Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
"I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

[Source of the famous "Now you have two problems" quote]

Introduction

Today I have the privilege to officially announce the kick-off of the ‘Composition Application – Missing Manuals‘ initiative!

Having build Composite Applications on all releases of SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (NWCE) and its predecessors for several years now we – SAP Custom Development – have gathered a lot of experience in how-to develop this new breed of enterprise software. Since my first blog in 2007 I’ve been actively rolling out our findings and learnings on behalf of the organisation and in 2011 we want to take our contributions to the next level with this initiative:

The ‘Composition Application – Missing Manuals‘ initiative hosted on the
SDN Code Exchange Platform aims to create a productivity starter kit and sandbox system for the development of Composites by providing technical libraries and an easy demo app documenting its features & how-to use them.

Links: Composition Application – Missing Manuals | Twitter

All in one

Today I’m up for something new. That’s just one of my credos when it comes to social media, blogging and the use of Twitter – try something new every day. It’s a great learning experience.

Last week I found myself in an ongoing discussions about dos and don’ts on Twitter. We talked about #FollowFriday, Retweets amd netiquette and naturally the usage and usefulness(!) of the platform was brought to the table. I’ll add Twitter Favorites to this mix and see how it all plays together – well at least for me. So, with this blog I aim at multiple things:

Re: the-top-five-dos-and-donts-for-tweeters/

During a coffee break I stumbled across a blog post by Natascha Thomson on her B2B marketing blog and wanted to reply right away. Yet, instead of writing a lengthy comment I opted for replying to her on my own blog – continuing our interchange on social media.

In fact, Natascha was among the first people I “got to know on Twitter first” before enjoying meeting her face-to-face during TechEd and Palo Alto afterwards. I’m sure you’ve all heard about the Natascha-2-TechEd tale by now, don’t you ;) Since that time we both have been exploring the twitterverse and for me it still feels like a a rewarding learning experience… the netiquette keeps evolving as do some of the rules.

Sure, some basics have established by now and one is well-advised to understand them, so it’s best to do a little of basic reading first before getting started. I’ve been strongly promoting twitter and its value for information gathering in this high fidelity business for a while now as well as sharing my own insights on a regular basis (with anyone willing to listen.) In this tradition, I just can resist the temptation to reply to Natascha’s post and share my own views… a 2nd opinion so to say. Here it goes…

Introduction

Throughout the last years I have been involved in numerous initiatives aiming to measure and improve total cost of development (TCD) in Composite Application projects. What we found out is that one (if not THE) main influencing factor on TCD is development productivity, which – in a nutshell – refers to the time it takes a trained professional to execute a given development task. Leaving the proper skill set aside (which is why I explicitly said trained professional) it all comes down to how efficiently the development platform – in our case the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (NWCE) – supports the developer in said tasks.