Archive for category Values
Rule 4: Use Only One Dot Per Line
This is the fourth part of a series of articles starting here.
The fourth rule of the exercise is to only use one dot per line. Why is that important? Well apart from the apparent readability increase, many dots one one line can signify that an activity is happening in the wrong place. Or maybe your object is dealing with two other objects at the same time.
In both these cases you are not fully implementing the object oriented paradigm. Objects are supposed to know something about their immediate “friends” but not about their friend’s friends.
This is an example of a quite broken implementation.
public class TimeLineObject extends UIComponent { .... public function redraw():void { TimeLineDrawer.theInstance.drawTimeLine(TimeLineDrawer.theInstance.timeLineCanvas); } }
To follow the rule of this exercise you might be tempted to remove the number of dots per line by doing something like this:
public class TimeLineObject extends UIComponent { .... public function redraw():void { var timeLineDrawerSingleton:TimeLineDrawer = TimeLineDrawer.theInstance; var canvas:Canvas = timeLineDrawerSingleton.timeLineCanvas; timeLineDrawerSingleton.drawTimeLine(canvas); } }
But this is hardly the point. It is very apparent in the above example that the activity as a whole is not in the correct place. In the TimeLineObject we are suddenly telling some remote singleton static object to carry out things for us. Our object knows to much and the architecture has in fact failed at some earlier point.
The example from the Thoughtworks book is excellent. It shows the correct way to think about the exercise, namely to put activities in its right place. I will quote it below. First the “erroneous” example:
class Board { ... class Piece { ... String representation; } class Location { ... Piece current; } String boardRepresentation() { StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer(); for(Location l : squares()) { // Oh lord lots of dots here... :) buf.append(l.current.representation.substring(0, 1)); } return buf.toString(); } }
Applying the rules of having one dot per line here actually means REAL refactoring. I.e putting stuff where it belongs. And that is usually in other classes. Here’s the refactored example:
class Board { ... class Piece { ... private String representation; String character() { return representation.substring(0, 1); } void addTo(StringBuffer buf) { buf.append(character()); } } class Location { ... private Piece current; void addTo(StringBuffer buf) { current.addTo(buf); } } String boardRepresentation() { StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer(); for(Location l : squares()) l.addTo(buf); return buf.toString(); } }
So, the lesson from this exercise is that you should put activities where they belong. Avoid using static utility classes and other “middleman” objects. And make sure that the object you are working in does not now to much about other object’s activities. Couple this with the previous rules and you have gone far in a sturdy, nice looking design.
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Rule 3: Wrap All Primitives and Strings
This is the third part of a series of articles starting here.
Wrapping primitives (ints, floats etc) and strings is an easy way to increase maintainability and readability of your code. Also, as Abinesh TD Consider for example the following pseudo-javacode:
public class Contact { private String emailAddress; public void setEmail(String emailAddress) throws InvalidEmailException { if (! validateEmail(emailAddress)) { throw new InvalidEmailException("Uhm, that's not a valid mail address..."); } this.emailAddress = emailAddress; } public String getEmail() { return emailAddress; } private Boolean validateEmail(String emailAddress) { // TODO: validation regexp etc } }
A very simple class, containing a single field intended to hold an email address. It looks good enough, but imagine that you have other places where you would need to validate and store email addresses. You would have a tendency for code duplication right there.
Worst case would be that you would have a validation function in every email container class. It would be better to wrap the string intended to hold the email address in its own class, even if it only holds one field, the potential for code reuse increases exponentially.
A better implementation could look like this:
public class Contact { private EmailAddress emailAddress; public void setEmail(EmailAddress emailAddress) { this.emailAddress = emailAddress; } public void setEmail(String emailAddress) { try { this.emailAddress = new EmailAddress(emailAddress); } catch (InvalidEmailException e) { // Oh lord something went wrong here... :) } public String getEmail() { return emailAddress; } }
The benefits should be immediately clear. Suddenly the class EmailAddress requires the email address string to be valid to be instantiated at all. This would make it much easier to quickly zero in on bugs and also increases the potential reuse of your code.
Pretty much any variable you want to store, whether it is a primitive or a string – WILL need some sort of validation. This is a major reason for wrapping them. But other than that, consistently wrapping gives your object oriented code a higher degree of encapsulation.
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Rule 2: Don’t Use the Else Keyword
This is the second part of a series of articles starting here.
The second rule of the “Nine Ways to Better Software Today” is to stop using
elseThis builds on top of rule 1, to decrease the level on indentation by again focusing on minimizing complex conditionals. Within the object oriented paradigm, polymorphism is a powerful model to handle this. Regardless of programming model, this exercise forces you as developer to find alternatives to using the else keyword and thus considerably beautifying your code.
Consider the following Python code
def set_member_status(member, status): """ Spot the else keyword """ if is_active(member): do_something(member, status) else: do_something_else(member, status)
There are several ways to simplify this method. For simple cases use early returns, as below. Early returns only work in methods which are short and lacking in complexity (keeping down the level of indentation helps with this). Once a method is long and contains many levels of abstraction, early returns can of course not be used. But by then you’ve failed at this exercise anyway.
def set_member_status(member, status): """ Example of using early returns """ if is_active(member): do_something(member, status) return # here is the early return :) do_something_else(member, status)
In many languages it is possible to use the ternary operator. That would look something like this (in javascript):
/** Wrong */ function drowned() { if (timeInWater < SURVIVABLE_TIME) { return false; } else { return true; } } /** Right */ function drowned() { return timeInWater < 10 ? false : true; }
Guard clauses is another way of increasing readability. The following example is taken from here
double getPayAmount() { double result; if (_isDead) result = deadAmount(); else { if (_isSeparated) result = separatedAmount(); else { if (_isRetired) result = retiredAmount(); else result = normalPayAmount(); }; } return result; }; double getPayAmount() { if (_isDead) return deadAmount(); if (_isSeparated) return separatedAmount(); if (_isRetired) return retiredAmount(); return normalPayAmount(); };
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Nine Steps to Better Software Design Today: Thoughtworks Exercise
There are few companies out there more exiting to me than Thoughtworks. They sport a fantastic set of values, and have some of todays most brilliant programmers and software thinkers on board. But what strikes me as most wonderful about them is the way they communicate with programmers around the world. They really have an interest in good software, whether it is their own, or somebody else’s.
On reading their book, the Thoughtworks Anthology there was one chapter (Object Calisthenics by Jeff Bay) which struck me as extremely fun to read, it contained an exercise called “Nine Steps to Better Software Design Today”. An exercise completely focused on object oriented design quality with all that that entails, like encapsulation and appropriate use of polymorphism.
It is really a very simple exercise in many aspects, it simply provides nine rules, and asks me as a developer to do my absolute best to abide by those rules. What Thoughtworks does is so ingenious. Instead of just preaching the holy grail of object oriented programming, they ask me to be a part of the sermon. On reading the whole exercise I was instantly revving my engine to actually do the exercise. So I started up a small GWT project and forced myself to actually try and comply with the nine rules.
I’ve never had so much fun programming! And the process truly changed the way I will write code from now, whether it is in a purely object oriented language or not.
Said and done. I will start with the first rule:
Rule 1 : Use only one level of indentation per method
No matter which language you are working with, this is something that is very important. Check out the class, that thoughtworks uses as an example, below. It contains one function with several levels of indentation.
class Board { String board() { StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer(); for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < 10; j++) buf.append(data[i][j]); buf.append("\n"); } return buf.toString(); } }
Now consider that after some refactoring the code could look like this:
class Board { String board() { StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer(); collectRows(buf); return buf.toString(); } void collectRows(StringBuffer buf) { for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) collectRow(buf, i); } void collectRow(StringBuffer buf, int row) { for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) buf.append(data[row][i]); buf.append("\n"); } }
What basically has happened here is that methods have been extracted for each level of indentation. The whole class is so much more readable, unit testable, understandable… you name it. Or as the authors of the chapter puts it:
Try to ensure that each method does exactly one thing. One control structure, or one block of statements per method. [Heavy indentation] in a method [is] a signal that you’re working at multiple level of abstraction, and that means you’re doing more than one thing.
…
Working with methods that do exactly one thing, and classes doing exactly one thing, your code begins to change, [...] increasing exponentially the level of reuse.
Next time I will talk about rule 2: Don’t use the else keyword 
Public Wave Invites?
Posted by PEZ in Innovation, Values on November 12, 2009
I just experimented with an interesting thing on Google Wave. I made my “Invite others” wave public. Now anyone on Wave can invite people using my invites. Pretty cool. Just a minute after I made the wave public the first person entered and used two invites. It feels quite awesome. Can people handle it all the way? Will someone come in and just use up all the invites? We will soon know. =)
Has anyone else done this? Are there lots of public invite waves out there?
Innovation – the heartbeat of products
Posted by Ram Sundararajan in Social, Values on July 31, 2009
Lately, I have been thinking and reading articles about innovation and innovative companies and I finally got the time to jot it all down over the weekend. And here are my thoughts…
Many companies want to be perceived as innovative. But are they really innovative?
Part of any process in a company should be to focus on products, the end goal that forms, guides and informs innovation. Wanton innovation is wasteful. There must be something in the product to pull it all together.
There are many companies that develop new technologies and go in search of problems for those technologies to solve. Take the internet bubble for instance; it was defined by this kind of thinking. It was a carnival of worthless innovation. Half baked business ideas and models pumped into money burning concerns in a misguided attempt to make quick bucks and beat the competition. Entrepreneurs launched websites for selling pet foods and some built gaint warehouses for delivering groceries by van. It turned out that no one wanted to buy groceries delivered to them by web van’s warehouses. Alas! The internet bubble burst taking with it all these half baked “innovative” ideas and businesses that had developed solutions to problems that never existed.
We need a very product oriented culture in companies. Lots of them have tons of great engineers and talented smart people. But ultimately there needs to be some gravitational force in the product to pull it all together. This gravity is what I feel innovation is all about.
I strongly believe that money is not the key for innovation. The key is the product focus and a product development cycle that has room for innovation. Microsoft for instance, spends billions of dollars in Research. Every year it invites journalists to look at its massive concrete and glass structure full of “innovations”. Yet, they end up copying things that Google or Apple does. Look at hotmail or yahoo mail apps. Its gmail mocked! Or Zune, the Microsoft variant of iPod, an obvious copy. The only product I know, correct me if I am wrong, that came out of these research facilities is the speech recognition component in Vista. Yeah it works well, but it is not a killer like gmail or iPod.
Talking about the key aspects of innovation, I think the company’s focus on the product is a must. If a company wants to be innovative and wants to differentiate itself from the rest, I think that it should question its products and its product development cycle.
As an example, let us look at Kano model of customer satisfaction.
It categorizes the features built into any new product as
• Must have feaures
• Linear features
• Exciter features
Must have features are the ones that must be in the product to be useful. Without the must haves there is no product. However, I feel that the must have features need not be fully implemented when the product is released. A “just about right” or “lagom” amount of completed must haves will do.
Research suggests, that although without the must have features the product will be useless, it is the linears and the exciters that gives more satisfied users.
Let us say, that I wanted to build a hand held music player. What are the must haves required for this tool to be useful?
Let us assume, a good head set, some hard drive to store music files, a play/pause/rewind/fast forward button
One can of course spend a lot of time for instance to make the head set really really good. But a good enough head set would fetch us “just about satisfied” users. There are other important things that can make the player really good. So lets stop there and move on!
The Linears, they are the ones that gives the user more satisfaction. A linear feature is the one for which “the more the merrier” holds true. It is called linear because customer satisfaction grows linearly with the quantity of these kinds of features. The more the linears in the music player the more satisfied the user gets.
Some examples of the linears I would like to add to the music player are
1. Good battery
2. A good display
3. A scroll wheel on the sides to browse music
4. Auto and manual lock/unlock button to lock when the user is on the move
5. Slick design
6. Light weight
7. Games, calendar, clock etc
Exciters are the ones that add great satisfaction to the customer. It often adds a price premium to the product. However, a lack of exciters will not decrease the customer satisfaction below neutral. But I believe that exciters are the ones that will make the product be perceived as innovative and these are the ones that make the product stand out from the rest of the pack.
Some exciters for the music player would be
1. As soon as I plugin the music player, it will bring up the users’ default music player (whatever it might be) and sync songs both ways.
2. Charge free device that uses solar and advanced light sensitive batteries
3. Maximum of 2 clicks to access any song on the hard drive.
4. No buttons in the player. We make the whole music player a touch screen.
In whatever feature in a product we do, we got to have 1 or 2 real exciters. Look at gmail for instance; they have built in at least one exciter in any type of functionality you find there…that is innovation! Google’s key to beat the competitive market where yahoo mail and hotmail once ruled!
For a product to be innovative, companies should integrate both linears and exciters in their feature list and make it transparent in their product development cycle. Categorizing features this way can contribute to an innovative company.
I believe that only innovative companies can stand in this harsh, competitive, volatile market. The more successful a company is in finding and implementing the exciters, the longer and happier the customer stays and hence stronger and faster the company grows. Many companies focus on adding a lot of linears to their application, this is not bad afterall. But they have to realize that time is wasted! Linear features increase the customer satisfaction to only a certain degree. They will not fetch greatly satisfied customers. Feature freaks got to think about it and control their temptation!
“Do you need satisfied or greatly satisfied customers?” One real good exciter is better than 10 different features. To me, it is like comparing a man to monkey!
So, let us all build more exciters…not just features!
Points or days? Should we care?!
Posted by Ram Sundararajan in Social, Values on July 27, 2009
Some months back, I wrote a mail to you guys about the easiness and the usefulness of using points system in a story instead of calculating its size in days or hours. I thought that I should blog this discussion now as I think that it might be useful for others too.
For calculating the effort involved in a story we now use days as the unit. By days we actually mean “ideal” days.
That is, we smartly ignore other work related things a developer does in a typical day and calculate only the amount of time s/he has to spend on the story.
We have calculated an ideal day to be 60 % of the developers’ typical day. In other words, it is 4.8 hrs or let us say 5 hours to approximate.
I think that this ideal day system for measuring the effort or size of a story brings in some unnecessary ambiguity into our calculations.
To understand what I mean, let us go back and ponder on what estimation means to us?
What are we trying to do in the estimating meetings?
The answer I think is, during the estimation meetings we are trying to define the size of each user story. In other words, we are trying to categorize each user story based on our previous experience and calculate the effort involved to put these stories into sizes or points like S, XS, M, L and XL or 1,2,3,5, and 8 respectively.
Great, so why do you use “ideal” days?
Well, I think that we use ideal days because we somehow wanted to relate time to effort so that we can know how many actual days a story is going to take or taken. Also, it becomes easy to express the status in number of days to the stakeholders rather than with an abstract entity called points. Yepp, true…but I think, this creates ambiguity to a very large extent when practised. For instance, an ideal day for person A need not be the same as the ideal day for Person B. So I think this system is highly subjective. It does not make sense to me to use a system that varies a lot between individuals.
If we wanted to measure how long a story is going to take, we should instead use the team velocity and perhaps create baselines using Burn down charts.
These two measures together can give a better approximate estimate in time for a story.
Let me add some weight to my argument with Mike Cohn’s thoughts on estimation
Choosing between story points and ideal days
With Agile methods, it is perfectly okay to use either points or ideal days as the measure of the size of a user story.
But I think that the points system is more advantageous and complete. Read on…to know why?
According to Mike (and I totally agree with him of course), below are the key advantages of using a points system
a) My ideal days are not your ideal days
b) Points estimate do not decay
c) Points are pure measures of size
d) Points estimation are usually clearer and thus faster
a) My ideal days are not your ideal days
Let us say, two runners one fast and one slow are standing at the start of a trial. Each can see the whole track of the trial and can easily agree that the track is one kilometre long. They either come to the agreement because of their previous experience or by comparing it with another track. Either way the process is easy and intuitive. Tracking the length of the trial is similar to the points system. That is, one simply measures the size.
Now, let us bring in some ambiguity by adding more parameters…
Suppose instead of discussing the length of the track, the runners wanted to calculate the time it takes to run the trial. Obviously, the time taken by the fast runner will always be lesser than the slower one. It is going to be difficult for these runners now to come to a consensus. Both of them with different numbers are correct from their point of view. They probably will never agree as to how long it will take to run the trial.
There is another thing that we need to pay attention too. An Ideal day between developers differ a lot because they are constantly involved with something else other than the story development. Things like support issues, big maintenance bug fixes, investigation, design for future projects all takes time.
So as said, the ideal days system is too subjective to be a standard.
b) Points estimate do not decay
An estimate in points has a longer life span than estimates in ideal days. It is simply because the point estimate only takes into account one parameter and that is the size.
Let me explain this with an example. Let’s say that we are to use ideal days to estimate a story that has to use a new technology like flex. We know that none of the developers have worked with it before and we have to do a lot of investigation and learning to produce the story feature. So, let us assume that the developer estimates it will take 13 ideal days to complete the story. Great!
Now, let us fast forward a few sprints and ask the same developer how long another similar flex story will take to do. Obviously, the estimate will be lesser, let’s say s/he says 3 ideal days. Bingo! we got a problem here. Similar stories take different amount of days to implement.
Many teams tend to ignore this as a problem because they think it is only logical that the amount of ideal days decreased, because the developer knows more about the technology now than before. They also argue that measuring team velocity over time would even out this difference. But it actually won’t in reality.
Because…we will see that using ideal days, the team velocity always remains the same even though developers do more work. See, the developer now after a few sprints produces the same feature in 3 ideal days, where the first time it took 13 ideal days. In other words, in 13 days the developer is now capable of producing 4 such stories (4 stories X 3 ideal days = 12 ideal days). But with ideal days the developer’s velocity is always 13 even though s/he can complete 4 such 13 days stories in 13 days. So ideal days do not reflect the actual team velocity in this case. (logically, after a few months the team velocity should have gone up)
With the points system, we do not take time into account…we just calculate the size. For instance, we say that the flex story is about 8 points or XL large and then after a few months, the team velocity is calculated, now we see that the velocity goes up because the team is now able to complete X number of more XL stories than they did previously.
c) Points are pure measures of size
As said earlier, points are pure measures of size and ideal days are not. Of course, ideal days can be used as a measure of size, but with deficiencies. As in the above example, points remain the same but ideal days tend to vary depending on the developers expertise.
Story points being pure measure of size has a couple of advantages. First of all, story points allow the team to estimate stories with analogies. It makes the estimation easy and more fun as we are only talking about “this story is like the other one” and hence should be for example an L or 5 points. When we estimate in ideal days, we can use the same analogy approach, but the problem is that we tend to bring in the calendar days and measure how long a story will take to execute instead of looking at how big a story is. As said, “how long” approach has hidden problems!
Secondly, a story being an abstract measure of size escapes the temptation to correlate it with reality or time. Less is more!
Ideal days has an inherent comparison built in That is, we tend to always end up comparing actual vs ideal time.
Then this pondering eventually ends up with questions like, “how the heck we ‘only’ did 8 ideal days of work in a 14 day iteration?” You know more often than not, many teams put the blame on some bully.
d) Points estimation are usually clearer and thus faster
Yes, to me it sounds obvious that it should be really easy to estimate a story on just the size. We skip detailed level of discussion and it makes things easy.
So in estimation meetings, we got to decide only if a story is an XL or M?…Then arises suggestions like we got to do these and these things. Further the last time we worked on that piece of code we found that we had to re-factor it etc. We can also use our previous stories as analogies. Perhaps a similar story that was an XL involves lesser effort this time?! Maybe maybe not…that’s what we decide in estimation meetings.
My point here is that it is easy to talk on higher level and skip going into the details.
Of course, we got to break down the story into smaller tasks. But that has nothing to do with estimating a story size.
Finally, I think that estimation in ideal days has some advantages. But I unfortunately can see only one obvious thing.
Stakeholders want to know when a story will be finished. Is it by Aug 1 or Aug 15? Calculating ideal days might be easier
to get to the date the stakeholder wants to know. But it is like a shortcut and it creates a lot of side effects for the team members.
So I think we gotta stick to the best practises that agile gurus suggest. That is points for a story size and velocity based on points for the team! Just as Ez as it can be
Bad business shouldn’t be in business
Lots of (most) people think we live in a market economy. I beg to differ. Plan economy better describes it. If it was a market economy, how come the market doesn’t set the interest rate? And how come, when the financial systems melt down because of sub optimizing in the sea of regulations, the answer is always more regulations? If Obama and his followers around the world gets it their way financial business, and even business that goes “To Big To Fail” (an arbitrary label put on any business that the governments can’t keep their fingers off of), will have to carry even larger legions of bureaucrats and politicians on their back in order to have permission to operate. The result will of course be even more volatility for the markets and higher prices paired with lower quality of service for us citizens. But do the Obamas of the world care? No, what they care about is taking this wonderful opportunity to meddle with peoples affairs, just like they did when those terrorists managed to kill so many innocents back in September 11 2001, just like they always do at the time of any crisis.
The problem is a bit like a super Kinder Egg. Four (unpleasant) presents in one package; Bailouts, Fake interest rates, government regulations and “Stimulus”. Unlike real presents though, we are paying for them ourselves. This blog post addresses the Bailouts. If I find some more time to write I’ll deal with the other Kinder Egg content in coming posts.
Bailouts
If this is a market economy why is it that banks and insurers that suck at doing business are propped up and bailed out by the governments? In the U.S. the bailout costs so far are approaching $10 trillion. Now, that’s a lot of money!. Check this article out to get an idea on how fast these bailout trillions are burning. In a market economy failing businesses fail and resources are reallocated to good business. Jim Rogers, chairman of Singapore-based Rogers Holdings has understood this and says:
The U.S. is taking assets from competent people and giving them to incompetent people. That’s bad economics.
(From Bloomberg article U.S. Bailouts Add to Risk of Depression.)
Contrast that with what the mainstream opinion holds true:
Banks that fail hurt the society.
(Freely translated from this editorial in Sweden’s largest news paper.)
In our phony economy banks don’t need to care about the long term. In the booms bank managements can reap as much as possible from the speed-blindness of the market, stuff their own pockets full with those insane bonuses and pretend it is a reward for business success. In the busts their business will stand completely unprepared, naked and vulnerable, but these nigh-criminals can just shrug their shoulders and rest assured that our tax money will step in and save their asses.
What this system does is to perpetuate the bad leadership in these institutions. It’s not setup for learning anything good. And, as you may or may not know, I’m crazy about learning. In a market economy the business these lousy managers run would fail. These people would have big ugly FAILs in their CV:s and they would have to find jobs better suited for them (something involving minimum responsibilities of any kind). As it is now they can continue their careers like if they actually knew what they are doing.
There’s also no incentive for these businesses to start competing using arguments like “with us your money is safer than with them”. Remember, in our messed up economy, money we put in the bank is just as safe regardless of what bank we choose. The governments think they own our tax money. They will use it to prop these banks and insurers up and even bail them out if it comes to that. Then they will act surprised and exasperated when the bank managers try to use the tax money to enrich themselves even more. In reality we have these criminals as bank managers because we deserve it.
Some say we should nationalize these bad banks. Like they would be run better by politicians. Like that wouldn’t be an even surer way to burn up our tax money. In Sweden, Bailout nation #1, politicians are trained to find some middle ground. What they try to do is to give the tax money to the banks if the banks sign a contract about how the money can be used. For some reason politicians seem to think of themselves as good business people. They don’t see that all they are doing is playing Monopoly with our tax money. (Or maybe they see that and laugh at the joke.) The really sad part of this story is that lots of the Obamas in the world are impressed with what’s called The Swedish Bailout Model. Sweden is successfully exporting it! The world must of course move in the opposite direction. Away from plan economy and towards market economy.
A little bit of Apple today…
Posted by Ram Sundararajan in Innovation, Values on July 7, 2009
Last night, I was reading a book by Leander Kahney. It is called “Inside Steve’s Brain”. I was mostly inspired to buy the book because of Google Story, the other book that I read some weeks back. Though both the books cannot be compared, to be honest I think this book lacks the flow. The author just wanders all around. Seems like it is just a collection of all news articles over a decade collected into one book with absolutely no concurrency. I was kind of cheated by the title in plain words. I was expecting the author to have had at least some kind of personal talk with Steve Jobs…at least a jovial walk with Steve on the streets of Palo Alto. Anyway, this blog is not intended to be a critic of the book. I think there are some good take-aways in there. Below is one of them…
Though not very surprising, it was interesting to read how much time Apple spends on the design of each and every little component from hardware to software to packaging. I was amazed to read that Steve and his bunch of talented designers were designing just the scrollbar function of Mac OS X for many weeks.No wonder why Microsoft’s scrollbars sucks when you compare it with OS X. For Apple “no detail is too small”.
Steve on the Mac OS X release said “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them”. Very true indeed!
One thing that intrigues me is how much detail oriented Apple as a company really is. I think the way their designers apply common world solutions for solving technical design problems, is what makes their GUI more intuitive. I think this is one aspect that distinguishes Apple’s user friendliness from others.
Here is a little story from Apple …
At one design meeting Apple guys were scrutinizing the three little buttons on the top left corner of every window. These were used for closing, shrinking and expanding. The designers had made all the buttons the same muted gray, to prevent them from distracting the user. But it was difficult to tell what they were for. Hard to communicate what these buttons did before the user clicks on it. There were many interesting suggestions to the problem and Jobs came up with what seemed to be an old and uninteresting idea…using traffic lights to symbolize each button function! The designers of course thought it was strange and boring BUT after a few weeks of trial, yeah it made all the sense to them…red meant close and green to expand.
The other thing that is very unique about Apple is their layman approach to problem solving. Steve Jobs remarked on Apple after taking over as its interim CEO in the 90’s, “I can’t find sex in apple machines anymore!” True eh? people got to relate more personally to the software they use!
The starting point of the iPod was not about a hard drive and a chip in a walkman. It was simply user experience! It meant concentrating on navigating content. FULLSTOP! Apple was paying so much attention to “saying no” to features that would make the iPod NOT simple.
Apple believes that the most important decisions you make are NOT the things that you do, but the things you decide NOT to do.
I think this is a very good approach for making things simple and easy. Less is more!
When it comes to user design and user design innovation, a lot of companies like to say and think that they are customer-centric. They approach their users and ask them what they want. This user centric innovation is driven by feedback and focus groups. But Jobs shuns laborious studies such as these where users locked in a conference room go through gruelling hours of no productivity. What one really has to do with the focus group is to just observe them and NOT listen to them.
What Jobs does is even much simpler. To Play with the new technology himself. He notes down his own reactions to it and gives his feedback directly to the engineers. Jobs believes that if the technology works for him it will work for others. Of course, one has to have a layman approach when playing around. Steve Jobs is neither an engineer nor a business expert. He is a master layman!
John Sculley the ex CEO of Apple says “ But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people what they wanted, Steve didn’t believe in that. He said, ‘How can I possibly ask someone what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphics-based computer is? No one has seen one before!’”
Creativity in art and Technology is about individual expression. Just as an artist couldn’t produce a painting by conducting a focus group study, Apple doesn’t use them either. They try it themselves!!
I think this can apply for us as well. Toyota believes that every engineer should be a quality controller too. For us we got to design and test our own software and give critical feedback! More and more!! I see very many good ideas pop up during our internal design discussions and during development. Some of them get implemented straightaway. Great! But I think we just have to get better at it…better at critically analyzing what we do. I don’t mean to say that “we should start shitting on our own doorstep”, this is bad I mean that we should do more constructive criticism of what we make…let it be design or coding. This I think will enable us produce easier solutions for our customers.
If Sony started believing on customer studies and feedback alone, they would never have released their famous walkman in the 80’s. The company did though invest a lot of money into market research before releasing the walkman. All the marketing research said that the walkman was going to fail dramatically. No one would buy it! But the founder Akio and his team believed strongly in their product and pushed it through anyway. It became one of the greatest hits.
It’s the same with Steve Jobs he does not require user groups because he himself is an user experience expert.
So why don’t we as visual/interaction designers and coders and salesmen spend more time on analyzing and testing the stuff we design and develop?
This will make our product easy to use! We got our core value in there, “We make it ez”
ThoughtWorks conference on Scaling Agile
Posted by Ram Sundararajan in Innovation, Social, Values on June 9, 2009
As some of you might know, four of us here in Bangalore went to a conference/seminar at ThoughtWorks on ”Scaling Agile”. For those of you who do not know much about ThoughtWorks, they are a successful company with over 1000 employees in six countries. They are the fore-runners when it comes to Agile project management. ThoughtWorks also sells an Agile project management software called Mingle.
During the conference, it was very exciting to see how similar our work framework was to theirs. Does this mean that we are on the right track? Oh yes; not only by following one of the Agile principles of “reach the customer faster” but also by following some of our core values very effectively.
Right, below is what ThoughtWorks had to say about how someone whom they call an Iteration Manager should try to establish in his/her team (this role is bundled in the role that Lena and Jojo are doing at present…)
Iteration Manager should work toward a professional and accountable work environment. Such environments exhibit proper behaviors and mannerisms, such as the following:
- Mutual respect is displayed for self, others and customers
- Successes are celebrated
- Mistakes are treated as learning experiences
Strikingly relevant to what we already have, isn’t it? I will post you this book today.
Okay, going back to the conference, below are the key points we learned from there
- Programming is an art and software development is a social activity – Improve the conversation and you improve the software
- Embrace change – Dare to make a difference
- Rapid feedback – Develop to make your MUST HAVE work faster. Get rapid feedback from the customer. In our case, UxD and Test
- Continuous Integration – Check-in your code often. Create a test harness like Unit test and functional test simultaneously
- Face to face communication is a must – ThoughtWorks does it using video conference, chats, etc
- Make yourself easily accessible
- Make dev. Environments close to Production.
Apart from these, ThoughtWorks stresses on the importance of graphing out our project activities so that the Project Team and the stakeholders can find out the bottlenecks in the project now and then. I do not think that we do it today but they talked about the importance of maintaining charts which can be discussed on a weekly basis. This chart becomes more interesting especially during the retrospectives, if not immediately.
It was interesting to see how they keep track of the number of check-ins a day through a graph. At ThoughtWorks they say that they have a general rule that whenever a developer checks in a code, s/he is responsible for the aftermaths. If a bug is found in the recently checked-in code, it’s the developer’s responsibility to see to it that the bug is fixed or the code is rolled back within 5 hours.
When it comes to practicality, I would like to jot some things on the Continuous Integration part. I think that we have completely missed out on this part when we moved to the new Harvest model. ThoughtWorks has MOSCOW requirements in the product backlog. When the project is under implementation, the development team discusses the design aspects and implements the most important MUST have ASAP. They check-in their code (they said 20 times a day) to the main branch, and write unit test and functional test simultaneously and make sure the automation test passes really at the beginning. The test and the design team then picks up the task and works with them. Thus overcoming the “continuous waterfall” pitfall in the development cycle. The dev, design and test team work simultaneously on the tasks. Fantastic!!
We tried something similar to what they suggest here May sprint and it seems to have worked well for us. But again, we all in our roles need to make ourselves more accessible, else we will end up in the continuous waterfall.
Below are what ThoughtWorks thinks are challenges and options to overcome when it comes to scaling Scrum
|
Challenges |
Options |
|
Limited face to face |
Formal and scheduled communication channels like meetings chats, video conference |
|
Consistent view of big picture |
Scrum of Scrums |
|
Lack in clarity of responsibility/ownership |
Information radiation
|
|
Decision making |
Improve escalation points |
|
Knowledge sharing |
Communities and forums |
Below are the key take-aways from the presentation ThoughtWorks did during the conference.
- Program plan and governance – By governance they mean communication
- Continuous Integration
- Trigger points for structural changes – We need to get red hot at things that work less good and burn to improve it ASAP
- It takes more time to change
- Focus on Objectives, Principles and ADAPT!
Oosch! You know what? I think that the next time you guys come down here, we should make a visit to ThoughtWorks. They really have an open, flat, motivated and a smart work environment!