That’s when TCE Answers.
TCE is a call-centre application that I wrote a few years ago that takes an operator through a scripted interaction with a caller, gathering data as it goes so that an appropriate remedial action can be scheduled before the caller hangs up.
Here’s a couple of piccys:
My CV says:
Development of Energex’s “Trouble Call Entry” call-centre application using the Spring 2.0 Framework with Spring WebFlow. The system is required to support 250 concurrent users and runs using the JRockit Server-side JVM on a load-balanced cluster of JBoss 4.2.0 application servers hosted by Redhat Enterprise Linux 4.2. Performance Testing was undertaken using HP’s LoadRunner tool.
It was a good project and I thank the guys at Energex/SPARQ for getting me in to design and build it.
All the webby technologies that I brought to bear (the Spring Framework proper, Spring WebFlow, Spring Valang, Apache XFire WebServices, Toplink JPA) played very well together.
The host RHEL4 systems also behaved very nicely; I set up a pair of servers in a geographically separate arrangement so that if a rain of dead fish put one site out of commission, at least the other site could continue supporting operations. I had some slight concern about performance but subsequent load testing put my mind to rest on that score.
JBoss (a 4-instance cluster split across the two servers) was simple and reliable, as always.
I learned quite a bit (this is the obligatory opinionated part of the post): about how important it is to fight people’s misconceptions as soon as they arise, about how a good project manager really is worth his/her weight in gold, and about how a bad project manager can be deadly (I am thinking here of one woman who insisted that she would be the sole point of contact between me and the actual product owner and eventual users. “Coders simply can’t understand the business users, so you must always only talk to me.” I stomped on that little impending disaster area pretty quickly!).
I also learned (was reminded again, I should say) that although one can argue a point based on one’s experience, any possible argument will mean nothing if it doesn’t talk to the other person’s experience; the comment “my experience tells me this will end up costing you much more in the long run and will lead to all sorts of trouble” really means nothing if the other person’s experiences don’t cover the same context/domain. “How can you explain colour to a man born blind?” (from the philosopher John Locke?)
Shortly after the application went live, Brisbane played host to one of its regular storms and the application got its “baptism.” After the storm was over, I received an email that said, in part:
Feedback from […manager…] was extremely complementary about not only the performance and effectiveness of TCE but all SPARQ supported systems that support customer response.
[…manager…] passed on his and the thanks of ENERGEX for the great work that has been done on our storm systems. He commented that “Looks like the work on our new systems such as TCE, CVU and others worked really well over the last few days as a trial-by-fire. All feedback I have had is that the systems worked well, are good to use, and are very effective. Great step forward, thanks”! – Now for storm season!”
As far as I know, not one bug report has been filed against the application. That’s something to be proud of, I recon.
So: if you live in Brisbane and phone up to report an emergency Loss Of Supply event, you now know a little bit about the software guiding the Call Centre Operator you are speaking to…
