lixo.org

This works for me: testing is about sustainability. If your tests
don’t let you be sustainable (for whatever value of “sustainable” is
important to you) then you’re probably doing something wrong.

The interesting thing here is that you can define sustainability as “if we don’t have this live tomorrow morning, there company will fold” and then proceed with the most appropriate testing strategy - something that gets out of the way and gives you the fastest possible feedback, like a smoke test not much deeper than a ping to the server or a wget piping to diff.

If you define “sustainable” to be “this codebase needs to constantly adapt to new features and output formats over the next 5 years”, the testing strategy changes accordingly, and it is up to a team of competent professionals to choose at what level to operate. In this case, most would choose to use tools like Behaviour Driven Development/Design and Domain Driven Design to explore as much of the problem space as possible during development and seek shared understanding through automated and repeatable processes, that can be maintained along with the codebase and ensure the features are always easy to understand and modify, should the functionality require changes (and it will).

Git commits: 1688
Xbox 360s bought: 1
Projects created or started: 14
Guitar Hero levels completed with 5 stars: 98 (on medium)
Burglaries: 2
Full-time projects: 3
kiva.org loans made: 7
Languages learned: 2 (Erlang, LOLcode)
Presentations given: 3
Family Guy episodes watched: 116
Presentations attended: 12
Interviews given: 2 (akitaonrails.com and MTV)
Tweets: 979
Flats: 1 bought, 1 lived in
Arduinos: 4 bought, 2 destroyed
Non-fatal incidents with a soldering iron: 3
Flight time: 28.5 hours
Countries visited: 4 (Brazil, France, Ireland, UK)
Google Reader items read: 127524
Pints of London Pride per week, average: 4.33
Books: 18 bought, 7 read
Photos taken: 29355
Semi-naked photo shoots published: 1
Copies of said publication sold: 500k+
Blog posts written: 16
Burritos eaten: 47
Attempts at purchasing an iPhone: 9 (0 of which successful)
Emails written: 1045 (2.8 per day in average)
Times I heard George say “shiiiiiiit” per day, average: 2.19

Jakob Nielsen on the use of Agile methods:

Agile’s biggest threat to system quality stems from the fact that it’s a method proposed by programmers and mainly addresses the implementation side of system development. As a result, it often overlooks interaction design and usability, which are left to happen as a side effect of the coding.

In my experience, mostly as a developer, it is really easy to dismiss interaction and usability design for two reasons.

The first comes from the developers themselves, trading prettiness and consistency of user experience for cleaner and sounder domain models whenever they go in opposite directions. Signs this is happening are developers crying YAGNI when the stakeholders ask for a zoomable chart or DTSTTCPW when a sortable, paginated data table is required.

Next time you see a system where there are enormous listings of items with no search, pagination or sorting, ask the developers if they have ever watched a typical user at work; chances are they have only thought about the system as they see it: since the testing dataset is usually small, a loop spitting out a bit of HTML for each element isn’t such a big deal. They might even say there’s a story to implement all that lovely stuff later on, but they just get moved over and over to the bottom of the backlog barrel… until everyone watches a person struggle to find needles in a tabular haystack all day. This is a simple example – almost too trivial actually, but one I’ve seen happen way too many times.

Changing the perception that usability is just the icing on the cake draws attention to all that wasted time to the stakeholders, and should enable a much better dialogue: developers get to write an application users will love, stakeholders spend their money wisely on something that will actually increase return on investment (as productivity gains), users feel empowered and less likely to make mistakes. Everybody wins.

The second reason UI design and usability get overlooked, and this is the one Frank alludes to in his latest post, is that some agile teams rely a bit too heavily on the stakeholder’s descriptions of what is wanted. It instantly reminded me of one my favourite quotes from Cars:

Lightning McQueen: All right, Luigi, give me the best set of black walls you’ve got.

Luigi: No, no, no! You don’t know what you want! Luigi know what you want. Black-wall tires, they blend into the pavement, but these white-wall tires, they say look at me, here I am, love me.

Lightning McQueen: All right, you’re the expert.

I find it rare for the stakeholders to know exactly what they want, down to what the end-user experience should be like. Thinking about a reasonably-sized application at this level of detail can only be done as a series of small, incremental steps and having someone on the team who is really obsessed about making every single pixel on the screen be in the right place. And if you read the last sentence and thought “well, that’s not exactly the role of my stakeholder!” you get the point: the stakeholders should not have the final word as to what the usability and experience details should be, in the same way they simply delegate to and rely on the expertise of the development team to flesh out the details of a persistence layer.

Have look and feel expertise in your team, and trust it, in the same way you would trust the database or network connectivity expertise.

Lots of Words is a new experiment to mash up a Wikipedia based lexicon with images from Flickr and whatever else I can get my hands on, in the context of building a representative and informative source of translations for any particular word, in any particular language. I’m trying to keep things as machine-readable as possible for now, so others can build on it, too.

My friend Patrick Hall and I have been musing about it for some time, and only now a technology stack allowed me to do this as a relatively small hack rather than putting together months of optimization work.

It turns out, indexing something as big as Wikipedia (check out those dump file sizes!) isn’t really an “idea in the head and 500 lines of code”, unless you use the right tools for the job. In this case, a shiny new CouchDB instance at Amazon EC2, a bit of Ruby and Merb to add a some logic and presentation magic, and JQuery as a finishing touch did the trick. This gets pretty much every Web N.0 buzzword covered, although I haven’t yet made any millions in an iPhone app.

This is a spare-time project, so it made sense for me to try out as many different bits of new technology as possible and make it into a breakable toy. This is its third implementation, and the first I’m really happy with in terms of performance and malleability. CouchDB, even with 21+ million documents loaded in about 120 GB of storage, still responds in under 200ms times on all queries I’ve tried so far. It truly is, even in its pre-1.0 days, a fantastic piece of software.

Now I find myself wanting to put a nice front-end to this, and while the current Flickr mash-up is already very interesting—and, it turns out, solves the problem of cross-language information retrieval for a small subset of Flickr, I’m sure others will have much more useful ideas about what to do with this data. My colleague Robert Rees has helped put together a hackfest here in the ThoughtWorks UK office, together with the nice folks from the London JavaScript Meetup group. Come join us 12 November!

If you just want to get to the code (be forewarned it is ugly!), it’s on GitHub.

It’s been nearly 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been ratified, and Seth Brau has created a amazing typographical interpretation of its text:

While you’re watching it, please take a moment to reflect about the ways in which your human rights have been challenged over the powers-that-be over your lifetime, and think of ways in which you can stop these challenges and abuses from happening.

On the geeky side, it’s also interesting to note that the UDHR is the most translated text in the world. I’d expect no less, and it’s interesting to note how technically challenging that is — apart from getting translators the world over to get the wording just right so it doesn’t become ripe for abuse and misinterpretation, it is also one of the benchmarks for proper character set handling in any particular computer system — and if you think whatever you’re building is up to scratch, you must give the translations a go. Chances are you’ll end up with mojibake all over the place at some point.