Tag: software development

Categories
Process Quality The Business of Software

“Software engineering” might be an oxymoron

By Jim Grey (about)

I’ve said it to my test teams many times: Making software isn’t quite engineering. Building a bridge – now that’s engineering. You determine how long the bridge needs to be, how much load it needs to carry, and what kind of bridge to build (steel truss, concrete arch, etc.), and from there it’s mostly mathematics and physics. Just run the calculations and you’re good.

We have bridge-building down. With a couple of notable exceptions, such as the Tacoma Narrows bridge which heaved and twisted and finally collapsed (video here), new bridges seldom fail. Old bridges fail sometimes, but it’s reliably due to accident or neglect.

The S Bridge at Blaine

My apologies to any civil engineers who stumble upon this post. I’m sure you’re cringing that I’m overlooking many subtleties of your discipline.

There’s nothing subtle, however, about how often software fails. Our users aren’t happy about it, but they aren’t surprised by it, either.

For any thing you ask a software developer to build, there will be a whole bunch of valid ways to do it, each with its own unique ways of creating failures. This is especially true when when that developer enhances existing software that he or she didn’t make in the first place. It’s tough to predict exactly how the enhancements will affect the rest of the software. The more lines of legacy code, the more time and analysis it takes to think that through.

If a developer had unlimited time and money, it might be possible to deliver perfect software. Ah, a developer can dream! But here’s where bridge-building and making software have an important thing in common: time and money are never unlimited.

I sympathize with the folks who call software a craft. People who make software use tools and knowledge in its design and construction. These are hallmarks of craft.

Another way that software is like craft is that it’s difficult to fully separate the design from the making. Even when one person designs the software and another writes the code, the coder has to make a bunch of lower-level design decisions along the way.

The software craftsmanship movement meets corporate resistance because revenue and profit ride on what we build. Our companies need to sell features to meet revenue projections, or deliver bug fixes to retain customers. That’s why timed delivery is so important: if you wait too long to deliver, the opportunity to grow or retain revenue begins to shrink.

Feeling pressure to deliver, yet knowing that if we deliver junk we’ll be in an even worse pickle, we tend to manage software-development projects like engineering projects. I think we feel like we have better control when we manage them that way. But that feeling of control can’t mask it: no matter how tightly you plan a software project, no matter how you shape your development and delivery processes to mitigate risk, no matter how much you try to predict the troubles you’ll encounter, you will discover things along the way can seriously derail those plans. It happens in two-week scrum sprints just as it does in ten-month waterfall projects. Discovery is simply endemic to software development.

As a software project manager, I try to build in buffers for the unknown. I also steer projects daily based on what we discover, adjusting plans and communicating impacts to whomever needs to know. I try to make sure our development practices deliver the best possible code to test, and then I try to arrange testing to find the worst bugs first so that near the hoped-for end, only minor bugs remain. Despite all that, important bugs still sometimes reach the user.

We ship when the software is good enough. What “good enough” means varies from context to context, but it is unfailingly short of perfect. Shipping at good enough means you succeeded.

If I delivered bridges that way, I’d never drive over one I built.

Categories
Managing People Quality

Four critical tips for getting your ideas implemented at work

By Jim Grey (about)

After eight years writing and editing software documentation, I itched to make software again, like I did in college. So I took a job with a software company as a tester.

My corporate mug shot from those days - yes, long hair and a beard
My corporate mug shot from those days – the Grizzly Adams years

The company made a sprawling product for an industry I knew nothing about, so I had lots to learn. Given my background, the first thing I did was reach for the manuals. They were incomplete, inaccurate, and poorly organized. There was online help, but it was unnavigable. Nobody was ever going to use the documentation to successfully learn the product. My boss managed the technical writers too, so I marched into his office to complain. I wasn’t delicate about it. “This stuff is terrible! I can’t believe you ship this to customers! It’s an embarrassment.”

He leaned back in his chair and calmly said, “What would you do to fix it?”

“I would throw it out and start over,” I began. And then over the next ten minutes, off the top of my head I outlined a project that would create new manuals and online help that would actually help users not just use the product, but get the best value from it.

Three days later, he called me back into his office. “Remember that thing you said you’d do with the documentation? You are now manager of the Documentation Department. Make it so.”

It was a bold move for him to take a gamble on me. I’d never managed people, and my project management experience was limited. What I didn’t know was that every year the company surveyed its users about product quality – and every year the documentation got the most complaints. My boss had been told to fix this problem, but had no idea how. Then I walked in with a solution that sounded like it just might work.

Most of this story is just the nuts and bolts of the project – hiring and coaching staff, creating plans and schedules, doing visual and information design for the new manuals and online help, managing the project, reporting to management, and even doing some of the writing myself. The details would be interesting only to another technical writer. Much of this was new to me, but I had excellent support from a boss who needed to see his gamble pay off. He also helped me navigate the inevitable office politics, including another manager who kept trying to torpedo my efforts. Also, the program manager helped me master the project management tools we used, none of which I had ever even seen before. My team and I worked on the project for a year and a half. It’s not often a technical writing team gets an opportunity to do a clean-sheet rewrite like this, and they were all enthusiastic about it. I worked hard to clear their roadblocks, respond quickly to their concerns, and generally be a good guy to work for, and it paid off in the excellent work they delivered. When we were done, we had written over 3,000 pages and had created a seven-megabyte context-sensitive online help system.

I was invited to demonstrate the new online help at the annual user conference. 600 people flew in from all over the United States, and there I was before them on the opening session’s main stage. My presentation was the last of a series about new features in the product. When I finished, to my astonishment the online help received enthusiastic applause – and then one person stood, and a few more, and several more, and soon the whole room was standing and applauding. That moment remains the pinnacle of my career; I can’t imagine anything else ever overtaking it. The icing on the cake was when I overheard the VP of Sales say to my boss, “All the blankety-blank new features we pushed you to put into the product, and everybody liked the blankety-blank online help the best! The online help! You’ve got to be blankety-blank kidding me!”

I used to think I was just a grunt paid to trade the words I wrote for a paycheck. Through this project I learned just how interdependent everyone is at a company, and how everybody is important. Specifically, I learned:

If you want to see your great ideas implemented, they need to solve a big problem the company thinks it has. The problems your company thinks it has may very well be different from the problems your company actually has. Frame your ideas in terms of solving the problems the company thinks it has.

When you’re doing something you’ve never done before, find people who can coach you through it. I don’t care how far down the ladder you are at your company, your success helps determine other peoples’. Look for someone who both knows how to do the thing you need to learn and whose success depends in part on yours – that last bit motivates them to help you. In my case, it was my boss and the program manager.

Work for people who clear roadblocks out of your way so you can be most effective. I now leave situations where the boss doesn’t help me in this way. It’s that critical.

Your success always depends on other people, so treat them well. In giving my team an exciting assignment and creating an environment in which they could focus, they happily turned out huge quantities of good work. Also, after we shipped the new documentation, I promoted every writer. They deserved it.

A footnote: That company went through tough times a few years later and so we all moved on, some for better positions and others (like me) because they couldn’t afford to pay us anymore. One of the writers who had worked for me called me one day seven years later, by which time I really had moved into software testing. She said, “We have an opening here for a test manager. I’d love to work with you again, and this is a good place to work. You really should apply.” I did, and I got the job. I found out later that just before my interview, she went to the VP and said, “He’s a great boss. You don’t want to let him get away.”

Sometimes the good things you do come back to you!

Categories
Managing People Quality

Multitasking hurts productivity

By Jim Grey (about)

“You multitask like a madman,” my boss said to me.

She meant it as a compliment, but it brought me down. I was exhausted, teetering on the edge of burnout precisely because I had been multitasking an enormous workload.

Not a skill to be praised

I managed 15 people across four teams: testers that delivered monthly bug-fix releases, test automation developers, performance testers, and technical writers. My teams were solid and I had great leads in place, which freed me to work with a security-testing vendor to start doing regular penetration tests of our product, and with a translation company to translate our product user interface into five languages each release. I had a lot going on, but I was handling it.

But then the company decided to lean hard into more international markets. The executive team asked me to gather quotes to translate our product UI into even more languages, and also to translate our giant online help system, which we had only ever offered in English. The costs were an order of magnitude more than the executive team imagined, and so I was called into endless meetings and hallway discussions to provide more data as the executives squabbled with each other over strategy. This all sucked down more than a third of my time – but I could never focus on this work for more than ten or twenty minutes because I was still managing four teams with leads who had questions and needed me to remove roadblocks.

My performance began to suffer. While I had my eye on one ball, another would drop. I started making silly mistakes. It all wore me down to a nub. To keep sane, I ended up not asking, but telling my boss to take things off my plate so I could survive. I really wanted the translation stuff to go, as I didn’t enjoy it very much. But instead she gave the technical writing and bug fix teams to other managers.

I really mean task switching, not multitasking

Everybody calls what I was doing multitasking, but it really wasn’t. Real multitasking is when we do more than one thing at a time, such as driving and talking, or walking and chewing gum. But when two things come along that require focused attention, most of us can’t do them simultaneously. We work on one task, and then we work on the next. That’s really called task switching, and it happens every time we stop testing a feature release to test an emergency hotfix, or even get interrupted to answer a question. I’ve just called it multitasking here so far so that Google’s sweet, sweet searches can find this post.

Task switching makes tasks take longer overall. It also hinders learning – all that switching from one task to another keeps things from sticking in our brains. It really is better to work on, and finish, one thing at a time. We are so much more productive that way.

The hidden costs of task switching

Say you’re working on task A when task B arrives. If you want to avoid task switching, you finish task A and then work on task B.

mt1

But say task B is hot, and your boss needs you to work on it right now. Task B goes out sooner, at the cost of delaying task A.

mt2

But there’s a hidden cost: unless a task is automatic or menial, it takes time to get oriented to it, even when you’re returning to it after only a brief interruption. You must at least try to remember where you left off. That orientation time delays overall completion.

mt3

This cost mounts the more you switch tasks. If you switch repeatedly among tasks A, B, and C, not only do all tasks finish later, but tasks A and B finish much later.

mt4
Task switching hinders learning

dq-treats-wafflecone-plaincone
Dairy Queen photo

One of my first jobs was working the counter at a Dairy Queen. It took me a couple weeks to learn the technique for creating their soft serve’s signature shape, but then I could do it without even thinking about it. It had become a habit.

Making software isn’t the same as making ice-cream cones. Being effective and productive is much more about deepening skills and knowledge than about building habits.

Single-tasking helps deepen skills and knowledge because it stimulates the hippocampus, which is part of the brain that puts information in long-term memory. Task switching hurts this because it stimulates the basal ganglia, which is the part of the brain that is good at building habits.

In software development, you simply get better at what you do faster when you single task.

What to do then?

It’s impossible to entirely eliminate task switching – emergencies will arise, questions will need to be answered. And I do believe in the power of collaboration to deliver better software. But it’s a good investment to minimize task switching as much as you can.

If you’re in management, make singletasking a value. Demonstrate it by removing obstacles so people can focus on one thing for long periods:

  • Can you have “do not disturb” periods or let people work from home when they need to complete a critical task?
  • Can you give people private offices?
  • Can you schedule meetings that involve your team members so they don’t interrupt work as much, such as first thing in the morning, just before lunch, or at the end of the day?
  • Can you organize your teams so that you have people dedicated to handling customer emergencies (in a prioritized way, so they can focus on one at a time) and people dedicated to building new product?

If you’re not in management, you can still do a lot to clear your decks so you can concentrate:

  • Adjust your work schedule so that you arrive earlier or stay later than most others. (My normal work hours have been 7:30 to 4:30 for more than 20 years. The first 60-90 minutes of the day are my most productive because few others are in the office.)
  • Stop responding to e-mail as it arrives; instead, set aside specific times when you read and respond to it.
  • Work out a do-not-disturb convention with your team. In one group I worked with, we placed a little blue flag on our desk when we needed to go heads down.
  • Ask if you can work from home when you really need to concentrate.
  • At least put on your headphones, which many people interpret as a sign that you don’t want to be disturbed.

And of course, when your boss pulls you in too many directions, be sure to ask him or her to help you prioritize your work so you can focus on one thing at a time, or to assign work across your team in ways that balances the load. Multitasking alone doesn’t usually lead to burnout, but it absolutely brings you there faster when you have too much on your plate.

Categories
The Business of Software

Much ado about Flickr

By Jim Grey (about)

I was shocked when I logged into Flickr last week and found an entirely new interface.

I'm staying right here at Flickr
My Flickr homepage.

My shock turned to disappointment and sadness that some of my contacts were super angry about the change, left strongly worded comments on their photostreams, and immediately moved their photos to other services.

I make software products for a living; I’ve seen firsthand how interface changes can alienate users. They become comfortable with a product’s features and usage, even when they’re flawed. They don’t want to learn anything new (which often masks a fear that they can’t learn something new).

At the same time, Flickr (and Facebook and any other thing you do on the Web) is a product, built by a company that is trying to make money in an ever-changing landscape.

I’ve seen it often, and it’s happened at companies where I’ve worked: A company builds a good product that takes off. Success causes the company to grow or to be sold to a larger company. And then some scrappy startup company builds a product in an overlapping market that becomes a new darling. By then, the big company is so invested in what it’s always done that it struggles to adapt to the shifting market.

From where I sit, it looks like all of this happened to Flickr. Founded in 2004, Flickr quickly became arguably the king of the hill among photo-sharing sites. Web giant Yahoo! quickly noticed and, in 2006, bought the fledgling company. Success!

But consider all that’s happened in photography and on the Web since 2006. Most people had just discarded their film cameras for digital cameras. Soon cameras in phones became good enough for casual, everyday use; many of them are now very good. Users found it easy to share their photos across any number of the social networks that had emerged – primarily Facebook, which was founded in 2004, too, but also on upstart Instagram. Today, the three cameras that take the most photos uploaded to Flickr are all iPhones.

The market has shifted. It was a matter of time before Flickr either responded or became a niche product of ever decreasing importance. This new interface is its bid to stay relevant. I’m impressed with Yahoo! for moving Flickr so boldly.

I think that if people give the new interface a chance, it will work for most of them. I’ve heard complaints about slowness; I advise patience as Yahoo! would be foolish not to address legitimate performance problems. I’ve heard complaints about how crowded the interface feels; I’m also sure Yahoo! will tweak the new interface over time for better usability.

Another source of uproar is that advertising now adorns Flickr pages. I hate Web ads too, but really, they are the major way many Web products make money.

I sympathize a little with one complaint: all of us who bought Flickr Pro accounts for unlimited photo uploads now feel kind of let down, given that everybody gets a terabyte of storage now. That much storage might as well be unlimited; you could upload one photo a day for the rest of your life and never run out of space. But Flickr is letting us cancel our Pro accounts with a pro-rated refund, or keep Pro at its rate of $25 per year and never see an ad. Anybody who doesn’t have Pro already will have to pay $50 per year for that same privilege. I think this is a reasonable trade.

Flickr’s real mistake might be in underestimating how attached its users were to the old interface. But if my experience is any indication, perhaps that mistake won’t be fatal. Of my contacts, about five percent of them have moved to other services. I’ll miss seeing their photos. I wonder if they’ll soon miss the rest of the Flickr community.

Cross-posted from my personal blog, Down the Road.

Categories
Process

A thing called platform support and why Android makes me nuts

By Jim Grey (about)

“Our product is a Web app,” the CEO said. “Why wouldn’t it work flawlessly on an iPad?”

The answer, of course, was that we didn’t build it with the iPad in mind. When we got it to work on our PCs on Chrome, we declared it done. But some guy at one customer site decided to run it on his iPad, and he was upset because it didn’t work “at all.” Support escalated the case to Engineering, where one of the testers poked around the product on her personal iPad. She found that she could log in, navigate, and enter data on any screen. “It was a pain. I’d rather do it on my laptop any day. But it did work,” she said.

So we were puzzled by our user’s bad experience. And then we learned that he had an original iPad. Our tester had a fourth-generation iPad – on more modern hardware and the latest version of iOS. Unless we wanted to shop for an old iPad on eBay, we were never going to get to the bottom of this complaint. The user wasn’t thrilled when we told him that we couldn’t support his old tablet.

Crushed under the weight of platform support

If you don’t tell your users what they can use to access and run your product, they will run it on whatever they want. When it doesn’t work, they’ll demand you support it. This will crush you. You need to set some limits.

This isn’t meant to be done by fiat. You need to think it through: What are your customers likely to want to use? You need to be there. How will they access your product – devices, operating systems, browsers? If your product will be installed on their equipment, what hardware (or virtual servers), operating systems, and databases are they likely to use? If your product interfaces with other products, what versions will your users want to use?

What you’re doing is limiting the edge cases, like that user’s original iPad. You’re also limiting the list to what you can meaningfully test.

Creating a matrix of supported platforms

Create a spreadsheet that says your product runs on and with these versions of these other products. If you support several versions of your product, the list of supported platforms will probably vary a little version to version.

Give the spreadsheet to support and sales and say, “Use this to set expectations. If they want to use something that’s not on this list, try to talk them into sticking to the matrix. If they insist on going their own way, tell them we might not help them if they have problems.”

This isn’t a once-and-done job. New versions of your supported platforms will be released. Your users will want to use entirely new products with your product. You’ll have to decide when and whether to add them to your matrix. You’ll need to remove old platforms from the matrix sometimes. You need to keep gathering information and keep updating the matrix.

You can’t support it all: why I hate Android
IMG_5629 sm
I used to have a Palm Pre (right). I loved it, but it was on nobody’s platform matrix! My iPhone 5 (left) is on everybody’s matrix.

Still stinging from the customer who had the bad iPad experience, the CEO asked, “Do we have any idea how the mobile Web site behaves on Android? It needs to run on Android, too. It needs to run on any device they have in their hands.”

The problem with Android is that there are eleventeen base versions in active use, each of which a vendor can customize for their devices. And the devices themselves run the processing-power and screen-resolution gamut. When I explained that I’d need to buy a hundred devices and hire twenty testers to test them all, the CEO became less excited about Android.

You can limit the scope of Android, and any other platform with a lot of permutations, by deciding which permutations you’ll support and testing only those. As I write this, the 2.3.x (Gingerbread) versions of Android are the most widely used. You can buy a couple of popular devices on that version and test just those.

The only challenge is that where there are lots of permutations, you’ll have plenty of users on unsupported permutations who aren’t going to be happy.

This reminds me of the browser interoperability problems from several years ago, and why companies usually limited their Web apps to work only on Internet Explorer. Browsers are better now, and it’s more common for Web apps to work on any modern browser. Here’s hoping Android settles down as browsers have.

You can’t test it all: Supported vs. Certified

The items on your supported platforms matrix needs to be things with which your product actually works. As much as possible, design your product up front to work with them. But if you’ve just created a supported platforms matrix for a product that’s been around a while, the best you can do is test your product with those supported platforms to find out where the bugs are. The knee-jerk approach is to do a “full” (whatever that means) regression test on every platform.

One place I worked, our supported platforms matrix grew huge. When we printed it, we needed a jeweler’s loupe to read it. For each version of our product, there were fifty or more supported platforms. I couldn’t afford the army of testers I’d need to do “full” regression passes on them all.

But all that testing really wasn’t necessary. You can look at what’s new in the latest version of a supported platform and make a pretty good assessment of the risk to your product, and size your testing accordingly. For example, a product I used to work on ran on the Oracle and SQL Server databases. When Oracle 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.1) came out, it offered enough new stuff that we weren’t sure how it would run with our product. So in our next release, we did our normal release testing, including regression, on that database. We also ran some special tests that exercised our most complicated SQL queries on it. We found and fixed some bugs that way.

When Oracle issued 11.2.0.2, we looked at what was new in that release and saw no reason to believe that any of it would create new bugs in our product. Our experience was that if a database version was going to throw bugs in our product, those bugs would be foundational and would appear right away under even light testing. We had a bug-fix release coming up, so we installed 11.2.0.2 on that test server and tested the bug fixes on it. The release sailed through testing, so we shipped it and added 11.2.0.2 to the supported platforms matrix.

Platforms that got the so-called “full” test treatment were listed as “Certified” on the matrix. What we told our customers was that we had “performed a certification test” on the platform, had fixed the bugs we found, and were highly confident of a good experience on that platform.

Platforms that got light testing were listed as “Supported” on the matrix. Sometimes our analysis showed low enough risk that we did no testing and still called the platform Supported. We told our customers that we expected that they would have a good experience on that platform.

The bottom line for both Certified and Supported was that if the customer experienced a problem, we’d take their call and resolve their issue.

The bigger bottom line is that you want a manageable list of platforms with and on which you believe your users will have good experiences using your product, a list that won’t kill you to keep up with. Through understanding what your customers want, limiting the list to the most common and important platforms, and varying the depth of testing based on risk, you can keep up.