Questions, Questions

We’ve just started to roll out our new Questionnaire engine for ESN and ESP – it seems that when people fill in their evaluations online they are much more willing to type in detailed comments. This makes sense of course, who wants to spend time writing long pieces or prose?

The system allows you to setup evaluation questionnaires for your suppliers on ESN. When the delegate returns from the course they are prompted to login and fill in an evaluation.

You can then report on evaluations across suppliers. The report looks like this (names changed to protect the innocent) :

The obliterated areas cover the supplier’s name.

You can click on the name and drill right down to the individual evaluation and comments entered.

There are other reports of course, but this example illustrates the power of the system nicely.

Obviously you design your own evaluations, write your own questions etc. and set the alert reporting levels.

Free\Community software - DevPartner Profiler Community Edition

I’ve been looking for a development tool known as a Profiler for a while now. A Profiler helps you find out why particular parts of your application are running slower than they should. These tools can be quite expensive, though I do believe that they are an important part of any developer’s toolkit.

The most recent one that I’ve been evaluating is the DevPartner Profiler Community Edition from Compuware. It’s actually a free, cut down version of their full product. But…

…things hadn’t been going too well – I couldn’t get it to work and it was pretty unfriendly. However a member of their follow-up sales teams gave me a call and persuaded me to give it another go (which I did mainly because they also have BoundsChecker on their books and this is by far the best investment you’ll ever make in 3rd party development tools – if you do C++ development for Windows applications that is, and I used to use it a lot)

I’ve since been working with their excellent support team to get the thing to work and as of last week we had a workaround, so I asked when there might be a bug fix.

‘I'm sorry, the free version of the Profiler has been discontinued.’ came the reply. This is bad news – I had begun to like the product, and the support had been excellent. I’d even gone to the trouble of collating my feedback on areas where I felt they could make improvements – I like to invest feedback in the tools I use!

So why is it also bad news for Compuware?

I may have been using a free version, and using up their support resources for nothing too. However we are a growing company and very soon we will migrate from the free version to the commercial version, and at that time the development team will be larger too. Where would we go for our profiler? To the vendor that we are using at the time. That was going to be Compuware, but now I think I’d rather get a single copy of ANTS for now (their competitor) as it’s a better, and currently more reliable, all round product. I can then get one of the team to be responsible for profiling our code in targeted areas…

With their free version Compuware had the competitive advantage, and although they would have a lot of customers using the product for free, those opportunities are all up-sell opportunities.

Now I’ve moved on…