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Back in my days of Notes Application development at Iris, when we were first developing Web-based Domino applications with LotusScript, the general feeling was that they were too slow. We never felt that we could improve the performance except by trial and error. Countless hours were spent changing field names, view names, form names, any design element name to the latest company "standard."
By far, one of the most frustrating issues the Iris template team faced was how a team of developers could work on the same Notes application at the same time. We were quite jealous of the core Notes developers and their fancy source code control system. They could easily pinpoint when a change was made, what the change was, and then easily roll that change out. They also had a plethora of tools to choose from, for performance tuning, unit testing and coding standards.
Obviously the rest of the Notes application development community was also sharing the pain of the core Notes developers, because in 1996, Teamstudio came along with their initial set of tools to help the poor frustrated Notes developer get a little more sleep. Teamstudio seemed to have a tool for every pain point, so why didn't our Notes application development team use them? We were aware of Teamstudio CIAO!, but always felt that we couldn't use it because it wouldn't work with new design elements, or with any modifications which may have been made to existing elements. However, in hindsight, we could have used it for our maintenance stream.
We could have also used other tools, such as Teamstudio Analyzer, to create a snapshot of templates which had shipped. We could have used the reporting mechanism of Teamstudio Delta for creating a list of differences in our templates between releases, which could have showed what we had fixed. And Teamstudio Profiler could have been used to show us the things we *shouldn't* have been doing with LotusScript...
Obviously, I could go on and on here, and we all know that hindsight is 20/20. But my point is that the Notes community needs to be a bit more adventurous when seeking out tools that could help get the job done. Instead of making excuses about why tools won't work, I encourage everyone to try them. They may not fit your needs perfectly, but they may save you enough time and money to justify their expense. And finally, when you find something you like, spread the word! How about right now: What's your favorite Teamstudio tool?
Back in my days of Notes Application development at Iris, when we were first developing Web-based Domino applications with LotusScript, the general feeling was that they were too slow. We never felt that we could improve the performance except by trial and error. Countless hours were spent changing field names, view names, form names, any design element name to the latest company "standard."
By far, one of the most frustrating issues the Iris template team faced was how a team of developers could work on the same Notes application at the same time. We were quite jealous of the core Notes developers and their fancy source code control system. They could easily pinpoint when a change was made, what the change was, and then easily roll that change out. They also had a plethora of tools to choose from, for performance tuning, unit testing and coding standards.
Obviously the rest of the Notes application development community was also sharing the pain of the core Notes developers, because in 1996, Teamstudio came along with their initial set of tools to help the poor frustrated Notes developer get a little more sleep. Teamstudio seemed to have a tool for every pain point, so why didn't our Notes application development team use them? We were aware of Teamstudio CIAO!, but always felt that we couldn't use it because it wouldn't work with new design elements, or with any modifications which may have been made to existing elements. However, in hindsight, we could have used it for our maintenance stream.
We could have also used other tools, such as Teamstudio Analyzer, to create a snapshot of templates which had shipped. We could have used the reporting mechanism of Teamstudio Delta for creating a list of differences in our templates between releases, which could have showed what we had fixed. And Teamstudio Profiler could have been used to show us the things we *shouldn't* have been doing with LotusScript...
Obviously, I could go on and on here, and we all know that hindsight is 20/20. But my point is that the Notes community needs to be a bit more adventurous when seeking out tools that could help get the job done. Instead of making excuses about why tools won't work, I encourage everyone to try them. They may not fit your needs perfectly, but they may save you enough time and money to justify their expense. And finally, when you find something you like, spread the word! How about right now: What's your favorite Teamstudio tool?
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