Conference nicctr::dxml

321.0. "Your help is needed to help improving the efficiency of the development team." by RTL::CHAO () Mon Apr 28 1997 13:22

I am engineering manager for the Math Library group. In an effort to become
more efficient with the various consulting and benchmark tuning activities
without dropping off too much on the product development effort. I am looking
for help from people putting requests in this notes file.

In the past, we have seen cases of requesting for help without the complete set
of information needed. To this end, with the help from the team, I have put
together the following list. Please provide as much detailed information as you
can. It would help speeding things up quite a bit. This is pertaining to
those reqests that require the engineers to spend time investigation the code,
and/or actually doing the work of tuning them. Simple questions like "Is there
a parallelized version of foo?" would not need to provide the information.
However, requests like "How do I parallelize the following code?" would need to
provide the detailed information.

Please provide information for the following questions, feel free to add any 
other relevant data not on this list:

1. Business data:

	a. What stage we are in the sales cycle?
	b. Who are the competitors in this bid?
	c. What's the competitor(s)'s performance numbers to beat?
	d. The configuration and the type of machine we are proposing.
	e. When does the bid have to be in?
	f. Contact names, phone number and e-mail address
	   (e.g. Sales person, Customer technical contact, etc.)

2. Technical data:

	a. Background information on the customer code and the software tools
	   or components to be used.
	b. How much tuning has been done so far?
	c. Is this generic code or has it been tuned for a particular
	   processor?
	d. What is the expected performance? In other words, at what level of
	   performance would we have a good chance to win the business?
	e. How much freedom can we exercise in changing the code