OpenNTF organised a webinar in July 2021 showcasing Domino Keep which we had the pleasure of attending. Many of the improvements that HCL brought to the Domino/Notes stack has “catching up”: mostly self-evident improvements from accumulated feedback from domino developers. These improvements, though, have until now been unable to break the “yellow bubble”: Companies still needs extremely specialized developers and admins if they want to change anything or create anything in their Domino infrastructure.

The HCL Team, lead by Richard Jefts, was kind enough to invite me to its second Factory Tour, this time in Europe, in the HCL offices in Milan, in Italy. Milan is just a 3.5 hour trip in the train from Zürich, going through the new Gotthard tunnel, so it was an almost leisurely travel, compared to the trip to Boston last year.

I had inherited a template for a database which was taking 3 seconds to open any sort of document. It soon got to be irritating, and I noticed that the little lightning bolt at the bottom left side of the Notes client was flashing wildly, so I fired up the Notes RPC Parser to try and see what was all the traffic about.

The two ugly sisters of software quality are documentation and testing. Both are sure-fire indicators of how easy a piece of software is going to be to maintain. They are not sexy, though, and most customers or end users don't care about them. Nor pay for them. Bad documentation and missing testing routines makes their hit on quality insidiously.