Ben's Blog
Scenes from the Engine Room

Quarterly Releases 
 
Our first ever quarterly release is scheduled to ship early next week. On the one hand, you could say our first quarterly release will be at the end of June. On the other hand, even if customers cannot yet perceive the change, internally we're experiencing shifts in our approach to building and shipping software. It's been an interesting journey. 
 
In the past, WebWorks.com has always shipped "Big Bang" releases. You know, the ones where if we couldn't label it "Newer!" and "Tastier!", Marketing and Sales wanted more. This mentality meant most any desired feature could delay a release. Bug fixes and Support issues be damned! The thought process evolved to become, "Introducing feature X will cause customers to forget about defects A, B, and C." 
 
Is that the right way to build and ship software? What message does that convey? What message do we want to convey? 
 
Trust 
 
In Stephen Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", Stephen guides readers toward the concept of "priciple centered life". I've come to realize that what holds true for people also holds true for organizations. So the question is: 
 
    What principles center WebWorks.com? 
 
I answered this question by thinking back through all the years of feedback from customers and partners. Through all of it, there evolved an image of what our past actions were leading us towards. All of the times developers stayed late to fix one last defect. All of the times our Support staff took the time to help a customer reach success. And all of the effort spent trying with all our might to understand customer needs. Heck, I even caught a clue from the behavior of customers who complained for years about this and that, yet steadfastly insisted they would use no other product. 
 
There was only one answer. Trust. 
 
Quarterly Releases == Trust 
 
The effort to develop, package, ship, notify, and handle all aspects of a quarterly release demonstrate our commit as a company to enable users to trust us. Yes, we slip up now and again. And yes, we do have to charge money to keep the lights on. But mistakes and a need for profit are not obstacles to establishing trust with customers. 
 
Today, we have an opportunity to foster that trust relationship every three months! 
 
Now, about that Q2 release... 

Extensibility is the hallmark of Quadralay's publishing products. Invariably, if we didn't ship a given feature with the product, someone, somewhere found a way to add it to the mix. Whether on Publisher 2003 or ePublisher, customers found a way to be happy and successful. 
 
Until upgrade time. 
 
The Publisher 2003 line took the approach of never (well, almost never) removing or changing functionality. Users could take a Publisher 3.5 project, open it up in Publisher 8.6, and obtain consistent results. 
 
    No new features, but hey, everything still works. 
 
For ePublisher, we took a different approach and really focused on creating an easy upgrade path for casual users. This approach is great for anyone who limited their changes to the ePublisher UI, page templates, and CSS files. However, when users customize XSL code, we run into the issue of incompatible code. 
 
To address this, we introduced ePublisher Stationery in the ePublisher 9.2 release. ePublisher Stationery allows users to mimic Publisher 2003's trick: 
 
    No new features, but hey, everything still works. 
 
When users do need to resolve incompatible code issues, ePublisher's override mechanism clearly separates Quadralay code from user code. This approach enables formats and targets to exhibit different behaviors as necessary. It also works well for non-XSL files. 
 
Until you want to share your cool feature. 
 
I ran into this problem while working on a customer request from RoundUp for printable reports. I didn't need to modify any existing XSL, just add to it. So, I created my new XSL stage, overrode the "format.wwfmt" file, and Bang!, I'm done. But how could I deploy this to a customer who might be using WebWorks Help or another using Microsoft HTML Help? Changing the "format.wwfmt" file basically defines a brand new format. What do I do if I create yet another new feature that requires a similar change? 
 
Looking around at various plug-in architectures gave me a few clues. Eclipse has one way to do it, but it seems to be really focused on UI interactions, drag-drop behaviors, etc. Mozilla's FireFox browser has a nice interface to plug-ins. Just add the feature and go. I like that! Finally, the DITA Open Toolkit defines a plug-in architecture. The DITA-OT approach requires a user action to enable your plug-in (ant integrate). Then the DITA-OT build script rewrites XSL files with user extensions added, etc. The problem is that you can only extend where DITA-OT gives you an extension point. There are proposals to enhance the capabilities of DITA-OT plug-ins ala this one, Making plugins more useful. 
 
So what about ePublisher? 
 
In ePublisher, the reposibilities that Ant handles for DITA-OT are split between the format definition file, "format.wwfmt", and XSL extensions. "format.wwfmt" expresses dependency information only. It defines relationships only. No processing. That's a bit easier than working with arbitrary Ant build files. Good! So then what ePublisher needs is a way to build the "format.wwfmt" file on the fly. ePublisher can then integrate modules before initiating the publishing process. The first step towards ePublisher plug-ins is to define the module layout and see if we can script the "format.wwfmt" compile step. 
 
Jesse and I talked about this before Christmas. I'm wondering what he might cook up over the holidays. 
 
P.S. I see the Apache folks are working on something similiar for Ant called Ivy. Looks like I have more research to do. 

Video Link: "Big Picture" 
 
My daughter Kalyani is an amazing person. Smart, strong-willed, and just about the greatest Second Grader you'll ever meet. She does, however, possess one less than endearing trait. Kalyani can be an absolute nightmare when things don't go her way. More exactly, Kalyani has trouble when the "Real World" doesn't match the "Big Picture" she has envisioned. 
 
It isn't that Kayani's "Big Picture" is wrong or impossible to achieve. Nope. The problem is that Kalyani never bothers to communicate her "Big Picture" to the rest of us. She just starts "doing stuff". This does not go over well with her brother when said "Big Picture" involves his Legos and his train set. 
 
At RoundUp, I had this dawning realization... 
 
    I am not that different from Kalyani! 
    Quadralay is not that different from Kalyani! 
 
    I-We-Quadralay just start "doing stuff". 
    I-We-Quadralay never bother to communicate the "Big Picture". 
 
We talk with customers about the nuts and bolts of the ePublisher Platform. We talk about pipelines, stages, XSL overrides, and page templates. But in all of that, we never once stop to communicate the "Big Picture". This image, perfectly formed inside our heads, has no concrete form. It exists only in conversations and off-the-cuff emails. And what customers need are not more details without context. Customers need to understand the "Big Picture" that ties all of those details together. 
 
So after RoundUp, I tried a little experiment. 
 
I was scheduled to talk with a customer who wanted to know "how to implement a few things in ePublisher that we used to do in Publisher 2003". Instead of answering their question directly, I pulled some slides out of our RoundUp keynotes, mixed them together, and just focused on giving them the "Big Picture". By the end, the customer understood what deploying ePublisher could mean for their organization. Replicating Publisher 2003 features became secondary to understanding how they could use the ePublisher Platform to move far beyond the possibilities offered by Publisher 2003. With the "Big Picture" in their heads, they started asking and answering their own questions. The ePublisher Platform transformed from a mystical process akin to hyper-dimensional Physics and into a simple, knowable tool. 
 
Maybe this little screencast can help others make that connection too. 
 
Video Link: "Big Picture" 

Alan Porter, our VP of Operations, likes to count things. Counting things helps him in his day-to-day job. 
 
- How many Support requests have we handled this week? 
- What is our average close time for Support cases? 
 
You can imagine. 
 
During RoundUp, Alan taught me a brand new metric: 
 
The Doodle Metric 
 
Now, as I watched Alan slip in and out of presentations, I just thought he was counting the number of people present and subtracting out the nodding heads. When I asked him about it later, he said: 
 
I wasn't counting people. I was counting doodles. 
 
Of course! Instead of trying to measure someone's interest in the speaker directly, see how much effort they direct away from the speaker. 
 
So there you have it. Alan Porter is the founding father of Doodle Metrics. 
 
BTW: By all reports, RoundUp had a very low doodle metric index. 

I've been to many conferences over the years as both a vendor and an attendee. Some were good, some were bad, and, yes, some were just plain ugly. But what happened in Austin earlier this week was different. 
 
How exactly was RoundUp different? 
 
I can't quite say. 
 
Except... 
 
Those other conferences? 
 
They ain't no RoundUp. 
 
RoundUp didn't peak and flame out. It had a slow burn to it. Like the Poblano peppers at Hula Hut, it stayed with you and got better over time. Everyone was relaxed, enjoying the give and take of conversation and life here in Austin. It felt like a family reunion. 
 
Customers were excited to personally meet members of our Support team like Adam and Osman. Developers like Jesse were going off into corners with customers to "fix my last documentation bug". People joked and talked as if they have been friends their whole lives. 
 
As a company, WebWorks is committed to hosting the RoundUp Conference every year. That's good. I just hope we can figure out how to recreate the atmosphere that existed this year. I hope that we can capture all the great things about RoundUp 2007 and, just like they do over at Stubb's BBQ, "put that in a bottle". 
 
<hr> 
 
In case you're wondering who I am, my name is Ben Allums. These days, I'm Director of Engineering here at Quadralay/WebWorks.com. I started working at Quadralay back in 1994. Back then, our main product was a C++ development environment, UDT. We needed help for it, so Tony McDow wrote a quick MIF to HTML translation tool. When we showed it to the customer, they weren't too interested in buying UDT, but that MIF tool, they thought that was pretty cool. From that point, I was involved in the planning and architecture of a number of Quadralay Products: 
 
- Publisher 2.0 - 3.5 
- Publisher 6.0 - 8.0 (I was at IBM/Tivoli for a while) 
- WebWorks Help 2.0 - 5.0 
- An edit/review product with the initials FD which shall otherwise remain nameless 
- ePublisher 9.0 - 9.3 
 
So if you've got a question regarding current WebWorks products or if you're jonesing for a vintage copy of UDT on Solaris, send me an email at allums@webworks.com.