Customer

Featuritis Cure

October 24, 2008

Don’t you just love when users come up with new feature ideas at a microprocessor clock rate. Even before you finish developing one, five new requests pop up. This is a disease, and it’s called featuritis!

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The Sure Step Rule of Taxi Fare

October 12, 2008

Some time back, as I was riding a taxi from Prague airport to Holiday Inn hotel, I wondered about the fixed price I was about to pay for the ride. – “Airport to city is 700 flat.” – said the driver when I asked how much approximately will it cost. Common wisdom goes that flat [...]

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Read My Lips: Why?

September 24, 2008

Recently, a reader, commenting on my last post about Sure Step, pointed me to an article by Karl E. Wiegers “Read My Lips: No New Models!” I initially responded to the comment, but I figure the comments aren’t read as often as posts, so I decided to blog it. It’s doubly funny that the reader [...]

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Diagnostic Phase – a signpost for implementation

September 19, 2008

Each phase of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology is equally important in an implementation project. You could argue that analysis is the most important, or that design is the most important, or that operation is less important. I’ll paraphrase Scott Adams here and ask: how one phase can be more important if each of them [...]

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A case for Sure Step: how Sure Step brings project success

September 11, 2008

Methodology is a tough topic. There are good methodologies, there are bad methodologies, there are good methodologies gone bad. Methodology is not a silver bullet, it won’t just make any problems disappear, and is hardly ever the single source of success or failure. But a methodology can be a major contributor to success. I could [...]

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NeverENDing story

September 10, 2008

Hint: this is a post for developers, and mostly junior developers, those who are still learning how to code properly. I know, I promised not to blog about stuff like this, but I simply couldn’t help this time. A friend of mine has asked me for help. “There is this C/AL function I had to rewrite, now I [...]

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“Our old software” syndrome

August 1, 2008

A few days back, while prototyping a new solution for a customer, one of the key users said: “But in our old software it didn’t work like that.” I was about to try to explain why the change, but then the user’s boss said: – We aren’t implementing a new solution so that everything can [...]

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Serial Numbers Conundrum

July 25, 2008

A blog reader has asked me for help about an allegedly strange behavior of items with serial number tracking. They had a customer who had serial number tracking switched on for an item with FIFO costing method. Whenever they posted a sales transaction, they chose the serial number manually. Then they noticed a puzzling behavior. [...]

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Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step 2.0

July 9, 2008

A new version of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology was released yesterday and is available for download to all Microsoft Dynamics partners enrolled in a service plan. If you were a partner, and thought you had no reason to enroll in one before, now there is a compelling reason to do so. This version brings [...]

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Mystery laptop: the conclusion

June 14, 2008

I never really expected that my post about my laptop outperforming an 8-headed dragon of a server would draw that much attention: record number of first-day reads of any blog post on my blog ever (134), and record number of comments (11 comments, by 5 people, me included). Not a big deal, but I believe [...]

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Mystery laptop: an update

June 12, 2008

Never trust the customer We were sure that the server had last service packs applied, that’s the first that we asked of the customer IT, and got a definite answer that “But, of course!”. So we didn’t really think this might be an issue. Then we noticed that SQL Server build number was 1399, while [...]

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