Re: [xml-dev] RE: XML As Fall Guy

[cbullard@hiwaay.net]

Some jell.  A team that jells is actively working at improving the  
product and with each other at making sure the best ideas make it into  
the mix.

Some bake.  A baked team passively and actively works at ensuring the  
product doesn't change.  Their formula is fixed.  A fully baked team  
sometimes has to be destroyed because they also work at ensuring their  
environment doesn't change and that is a disaster when it inevitably  
does.

The difference is skill from practice for professional pride versus  
habitual application by force of fear.  Having worked as a manager and  
as a code bringer, I've been given teams that needed to be dismantled  
before the work could progress.   Once again, if a social network  
takes over the business, it's done, dead as a dodo.  The wrong rewards  
have become the right things to achieve.   Sometimes the worst  
possible candidates are making decisions because of political wins  
that over time set those habits in like concrete.  They pour more  
tools and frameworks on top of that but because the same people are  
picking those, interfacing with the integrators and customers,  
protecting turf instead of working the code which they confess they  
don't understand, it becomes a scene out of the old horror movie where  
the back garden of the haunted mansion is full of gargoyles and  
rotting angels covered in Spanish moss and kudzu with the bug eyed  
butler carrying the messages from bewildered guests to possessed  
owners.  American enterprise gothic du jour.

SharePoint is inimical to XML or any data driven system.  What I'm  
seeing most often is it captures all the processes XML can fortify and  
pushes the XML development to the other side of the waterfall as a  
back-end tag-it, bag it, ship it process.  The customer never verifies  
or validates the content when the XML can be helpful and only  
validates the structures on delivery.  By defending Office turf to the  
last and making XML a poor second cousin in the MS editor UberVerse,  
they crucified markup for documentation work.  They considered  
building a good XML editor for documents beneath them and in so doing,  
punched the long lifecycle projects in the face leaving Adobe Acrobat  
with the prize:  data bag by default.

len

> > On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 10:53 AM, <cbullard@hiwaay.net> wrote:
> >
> > At the core was a team of civil servants who specified it, designed it AND
> > > managed its fabrication and fielding.  This team had been together
> > > developing these systems for three decades:  German Rocket Scientists.  The
> > > Von Braun Team.
> > In short, what de Marco and Lister call a "jelled team".  Unfortunately,
> > we don't know how to create those, only how to destroy them.