, you might take the perspective that Microsoft’s announcement that they are going to offer lightweight web versions of Office 14 applications as being an admission that the old model is bankrupt, but it really points to an increase in reach: Reaching many users that wouldn’t have been purchasing the product before. Casual home users that wouldn’t purchase a “real” copy of office may find what they want in Google Docs, and would also be happy with a lightweight feature set of Office.
In Google’s defense, the products are worth what you’re paying for them: Free. But, you have to ask yourself: If it wasn’t for the Google brand, would you give them the time of day? For search, absolutely. Finding an address and getting a street view? Bring it on. But don’t feel bad for depending on traditional software next time you want to buy a copy of Office, Photoshop, or use Outlook for your email.
It’s all SaaS These Days
Make no mistake, web applications, SaaS and Cloud Computing are all here to stay. However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot going on in Client \ Server as well. The key question to consider is how many applications you would have made, but done in another technology are being built as a web app instead? There certainly are some, but for the most part web applications are creating entirely new spaces and solving problems that weren’t being solved before instead of replacing entrenched problems.
Take document management: On the surface this feels like a problem that should go entirely web and not look back because the web is very good when the readers to editors ratio is very high. That said, the big document management companies still have very robust, integrated traditional offerings as well as their web portals. You do have people using web document management solutions (like SharePoint) that never had document management before, which is a case of expanding the size of the market not replacing an alternative option.
When you are running your business, you have a set of requirements that are often best suited by a traditional client application:
- Users need advanced capabilities: Once you stray out of the basics, it is invariably harder to provide features through web technologies than traditional technologies. Tools are improving and making it better, but the cost per feature is lower in a modern client development environment than through a browser. This is particularly true since you can put a browser in your app to enable things that it does really well – like show HTML content – you just let it do and keep the tricky stuff – like that big set of coordinated data entry fields – in your traditional app.
- Users are doing a lot: One thing that is easy to lose perspective on is that when you run a client/server application every computer is bringing power to the party. You often don’t need that strong a central server because the real action is happening out on the clients, and every new client that logs in is bringing their own muscle with them. In the web, it’s all on the server. Not only that, but you’re rendering things in a less efficient way due to the stateless nature and limited protocols available for data exchange.
- Users need access to diverse data: With web technologies it’s straightforward to manage information once you’ve brought it into the cloud, but it’s tricky to provide end users with fast casual access to a range of data in a range of formats. In many businesses data is coming in pieces from many sources and being assembled to produce a coherent output. This isn’t easy to do in any environment, and it’s one thing that the modern PC operating system, particularly Windows, has gotten very good at. You can double click a file and almost always get it to open into a good viewer. You can preview files, drag and drop from one program into another or a file into a program. All of this is intuitive and fast for users that aren’t fitting into a pre-packaged user scenario.
There are counter balancing effects:
- Transient user community: The more far flung your people are, the more work it is to keep them up to date. The more transient that user community is, the higher a barrier installation is. This is the leading reason why you want to make something a web app: It just isn’t worth the deployment effort to do it any other way.
- Diverse user community: If you want to service Linux, Windows, and the Mac then web technologies are the lowest common denominator, it’s just the way it is.
What we’re seeing in the field fits into this: People are creating a lot of new, lightweight web apps to solve point problems they probably wouldn’t have solved through technology before. But they’re also still heavily investing in traditional applications.
As a development team, it’s easy to get caught up thinking that Effort is the same as Value – just because something was a lot of work it must have a commensurate value. The fact is, that there’s just no evidence that effort and value are correlated. On the web, if you want to create a great looking and functioning generalized tool you’re signing up for a lot of effort. And the value may be there – it could be that you’re going to reach a whole set of new users that otherwise wouldn’t use an application at all. On the other hand, it could be that users perceive no extra value for it being in the web so all the extra work you put into creating the graphics, testing in five browsers, establishing identity, and the dozen other things you wouldn’t have needed to worry about if you were just running on the desktop netted you nothing.
So if you’re a business wondering how to approach that next application you need, don’t be afraid to get one that isn’t all wrapped up in Web 2.0 goodness. In the end, it’s all about making the solution work for you and your users.
Now where was I…
Posted by: | CommentsAs you can tell from the timeline It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. It isn’t because I’ve had nothing to say – instead, I’ve been completely consumed by leading the team creating Gibraltar, a new application monitoring product for .NET teams that we’re launching. You can download the latest version at www.GibraltarSoftware.com. We just published the last beta version of the product before the commercial release which is scheduled for June 1, 2009.
Bring a new product to market is really hard. I’m sure you’ve heard that before – but however hard you think it is, it’s harder than that. While we’re not quite across the finish line, there are a few things that have become readily apparent:
- Commercial-grade quality takes a lot to achieve. At each turn where you might normally say “well, users just shouldn’t do that” you can’t. Things you otherwise solved through training you can’t. It’s the difference in construction of a commercial Amp and the receiver you bought at Best Buy.
- Users won’t read anything. We did a beta release where we posted in five places instructions for how to upgrade from the prior beta which required an extra step or things wouldn’t work. We got deluged with calls about it not working from virtually every beta user; no one read any of the notes they saw, even in bold text in a yellow box in the middle of the screen.
- Marketing involvement early and often: The feedback from our first beta version was brutal; it told us that we were going in entirely the wrong direction because the users we were building the app for weren’t going to buy anything regardless of how singing & dancing it was. We had to step back and go a whole different direction. That would have been far more painful if we hadn’t been early in the process.
From here on out, I’ll be contributing to a separate blog articles that are focused on .NET software development and being part of a small Independent Software Vendor (ISV). This site will focus in more on its original goal: IT and business strategies for reliable systems.
Ignore what you know – Demand Results
Posted by: | CommentsMany if not most software project leaders came up through the development ranks. It’s generally thought of as a distinct advantage – you know the technologies you’re using, you can form your own well reasoned opinions about how hard something is, what is possible, and how long it should take. For a long time, I felt that the best way to get results from development teams was to use my experience and knowledge to be very understanding of the challenges they faced and give them whatever time they asked for. However, in the last few years I’ve run into several situations where I just couldn’t get them the extra time or relief from the most problematic requirements. I predicted doom to the projects in question but instead I observed some of the best outcomes I’d ever experienced.
While the projects were successful, it bothered me that the secret sauce seemed to be a rigid adherence to schedule and delivery more than any other consideration. This was exactly the reverse of how I wanted projects to succeed: I wanted them to succeed because I was treating the developers how they always wanted to be, not like a stereotype from Office Space. How could it be that better results came from ignorance of the technical details involved?
Developers Will Use All Available Time
Upon reflection, the first thing that struck me was how much an immobile deadline focused discussions and decision making. If you give a team more time, they will expand their process to consume it. Time will get consumed by:
- Elaborate Decision Making: When you have little time, you make a choice and go with it until it appears it just can’t work. When you have a lot of time, you sit back and look for the very best option. That then requires defining what the best is – is it fastest, or smallest, or most scalable, or whatever.
- Development Approach: Under pressure you’ll tend to go with the proven guaranteed approach. If you have the luxury of time you’re more likely to engage in yak shaving like investigating a new tool or approach, or writing several prototypes first before you develop the real solution. You might even just throw caution to the wind by skipping a formal design figuring you’ll have the time to just code and test your way to a solution.
The more time a development team has, the harder it is to argue against spending it on up front luxuries. It also can be harder to argue for long term best practices because the team has the time now to develop a solution any way they want.
Unknowns Create Boomerang Estimates
Even very experienced developers are generally terrible at estimating the duration of developing a solution. This has been demonstrated over and over by many other parties. The key behavior that we’ve observed is the phenomenon that from when you approach a specific development problem (like displaying a graph on a web page) until you know exactly how you’re going to solve it (and have a reason for confidence in that approach) you will tend to estimate high because in effect the only reasonable estimate is infinity.
Put another way, as long as you don’t know how you will solve a problem you don’t know for sure that it is solvable which means it will take an infinite amount of time to solve it. Fortunately, developers are almost universally optimists so they believe they can solve anything eventually – so they’ll pull out a standard answer like three weeks or months or whatever feels like a big chunk of time to figure out the problem but not so big that it kills the project. The reality is that until you know how you’re going to solve it, it feels like it could take forever.
Once a solution has presented itself the development team will often find that all it will take is some cleanup and polish to be done- a very small amount of time. What will push the team to find the answer? We’re back to the problem of elaborate decision making when you have the luxury of time. Finding solutions tends to not be a linear problem that will be solved with incremental development energy. Instead, it tends to be solved by getting people together and brainstorming possible solutions until you find a few candidates and can work out what it’ll take to prove them out. Under pressure, people tend to focus their creative energy and be more willing to compromise. That flexibility will tend to get rid of pet requirements and developer gold-plating and focus on the most critical aspects of the problem.
What’s the alternate approach?
The key is to not let your knowledge and experience as a developer lead you to buy into the stories the team creates around what’s reasonable to get done and how long it will take. Instead, you have to stick with the project’s goals first then the facts of the project. The project’s goals form the objective reality of what has to be accomplished for the project to survive: Deliver this functionality by that date, keep these people informed, solve these problems without causing those problems.
When the team runs into a wall and needs more time, instead of buying into the story of needing a lot of time, set a specific and tight goal that keeps a solid amount of time pressure on the team to solve the issue and prevent the problems above from showing up. Ideally, find a way to give out one or two day chunks to answer incremental questions if necessary to emphasize that time is precious and has to be invested carefully. This is where you can leverage your experience in a way that a non-developer can’t: The team knows they can’t snow you with tech details, and you can define a specific, measurable result that can be achieved in a short period of time that they can’t argue with. Despite this, you are bound to have to assert a few times that the time limit is the limit – solve the problem in that time. It’s very hard because you’ve been on the other side of that conversation and it can feel like you’re the Pointy Haired Boss, but it’s fundamentally your job on the project.
What will nearly always happen is the team will surprise itself – a solution will be presented within the team that they can live with and can be done in the time they have. It may be incomplete or have some risky shortcomings, and you’ll want to ask how long it’d take to address those. You probably shouldn’t address them in the first round, but the team will feel better that you’ve considered through things and will buy into the outcome more if you ask. You’ll also want to make a record of it so that the team can in the future recognize what was a predicted shortcoming vs. an accidental defect.
Do you want it solved right?
This is a question that often gets voiced within a team as a rebuttal to external time pressures and is very dangerous. The challenge is that most non-technical people don’t get the number of ways that a problem can be solved: instead, each problem appears to have a single solution. Take away your technical knowledge and imagine you’re the paying customer: What’s the alternative – were you going to solve it wrong? If that’s the case, what else have you done that’s garbage? If you took your car to a repair person and they said it’d be $500 to fix it, then when you came back they said well, if you want it fixed right it’ll actually be $1200, wouldn’t you wonder what the hell the $500 fix was?
Usually this statement is uttered in desperation when a team believes they just need more time to figure out a problem. Nobody wants a problem solved wrong. Skip the hyperbole and get down to action: break down the problem into small chunks of time that can be invested for a specific measurable result, and make sure the team gets that overage time is the most precious commodity.
Side Note: This is an advantage of SCRUM in practice. If you’re following an Agile Development practice, particularly SCRUM, this fits right in: Focus on making each sprint deliver the user stories it was supposed to even if you have to leave some special cases for a later sprint. The daily stand up meetings are a great place for the different team members to apply team pressure against over engineering and doomsday estimates.
Cleaning Up and Closing Out
At some point you need to close out your release and ship it. For each of the areas where you’ve had to make compromises and taken shortcuts you have to choose to either:
- Ship as Final: Decide the implementation is close enough to the intent of the end-user functional requirements that it can be the final implementation (at least until new information contradicts this decision)
- Ship as Temporary: Decide that something is better than nothing and ship the feature with limitations.
- Cut the Feature: Hold back the feature until it can be reconsidered or reimplemented.
You’re nearly always better off shipping the feature, often as a final feature pending more information because it’s very hard to gauge the true impact of each limitation. This is particularly true of user-facing features and environments where it’s possible to evolve the software rapidly. Inevitably once it’s in the hands of your users you’ll discover aspects of it that you didn’t think of that will require rework and you may discover that the killer feature you were sure would be the hit of the release is hardly used. In either of these cases if you’ve invested a great deal of time in making it foolproof the team will tend to resist changing it. It’s a natural product of the presumed relationship between effort and value. If necessary, you might put in some temporary safeties to detect and catch the limitations you’re worried about.
The major exceptions to this approach are areas that are too dangerous to deploy if less than fully trustworthy. For example, if your team is developing a data storage system, software deployment system, or other critical infrastructure your choices likely resolve down to making it as right as possible or holding the feature until it can be reworked.
If it turns out that the solutions that are viable within the schedule have significant limitations, you should make sure these caveats are known to the business – provided you can express them in business terms. For example, knowing that an algorithm won’t work if your userbase doubles is probably not a significant caveat, unless you know the business plans to double in a relatively short period of time. Every system has limits, and every software change has risks. Business representatives don’t like to hear the same items covering the same ground repeated every time you discuss software, and it tends to make them not hear the new and important information as well as sound like you’re attempting to transfer accountability from your team to them.
Code Monkey Challenge
Posted by: | CommentsWe spend most of our time deeply engaged in our client’s projects. We work hard to assimilate quickly in to our client’s culture and challenges to make sure we can deliver the most value we can. This doesn’t leave us with a lot of opportunities to do team building within our own company. We’re committed that employees of eSymmetrix feel a part of something a lot more than just our clients – they are part of the eSymmetrix way of getting things done, which they can be proud of.
In the past several months the three partners of our firm have been scattered to handle all of the challenges of our growing business, but with the completion of a major engagement with a client we had the opportunity to spend some time back together to focus on more long range concerns. We had intended to spend the time working on product and marketing strategy for our upcoming commercial release of Gibraltar, but instead on a whim decided to do something we called the Code Monkey Challenge.
The goal was to make something complete and useful within a very short period of time. Complete for us meant we were going to create a software component, test it, package it, and publish it to a new web site with descriptive content all in 48 hours. We didn’t even have a hosting company set up beforehand. To be useful it had to be usable by people outside of our company as delivered, and fulfill a real need, at least for a set of users.
We started at 9:00 AM with the goal of publishing the final version to a new web site by 6:00 PM the following day. Our initial approach was to have one hour sprints of work divided between each team member, then meet and review and set up the next sprint. In the end we used three hour sprints, delivering to each other through our source code system at the end of each sprint. We made our goal – you can see the results at www.gibraltarsoftware.com. Most importantly, we achieved our result of bringing together our team members.
Update: The small Logger we wrote as part of the Code Monkey Challenge has since been rewritten and incorporated into the Gibraltar Agent.
We eliminated any distraction we could so that we could apply as much of the 48 hours as possible to the project. We worked well into the evenings and had others provide some support to make sure we had food, coffee, and no outside distractions.
The intense time pressure gave us a good tool to eliminate most conflict: there simply wasn’t time for much philosophy on how to approach the different technical aspects. The lack of time removed ambiguity that otherwise would be the source of conflict. There wasn’t much time for yak shaving either – we had to produce results at the end of each sprint. Still the first few sprints were spent mostly in exploration and validation of the approaches with our first rough cut of each element done by the end of the first day. The second day was then about refining and documenting.
While we did skip over some aspects that we would normally do on a larger scale project, we did include most elements of our preferred development process. We did coordinated sprints of the team separated by an after action review to adjust our plan. We distributed code and results between the team through our source code control system, we wrote automated unit tests to verify key aspects of the system, and did peer design reviews. If anything, the lack of time made us less likely to bypass most parts of the process because we knew we wouldn’t have time to dig our way out of any problems we created.
The real goal of the exercise was to bring us back together as a leadership team and establish more of the shared experiences that define interpersonal relationships. It’s helpful to bridge the gaps that easily develop between architects and developers, developers and designers, engineering and marketing. We all had to come together to achieve our result because it was clear that we’d all fail if we couldn’t. Most business projects are sufficiently fuzzy that it isn’t nearly as clear what the cost of not working together is, and politics can overwhelm cooperation. It’s an experience I’d recommend in any software team, particularly if you’re in a company that can mix skills and responsibilities.
The next time your shop is done with a project, or when you need a break consider doing your own Code Monkey Challenge. It only takes two days. Here’s the rules:
- Produce a Real Product: Scope out a product that is really useful to a specific audience. Sure, you’re giving it away for free, but it still needs to stand up to scrutiny.
- Marketing Material Too: What good is a product if no one knows about it or understand how or why to use it? Even though you’re giving it away you want people to be able to understand and take advantage of your effort.
- Help and Usage Information: Like a real product, it has to be usable without you sitting over the customer’s shoulders. Depending on what it is, you need to tell them how to install it, program with it, and provide guidance on recommended usage scenarios.
- In Little Time: Extra time is the enemy – it will reduce the pressure to work together and encourage unnecessary bells and whistles while removing the catalyst that gets everyone to work together.
- Publish to the World: If you’re a large company, perhaps it’s just the company. Wherever it is, it has to feel like real stakes to the team: Your results will be on display.
To set it up, be sure that you can eliminate anything that would distract the team – they can work into the evenings, have food brought in, whatever. The closer it is to a total immersion experience the better. It improves the sense of camerarderie developed within the team and ensures the most creative energy is directed to the project.
If you try it out, or have another software team building story, please drop me a line and tell me how it went, or leave a comment below.
Technology Debt? Don’t bet on it.
Posted by: | CommentsIn the past two years I’ve heard the term Technology Debt thrown around to justify a number of technology decisions. In an effort to come up with a term that would bridge the business-technology gap, someone came up with Technology Debt to indicate that you were basically creating a future liability that would have to be paid back - rewriting a section of code or switching out a module, whatever. Since business folks deal with assets and liabilities routinely, expressing subtle technology problems in financial terms has a lot of appeal. The basic concept is most frequently used in relationship to software: Let’s say you defer something to a future release so you can get the release out the door. Perhaps the feature will only work for very few customers but you don’t have time to generalize it, or the solution won’t scale as new users are added.
This is fine as far as it goes, but like any metaphor while it may be a way of explaining some aspects where two things are in common it’s very easy to overextend because in fact it isn’t a true financial liability.
Take a hypothetical example: You are supposed to add federated identity to your web application. What you want to do is create an identity broker that will allow your SaaS application to connect with Microsoft’s ADFS, OpenID, and a few variations of SAML. You believe this will get you the market reach you need, and by creating your own identity broker you can decouple your application from changes in this still evolving space, as well as support your own native security technique.
As you dig into it, you realize that this just isn’t feasible in the time you have: You need to get a solution done in two months to meet a commitment to a customer, and it turns out this customer just uses ADFS. It just so happens that your web framework can easily work with ADFS directly, so to save the schedule you drop back and just do ADFS. From a development standpoint this is a hack – you are doing something quickly you can’t extend to meet the original requirement and you’re pretty sure that you’ll need to undo this later and do it right, which will cost more than just doing it right the first time. This is Technology Debt.
Metaphors have Limited Application
The metaphor doesn’t hold for long. First, unlike real debt there is no external requirement to pay this back. Perhaps you never will need to support more than ADFS, or that after all of the talk customers just won’t adopt federated identity. At the start of each release cycle, you can look at the competitive market and see what is the correct, most important work to be done. It might be that you’ll have to make good on something you deferred, but you might not. If you didn’t, it never was debt. How confident are you that you can tell the difference right now?
Second, all technology has future liability. The more code you write, the more you have to maintain and support. That has a cost as well for the future. Depending on the nature of your product it could mean that you have to support questionable past API decisions or obscure and intricate features of your product. Every feature has a cost to maintain, every line of code you use or reference in a third party library has weight. Only talking about deferred development as technology debt implies that what you have right now is all asset, but it isn’t.
Rampant Misuse
The biggest challenge I’ve seen is that the metaphor is used to push development team goals on the business without having to adequately justify them. By handing business folks something they can easily relate to, it’s easy to gloss over the underlying technical implications.
For example, say you have an application that’s currently written in Visual Basic 6. You can justly claim that Microsoft has dropped support for it and that the day is coming when it will no longer run on the latest operating system (Microsoft has committed that it will run on Vista and Windows Server 2008, but that will likely be the end). This sounds very alarming indeed! Naturally, the answer is to rewrite the entire application in .NET 3.5. Yes, this will take longer and cost a lot more than just adding the features you need to the existing code, but it eliminates all of the technology debt represented by that old nasty VB6 code.
Now look at it a little more objectively. Yes, you will need to eliminate that VB6 code at some point – notably when you are upgrading from Vista to whatever’s next. When will that be? Well, if you believe the hype that people love Windows XP and may just consider Vista in the future, you have some calendar time. As long as it’s done by then, Microsoft dropping support isn’t a real issue. We’ve yet to work with a client who’s VB6 application didn’t work just fine on Vista, thank you very much.
Second, with rare exception every modern technology has a half-life. The notable exceptions are COBOL, C, and C++. You can with confidence know that these languages are still going to be in active use in 15 years and that code you create now will work with minor to modest adjustment on current platforms at that time. I would dispute if a similar claim can be made for the latest crop of languages. A major reason for this is that modern languages are really whole environments – a programming language and an API/runtime. While it may be theoretically possible to write a C# compiler without toting along the .NET runtime, it isn’t going to happen. Likewise for PHP, RoR, and even Java. Java’s framework is much more shallow which ironically will likely give it more life because it can adapt to radical changes in computing environments and there is already an intent to decouple most of the code from specific frameworks.
This means that today’s latest and greatest environment will be tomorrows VB6. Just listen to people that jumped on .NET 1.1 discuss how they’re going to upgrade to .NET 2.0 or later, and that’s really not a particularly dramatic move.
Fundamentally, when you purchase software you’re making a bet in the vendor and community behind it. This is one place where the LAMP stack has a number of advantages because of the openness of the environment and the institutionalized tolerance of actively supporting releases for a long time. This is fundamentally enabled by their open source nature, but even if you had the source code for a commercial product it’s not likely you could do much with it; unless it’s fairly simple the burden of maintenance is likely higher than the cost of replacing it. Counteracting this are a lot of hidden costs to open source that may be difficult for a small team to absorb.
Easy Metaphors Seldom Produce Great Outcomes
Next time you’re trying to bridge the gap from technology to business, try to stay away from simple metaphors like Technology Debt. Instead, have real conversations to articulate the potential business impacts of the technical decisions and then hear from the business what they are concerned about. With a real dialog, everyone is in on why you deferred work to later and what bet is being made, and no one will be surprised when you do show up in a year to start porting that VB6 app to .NET.
