Friday, March 18, 2005

It should be a lot of fun. You get to hear Scott Ambler, David Dossot, Joel Spolsky, Alan Zeichick, and Paul Tyma talk about how they evaluate dev tools, while I provide the comic relief and some tips from my own experience doing the Jolts, New & Noteworthy, and product reviews for SD.

See you in the theater!

[Afterwards]

Hey, it *was* a lot of fun. Those guys are something else. I didn't total up the years of experience on the stage because it would have been too depressing to think about (hint: When Jerry Weinberg showed that slide of punched-card decks in his keynote, I was convinced that one of them was mine), but these guys have definitely walked the walk.

Paul and Joel were in especially interesting positions, because they're not only developers, but they're vendors of tools that developers buy. Paul made a great analogy to reading a novel: Not only does a dev tool have to do its job well (i.e. characters, plotting, climax), but you should be grabbed by the very first page. You should be able to get something useful done right away.

Joel said that to him, the interesting thing was not tools so much as platforms for development, and he made the case for looking out for the little hide-in-the-cracks problems that will kill you down the line. He gave the example of Java AWT 1.0 never quite giving the full platform experience on, say, Windows (accelerators, program icons, etc.). His intent was to motivate evaluators to really look deeply into a platform--or a tool--before you buy it. Look for the weird special cases, the outre things that your applications have to do that probably aren't covered in the "Hello World" samples from the vendor.

David had some good insights, especially about openness and lock-in. Look at how a tool persists its data, or stores config information. Can you make it interoperate with the rest of what you have?

Alan discussed the role of information sources external to the eval: Magazines, forums, other developers, references. (He also said a lot more for which I wish I'd taken better notes, but I was busy trying to look moderate-ly up there).

Soctt talked about some of the dysfunctional organizational obstacles to evaluation. For example: Is the deal already done, and are you just spinning your wheels? There was much more, but you'll probably have to hit Alexa's blog entries to see it!

As for my little spiel...well, I wrote it out word-for-word beforehand, so if you have any interest you can see it here.

2:55 PM

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