Henry's Web Log

Last night, the Apple iTunes store informed us that our latest app, the Valley Business Front for iPad,was approved and ready for sale! While this isn't our first app, it is the first one we have published under our new Mobile App Development Division at ACI: New River Mobile.

Valley Business Front is an outstanding local business magazine featuring beutiful photos and well-written articles. Tom Field, Dan Smith, Nick Vaassen and the rest of the VB Front team do an amazing job each month, putting together relevant articles and promoting the great things happening in business in and around Roanoke and the New River Valley .



Now, readers with an iPad can download the latest release, take it with them wherever they go (even on a plane with no Internet signal), and bookmark favorites across multiple issues. Facebook, twitter and email integration is in there as well. We enjoyed putting this together, because we built an app that we will enjoy using ourselves!

ACI got it's first big opportunity in 1998, when we were asked to develop a web-based solution for US Army budget management. We put together a team of three developers of moderate experience. In six months, we were able to field a solution that had hung up a 15-person team for over 2 years.
The reason for our success? We believe we did a better job of working closely with the customer, and communicating in the team.
Today I read a similar blog post, reinforcing the smaller is better concept with a few studies.
Regardless of the metrics and extrapolations, the general rule holds water:

How can small teams be so dramatically more efficient than large teams?

Communication and coordination overhead rises dramatically with team size. In the worst possible case where everyone on the project needs to communicate and coordinate with everyone else, the cost of this effort rises as the square of the number of people in the team. That’s such a powerful effect, in fact, that a large team couldn’t possibly hope to achieve the goal of everyone coordinating their effort. But a small team could.

QSM found another explanation for the huge cost differential between small and large teams. The defect rate for the large teams was five times greater than for the small teams. Defects consume time in discovery, documentation, and repair. That effort is obviously necessary, but doesn’t contribute directly to creating the desired software, and therefore inflates cost without any benefit to the schedule.

Other smaller-is-better axioms from our experience at ACI :

• The average size of a custom software development firm is 5 to 11 full time employees (ACI is currently 15)


• The corporate dynamic changes when a company goes from 20 to 35+; enter middle management and more layers.


• Bigger size = more communication needs = more meetings.


• Software developers HATE meetings.


• Small firms typically need employees to wear more hats. This diversity gives smart developers higher job satisfaction.


• Looking at the public company annual reports, the traditional "economies of scale" don't apply to custom software development.

A great article about a great American: SGT Jeremy Mixon.
Positive stories like this don't draw the headlines nearly as much as the negative ones. One reason? There are a LOT more positive stories than the negative ones.
I've often said that the news isn't interested in how many schools we built, wells we've dug, or new businesses started in Iraq (yes, the US Army helped numerous small businesses get underway). But to stabilize a nation, that's what it takes. Plus the firepower to keep civilians safe while they plug into the global economy.
Great job, Virginia National Guard!

Remember when Boy Scouts were pictured holding signal flags atop a tower?


Although this image does predate my days in scouting, it was the common icon for Boy Scouts in the early 80's.

This Christmas Holiday, however, we got to participate in more modern scouting activities: teaching the newly approved Robotics Merit Badge (April 2011), and the Geocaching Merit Badge (approved in 2010).
Lisa, Eric and Ethan helped me put together a great program for 17 boys, competing in a short autonomous robot maze and object-dropoff competition. They flipped for it!



We also enjoyed introducing 10 boys to the sport of Geocaching. We logged their first cache, and launched three different trackables.

To see our trackables, visit:

• travel bug, named for its planter Jersey Boy, headed to Pitman, NJ


• Coin/Tag: 100 Years of Scouting, headed to Vancouver, Canada and back


• Coin/Tag: HighTower CLAB with the lofty goal of visiting all Scout Camps!

Where could we do all this great stuff, plus 14 other merit badges? At the Claytor Lake Aquatic Base Winter Camp. Beautiful location, very good food (Really!), and an outstanding staff.

My prediction? Someday, the autonomous robot competition will rank alongside the Pinewood Derby!

Our team competed in the Regional FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) at the Southwest Virginia Community College on Saturday, December 3, 2011. Team 4924 was in second place going into the semifinals and will now advance to the State Level robotics state championship. FIRST “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” encourages students to pursue math and science careers through sports-like robotics competitions, building enthusiasm for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fields (STEM).

Team 4924 members, aka “Tuxedo Pandas” include: Ethan Bass, Alexis Marchand, and Kallista Winters of CMS; Austin Downs, Adrian Ruvalcaba, and Kent Anderson of BMS.

(left to right) Kent Anderson, Alexis Marchand, Kallista Winters, Adrian Ruvalcaba, Ethan Bass, Austin Downs

They also won the third place Inspiration Award and first place Motivate Award as well were finalists for the PTC Design and Rockwell Collins Innovate awards. Team 4924 Head Coach was Franky Marchand along with assistants, Henry Bass, Paco Ruvalcaba, Michelle Winters, Dean Downs and Eric Anderson. Over the last six months, Team 4924 learned to cut metal, use a milling machine, bandsaw, drill-press and pop-rivet gun. They also learned about programming in C, and prototyping their designs before building.

Their robot, “LuLu” is named for the parallelogram arm used to grab crates. Team member Ethan Bass said, “We didn’t have the chance in this competition to put LuLu to full use. There were 100 loose racquetballs on the field, plus 3 other robots, making for a lot of craziness! We plan to improve our arm so that we can put crates of balls on top of LuLu, then raise the crates with our four-foot scissor jack.” Coach Franky Marchand pointed out that his team was a rookie team, with five seventh-graders and one eighth-grader pitted against high-school students. “We’re ecstatic to have placed second in the qualifying round, as well as our Inspiration and Motivate awards, with such a new team. We attribute this to our experience in FIRST Lego League.” FIRST Lego League is a related tournament for ages 9-14 using Lego.

FTC is designed for students who want to compete head to head, using a sports model. Teams are responsible for designing, building, and programming their robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams. Teams, including coaches, mentors and volunteers, are required to develop strategy and build robots based on sound engineering principles. Team 4924 has been working under the mentorship of the the Montgomery County FRC (FIRST Robotics Team) Team 401 at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center since August to design, prototype, use tools to build and log all work effort into an engineering logbook.

The State FTC Championship will be held in Richmond, Virginia on March 3, 2012.