The spinny Solutions Provider that a friend of mine works for have decided to shed some staff.

Bit odd that they are doing that bearing in mind it was only a couple of months ago that they were on a major recruitment drive. Suppose you could say that they are getting rid of some dead wood but apparently a couple of them that are leaving are their better Business Analysts. They haven’t been made redundant or anything nasty like that they have just pissed off these guys so much that they have resigned. And how did they do that? Having promised them great bonuses all year to make up for huge amounts of unpaid extra work, they don’t pay the bonuses. Usual corporate thuggery carrot and stick stuff. 

This comes from the company that insisted that they interview, via telephone, a prospective Business Analyst with no IT skills at all. One of those people that can very superficially talk about IT systems and not mention any of that nasty geek speak. In an odd way it almost seems that it doesn’t really matter too much how many people they do actually employ. They have a lot of systems they are building for several companies and providing they have enough troops visiting clients and finding out the requirements and generally looking busy then all are happy as the solutions provider is constantly being paid for various documents they have bashed out and milestones they have reached. And what about the actual systems they are supposed to be writing. Well sometimes the programmers do actually get the opportunity to write code from the requirements. Then when it’s unleashed to the users there is the predictable response that all of the requirements have changed and ‘that’s not what we want at all’.

Then people get yanked off the project and onto another new project and the old project fades away and the contract torn up. Sort of running on the spot, perpetually. They are not good at, my term, ‘making systems work’. In fact you could say there was fat chance of them getting code working. Just stuck in a very financially lucrative design hell. That’s not IT that’s fraud.

I have been trying to keep the stats word off of this entry as I think that’s all I have written for the last 6 entries (Why don’t you just pay $25 to one of those companies that guarantee 10,000 hits and be done with it? Ed). Downloaded Deep Log Analyser yesterday and got it setup to import the statistics from the log files on the hosting server and pretty good it is too. One part of the setup process was to copy some code onto the home page then click on a control to test whether this had been setup correctly. Try as I might I couldn’t get that to work.

Deep Log Analyser (DLA) provides almost too many statistics. My most popular read mid-week day is Tuesday and the least is Friday. I can also see the most popular hour of the day and even half-hour of the day. In fact there are so many stats I reckon I need some other software to analyse the output from DLA. Haven’t checked whether the total hits it displays are consistent with those on the log file yet. But then surely it has to. Also another problem is that it is a trial version and the full version is $299. Ouch.

Quote of the day

‘In spite of the cost of living, it’s still popular’ Laurence J. Peter (1919-1988)

How come site visit statistics from different counters never show the same number of visits?

And they never do. You could put six counters on a site and within days the numbers of visits will not be the same. What’s worse is that quite often the counter writers try and justify it. I just came across the following at Google Analytics:

Why does Google Analytics report different values than some other web analytics solutions?
Different web analytics products may use a variety of methods to track visits to your website.

Do they? Why? How can a counter have a different method of tracking visits to a web site? If I start a new blog with 6 different counters on it and no visits i.e. the current hit count total is zero, and then I go to 6 different PC’s and visit the site once from each machine then that site visit total must be 6. And if I continue doing this kind of test in a controlled way, so that I know exactly how many visits I have made to that site then the displayed count totals for all of the counters have to be the expected result total. Period. More from Google:

Therefore, it is normal to see discrepancies between reports created by various products. However, we generally believe that the best way to think of metrics across different web analytics programs is to think in terms of trends, as opposed to numbers by themselves.

Well that would be convenient wouldn’t it. Never mind the numbers, forget about them coz we just can’t add up, think of trends instead. Of course the problem is not that they can’t add up its that they lose the information somewhere. I’m getting a right bee in my bonnet re lousy stats.

I ran the test yesterday where I visited my own blog’s pages at specific times of the day, which were noted, so as to check that all visits were recorded on the log file.

And were they? Yup. Everything showed up like where I expected them to. So confidence has been restored with regard to the raw log file. Now I’ve just got to find some analysis software that will read the log file and present the data in a more user friendly fashion rather than the ASCI file dump I currently see. The only way this is going to work is if the third party analysing software gets access to the log files which means I have to give them the FTP username and password. Is there going to be a problem with that? Wouldn’t have thought so as I only have read access so no damage can be done. This sounds like something I get the opportunity to pay for.

A couple of days ago I signed up with Google Analyitics to see what kind of statistics they knocked out. The setting up of these stats said something like add some javascript to each page I wanted analysing. Do they mean page or blog entry? Dunno. Anyway I added the javascript to the two most recent blog entries to see what I got out of that. And what have I got out of that. Haven’t a clue.

It seems that Google Analytics is analysing more than just the two pages with the javascript code as the stats include other pages. Of course the daily totals don’t map onto the raw log file totals. Nor do they bear much resemblance to the Sitemeter stats or the Blogrankers site or even the Blogtopsites or Blogtoplist sites. In fact none of them have daily visit totals or even total site visit totals that resemble each other in any way shape or form. Nielsen it ain’t.

I’m thinking of going to the Starwest Testing Conference in Anaheim in October. One of the speakers is Jon Bach who is the Exploratory Testing guru. That should be interesting.