The DOBlog

Tag: quality

  • Software Quality, Information Quality, and Customer Service

    Cripes. It’s been a month since I last posted here. Time flies when you are helping your boss figure out how to divide your work up before you leave the company in 3 weeks. I’ve also been very busy with my work in the International Association for Information and Data Quality – lots of interesting things happening there, including the Blog Carnival for Data Quality which I’ll be hosting come Monday!

    One of the things I do in the IAIDQ is moderate and manage the IQTrainwrecks.com website. It is a resource site for people which captures real world stories of how poor quality information impacts on people, companies, and even economies.

    Earlier this week I posted a case that was flagged to me by the nice people over at Tuppenceworth.ie concerning double-charging on customer accounts arising from a software bug. Details of that story can be found on IQTrainwrecks and on Tuppenceworth. I’d advise you to read either of those posts as they provide the context necessary for what follows here. (more…)

  • Stuff wot does work

    Regular visitors to this blog will know that I always appreciate stuff wot does work. Be it the excellent OnlineMeetingRooms to a humble bluetooth keyboard, I am a ferverent champion of kit that humbly bows its head and goes about doing what it sez on the tin in a competent and reliable manner.

    I was faced this week with the god-awful challenge of upgrading the first of my wordpress installations. I f*cking hate wordpress because of the complexity of its upgrade (let’s be honest -it’s a full monty reinstall) process, so I usually hold off for as long as possible. 2.3 passed me by. 2.5 made me sit up and ponder that perhaps I should bite the bullet. The announcement of 2.5.1 made me realise that soon I’d be spurned by the masses for being a lazy barsteward who didn’t bother to update his install.

    Also 2.5.x has some nice improvements in structure, layout and design of wordpress that I was hoping to to try out (I am, they are nice).

    But the pox-bottle dilemma of the upgrade had me frankly underwhelmed as my WP install was not broke so there was no urgent need to fix it. So I was quite happy when I came across the appropriately titled “WordPress Automatic Upgrade“. This spiffy little plug-in takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of doing a wordpress upgrade.

    It is not perfect but it allowed me to upgrade the DoBlog to 2.5.1 in a matter of moments with relative comfort that all was going well. Being a tad paranoid about these things I’d already taken my own backups of the DB and filesystem, but WAU did it automagically for me as well. All I need to know was an FTP login and FTP path for my host (which as I run the shebang meself I do).

    Some minor hiccups with things not quite happening in the order the screen messages said they would but other than that a spiffy simple tool that did what it said on the tin.

    I’ll miss Ultimate Tag Warrior (specifically being able to select from existing tags) but look forward to using the improved tagging support promised in WordPress.