Updates for New Years

I just uploaded updates for both QVCS/QVCS-Pro and QVCS-Enterprise.

For QVCS and QVCS-Pro, you can read the details here. 

For QVCS-Enterprise, you can read the details here. 

Happy New Year!

Holiday Distractions

The holidays generate many distractions. The distractions are the kind that make the holidays a happy time:

• picked my daughter up from college...
• went to visit my son and his fiance -- he's on his own, and has been now for close to 2 years.
• shopping
• "must see" movies (Pride and Prejudice)
• peppermint ice cream...

Between the distractions, I've been working on cleaning up some bugs in QVCS 3.9.23, and some bugs in Enterprise 1.2.10. Both will get refresh/bug fix releases near year end.

The 3.9.23 bugs are subtle, and not urgent (which is why they haven't been fixed already). One area of cleanup surrounds the correct treatment of obsolete files. In QVCS, an obsolete file is one that cannot be changed (it's obsolete), but is available for 'get by label' operations for those cases where you need to get an old revision for building an old release (for example). The goal of the changes is to make the handling of obsolete files more transparent than is currently the case. Along the way, I've had to cleanup some subtle problems with the file rename operation. The last of those changes went in today. Thanks to David A. for reporting a weird boundary case that turned out to be related to the rename operation.

This next QVCS/QVCS-Pro build will also add support for two new keywords suggested in this forum topic. 

The Enterprise changes are also minor: In some rare cases, the server shutdown doesn't happen in a clean way leading to corruption of the role store and/or the authentication store. The symptoms are the sudden disappearance of projects and/or the sudden disappearance of users. The bug is very difficult to reproduce, but the changes for the next build should address the issue. The next build will also include support for the same 2 new keywords mentioned above for QVCS/QVCS-Pro.

Web site updates

If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed recent changes to the Quma web site. The changes were made as a result of suggestions from Al Harberg. Al's business is PR and PR related areas. He offers a very reasonable service where he will review your web site, and provide a useful critique. I'm more of a propeller head than a sales guy, and can use any help I can get in the sales area. Al's suggestions helped add a little more sales pitch to the site. I haven't asked Al for his comments on the changes yet, since I want to get more comfortable with them myself. The measure of success will be an increase in sales.

In any case, I think Al did a fine job. Whether my execution of his suggestions bears any fruit remains to be seen.

Knowledge Problem II Reprise

As it relates to software development, the knowledge problem is a double edged sword -- a methodology will succeed to the degree it provides tools to solve the knowledge problem. But solving the knowledge problem is not so simple as making it easy for everyone to know everything. A methodology must also provide effective tools for information hiding -- for making it so that the information that is available to be shared is only the relevant information -- not a cacophony of detail.

Knowing where to draw the boundaries in system design is difficult. From the knowledge problem perspective, the boundaries effectively determine what information needs to be shared, and what information can be hidden. If you draw the boundaries right, you can create something beautiful. Draw the boundaries wrong, and you'll get a pile of sludge.

So far, the only way to learn how to draw these boundaries is to get in the trenches and create systems -- some will work, and some will not. It's the kind of skill that is best acquired by doing. Reading books on this methodology or that can help give you a vocabulary for dealing with the problems of abstraction, etc. But they cannot teach you the lessons that you'll learn by actually building things.