lixo.org

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.

A toothpaste factory had a probem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down the supermarket don’t get pissed off and buy someone else’s product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using some high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighing less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done.

A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!” – he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before it, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.

“Oh, that — one of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang”, says one of the workers.

At ThoughtWorks and many other workplaces all over the world, employees are given SecurID tokens, a tiny and nearly indestructible device with an LCD screen that shows a different sequence of six random numbers every minute.

So, what do you do with a sequence of random numbers, apart from logging into your corporate intranet and email using secure two-factor authentication? You play Poker, of course!

The rules are pretty much the same as a Draw Poker game, only without any card changes or betting round. Ordering is also different, 0 being the lowest and 9 the highest values. There are no suits, but the time left to the next sequence change, displayed in bars at the left-hand side of the token, can be used to settle ties. A new round is usually more convenient, though.

As two fobs don’t change sequences at the same time, it makes sense to shout out your hand as soon as you look at it, or see if you can get away stalling everyone until your next hand shows up, if you have nothing. Of course, there’s room for the High-Low Split variation, but that could get a bit messy and has been discouraged.

I was introduced to this brilliant little game last night, and it has instantly gained my preference over Rock, Paper and Scissors to settle small arguments such as who’s going to get the next round, fix the build, pay the restaurant bill or drive the rental car.

Interesting quote from my colleague Obie after my comment that software development projects have five variables (time/duration, budget/price, scope, people/rates and quality) and that we should be able to respond to change in all of them, on this post:

(…) Letting quality slip has never, ever produced good results in my experience. I’ve been in situations where the client was explicitly demanding it, but it was still a bad idea and has all sorts of negative repercussions on the team.

Some might argue over the exact definition of those variables and how they play together. I write specifically in the context of consultancies, in what I may have some experience in.

In this context, budget/price equals time/duration of the project times people/rates including the management overhead. It’s a simple and easy equation which has traditionally left the scope and quality variables out, up for discussion. And those discussions can go on and on until the last pointy hair is yanked in despair.

To us and most people in the Agile world, quality is not even really a variable – we like to think it’s a constant, and hopefully fixed way up high close to 100%. To clients, not necessarily so – while some definitely know the importance of a good QA, some might be willing to take the risk and compromise the quality of the product in order to gain some market advantage by reducing the duration of the project, or to save some money on the short term.

As long as everyone understands what playing with that variable causes to the sustainability and risk of a project, and there is a justifiable reason to do so that the whole team can buy into, I don’t see a problem. But, you see, that’s only a theory of mine – I’ve never actually seen that compromise being made with a reason I could believe myself.

PS: I need some feedback on this! If you know – or even better, was involved in – a project where that happened, please get in touch.

I had an interesting chat last week with some colleagues from ThoughtWorks about a situation we currently have at a few of our clients. It’s an interesting economical challange and, even though I’ve missed most of my Economy classes, I still like the subject. Point is, companies and IT contractors tend to develop a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome over time because of the way incentives play out.

It goes like this: FooCorp has a big IT project ahead of them, which will need about a dozen developers. They’ll only need a third of that to maintain the application once development has finished. It makes sense for FooCorp to hire the remainder of the staff as contractors, so that they can show them the door without too much hassle when everything goes to production use. Contractors, therefore, take the risk of having to look for another gig sooner than expected, in case the project gets cancelled, and adjust their rates accordingly. Those high rates may lead to a project management working under budget pressure, which might drive managers towards shrinking the feature set and/or the schedules. Here’s where the fun bit starts: are there any incentives for a contractor to actually deliver any quality software at all?

As I see it, there are two positive incentives: peer pressure in justifying rates, and collecting good contacts and references. In the situations we have been witnessing, those pale next to doing whatever is possible to extend the contract, which more often than not are some incarnation of finger-pointing, back-stabbing or just plain inaction in order to make the project as late as possible. By extending the contract, they can ensure there’s always time to fix the mess created by blaming everyone else but their contracting buddies (those who’ll happily point them to new gigs) and pretending to work harder than everybody else by assuming authorship of other people’s work and ideas, while happily surfing the web all day.

Wouldn’t anyone at FooCorp notice that? They may have, but by the time they realize how serious the situation is, it’s usually too late to dismiss the contractors without seriously bleeding knowledge from the project and risking the schedules too much. In a way, there’s all this business knowledge being held hostage by the contractors, and the ransom is to be paid in monthly installments, until FooCorp’s employees pick it up and are able to run maintain the project on their own. Keith Henson wrote, in Sex, Drugs, and Cults:

Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes. In particular it would be good for genes that built minds able to dump previous emotional attachments under conditions of being captured and build new social bonds to the people who have captured you. The process should neither be too fast (because you may be rescued) nor too slow (because you don’t want to excessively try the patience of those who have captured you).

Of course, there are contractors with good ethics and who manage, against all odds, to deliver some truly amazing code.