Well – I just had my last day with a client. I had the pleasure of (eventually) running a team of a few guys here in NYC and 1 member over the pond in London. We worked quite hard on building a trader facing credit deriv trading system. C#/ .Net clientLong story short – they tried hard to keep me around to help them out – but for N number of reasons – I am off to yet-another-banking-client.What worked? What did not work? What did I learn? Who did I help? Here are my general thoughts in no particular order.

• Made a few friends
• Learned a bunch about various credit deriv instruments.
• Helped a few developers change their ‘path’ and way of thinking about software development. I bet they will go on to do better and better things.
• Learned that I am NOT a ClearCase fan – at all.
• Re-affirmed my beliefs in
• Daily meetings
• Small tasks
• Unit Testing
• Pair programming
• Learned to really love SpringFramework.net more than never
• Took my love of mock frameworks up a notch with Rhino Mocks
• Improved, used and extended my object binding framework Stuck Object Binding

Slow Starts Suck
I DO wish we had a quicker start with this client – but once we were able to run the project in a way that was proven – we began to make large steps. Between slow IT setup – 2 weeks of ClearCase issues, permissioning issues etc, followed by 3 computers in a row that were ‘bad’. We also had some ‘too many cooks’ problems – but once we got past all that – I think we did great as a team.

Communication and Small Tasks

One of the effects that I worked hard to get rid of was that there were several developers each owning a function – going off and coding for long periods of time alone with little or no guidance/ communication. Fixing this was a huge win. Once we elevated the communication up a notch

Did I help the client?

Plenty more could be said – but in essence – I had a good engagement. I think the client was beyond pleased with me. I think I did my best for all the folks involved. I think I had a truly positive influence on the software, the people and their way of doing things. I am thankful that I could be a part of it
-Chris

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