I am building my own CRM access database that will contain a list of contacts. I would like to have an opportunity reference one contact as an employee, and another as the customer. Is there a way that I can add employees using their internal user ID (always 4 digits) and autonumber customer contacts? I don't plan on building forms un...
I have a scenario where customers are asking to develop a new project on struts 1. It appears they have many applications running on Struts 1 and the in house IT team is comfortable with it. For data access, we are asked to write JDBC, no ORM, not even Spring DAO. They have developed a framework and we have been asked to use that. I'm ...
I'm our companies only PC software programmer so I often end up in meetings with customers discussing what they want. We have developed custom hardware and software, but some of our customers are very very non-technical. You show them a 'cool' animated realtime display of data coming from multiple sensors over a network and they get so ...
My company is following a bunch of clients and one of them has a terrible legacy website from another century. We did some updates on it and we are in charge on maintaining it even if we didn't created the website in the first place. Code sample? <TABLE bottommargin="0" topmargin="0" rightmargin="0"><tr><td><br><br><table> <tr valign="...
I'm just starting out on a freelance project after several years as an employee. Currently, I'm negotiating a short contract with my first customer, and its proving to be quite difficult. Edit: I have not started any work for them yet, we are still negotiating a contract. The main problem is simply this - the client is rarely availabl...
Ok, I'm a lowly developer just minding my own business. Suddenly, I'm thrust into the crazy situation where I'm being handed a piece of paper, consisting of hastily written point notes from a client meeting. From this, I'm supposed to estimate development time on a short software project (3 - 6 weeks). The notes range from fairly useful...
I recently accepted a large project which was basically making a lot of CRUD (create, read, update, delete) pages for the database of a company. The reason the project was large was, there were a lot of tables, and there were a lot of fields in each table. Envisioning that the project will take at least 10 days of work, I quoted appropr...
So you're striving for a job, then you have two to choose from: Job A: You have direct contact with the customer. You get the user requirements. You design and develop being able to contact the customer for whichever issue you have. You receive the bug reports directly from the client, for whichever issue they have. Job B: You don't h...
I have the problem all the time of clients coming to me with their print designer who just wants to give me a design and get me to code it up. I'd prefer to be able to give some input in with considerations for SEO, usability, download size etc, but quite often the designers are of the mind that the design is finished and mustn't be cha...
Our customer has a "No unnecessary code" policy. And the people they have assigned to my project thinks this includes: Dianostic code Cross platform compatibility code "Software" faultcodes. ("Software doesn't break therefore these are unneeded.") Class methods that aren't used for THIS application ("Customer Code Review Issue : Pleas...
What questions can I ask and what other considerations are important to make this survey effective, so that people actually fill it out? I will be distributing it only to existing customers of my small e-product, to collect testimonials and other general information from my customer base. I plan on using Google Docs to conduct the surve...
Are there any open source alternatives to the not very active and drupal-bundled Ideatorrent project? ...
We are a small team (3 developers) and one of our main clients is about to submit a bunch of new feature requests and a follow on project to us to get estimates on cost and delivery times. Our last project with them was a 'success' in that they are coming back to us but I know we could have done a much better job (we used waterfall... t...
This question is somewhat multi-part. First, I realize it can vary somewhat, but what is generally expected from SaaS vendors in terms of what happens when a customer discontinues service with respect to their data. I have/am building a hosted Web based business application that customers use for an important aspect of their business. I...
How to show benefits of adopting asp.net mvc to client? I mean - we as developers can understand benefits of easier implementation of automated testing, better control over rendered html etc., but what would be strongest motives for client to accept usage of asp.net mvc? Maybe there's some more nice looking examples built with asp.net ...
Our company is in dire need of a Web-based customer collaboration or CRM tool that allows us to manage our relationships with customers. Here are the specific requirements of the tool we're looking for: Customers should be able to message our company, and our company should be able to respond Customers should be sandboxed from eachothe...
Sorry for the vague title, if anyone can think of a better one please feel free! My company is negotiating providing a small dev team (me as PM + 2 or 3 devs) to a client. However he's not the customer, his client is. It's important to him to be providing the software services to the customer, he doesn't like to tell them he has outsour...
Are there some standards that you consider to be so obvious that they would be assumed to be in any spec? For example, should hitting escape always cancel a form? Should double clicking a column header separator resize the column? When a customer says "this is obvious and 'standard behavior' therefore it is a bug to not have it" -...
Most of you certainly use some kind of bugtracker. Maybe internally only, once a customer files a bug via email or phone you add a new ticket by yourself. Sometimes weekly project meetings can be great source of new tickets coming preferably in flavors of excel sheets that the PM on the other side of the table loves to maintain and chase...
Normally when I do a system for a customer, I do design sessions on an hourly rate and then come out with a fixed price quotation for the full system development. Now this customer has thrown me a curveball: he doesn't want an hourly rate for design, either - he wants me to quote a fixed price to do all the design, too! Not that he's t...