Jarrett House North: Software

Program to live vs. live to program: early hacker critique

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:08:31 GMT

Happy Good Friday! In honor of the day when history turned upside down, here’s a keen little insight from the late Joseph Weizenbaum (via helmintholog, via Scott Rosenberg): some programmers are compulsive programmers who, in taking a purely software-centric approach to solving problems, set themselves up for failure and take the organizations in which they work hostage. Weizenbaum cites some nifty examples of this, such as the programmer who can’t be bothered to write documentation for his mission critical hacks.

Weizenbaum goes on to cast this critique of hacker culture—the concept that everything can be explained by the computer, and that no external skills are needed—in the context of scientism, the belief that science alone, without external belief systems or other human considerations, is sufficient to explain everything about the world around us.

I may have to go and dig up a copy of the book. It sounds like a thought provoking read along the lines of Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor.

Usability metrics: mouse faster than keyboard

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:31:33 GMT

Worth collecting: usability studies like this one from Bruce Tognazzini (“Tog”) from 1989, which established that users think keyboard shortcuts are faster, while mouse actions turn out to be really faster. (via)

XSLT resources, take 2

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:43:50 GMT

Following up on my earlier post about XSLT: I am drawing near the end of the first stage of my project and wanted to update my notes.

One thing I learned is that XSLT is far from dead. There was a 2.0 version of the standard released a while back that fleshed out some of the capabilities of the language, and much of the contents of XSLT have sunk seamlessly into other frameworks. The nice thing about XSLT is that it is a very compact yet flexible technology that is easy to learn the fundamentals; the reason that so many of the resources about it are older is that there simply aren’t that many lingering questions in working with XSLT that are generating ongoing discussions. It just works.

The two best resources for this project were a pair of O’Reilly books, Learning XSLT and the XSLT 1.0 Pocket Reference. I read the former over a couple of plane trips on Friday, and by Saturday night I was happily hacking away at the task that I was trying to do.

I had a couple of learning experiences with XSLT along the way, and learned two techniques that I think are worth sharing and were not documented in the O’Reilly books (though they may be elsewhere).

The first was in reordering nodes in the XML document. I had a few nested (level two) elements in my document for which I needed to take their contents (level three elements) and move them up a level in the document. But I couldn’t figure out how to do it without breaking the DTD. I finally realized that I could process any node and place it anywhere in the target set by being specific in my call to <xsl:apply-templates> and always using a select, rather than simply letting the stylesheet process the nodes in the order that they occur in the parent document. I will try to hack up a sample transform to illustrate what I’m talking about.

The second dealt with batch processing at the command line. Microsoft’s msxsl.exe is a nice, lightweight, fast transformation engine that can be called from a DOS prompt. Unfortunately, it does not accept wild cards for input, so you have to call it explicitly with each file to be transformed. A useful sample solution I found for XSLT batch processing using msxsl uses a VBScript in the Windows Scripting Host to enumerate the files in a source directory and calls msxsl in a loop to process them. The only problem is that the method used opens and closes a command window for each file being transformed, which is distracting and may hurt performance. I will continue to look for better methods, but for my project today this VBscript did the trick.

Certification for Product Managers?

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 13 May 2007 04:04:29 GMT

I suppose it’s indicative of my circuitous route to product management (through software development, consulting, and business development) that I was unaware that there is a professional certification for product managers through the Product Development and Management Association. If any of my product manager friends are reading this, I’m curious about the value of the certification. When I was doing my job search, I don’t remember anyone ever asking about NPDP.

Products: what’s in a name?

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 11 May 2007 21:31:54 GMT

Great post on the Product Marketing Blog at Pragmatic Marketing about product naming. (Aside: Steve Johnson surely practices what he preaches: a good solid descriptive blog name for the B2B audience. But is it memorable?) As a company whose name violates the “letter name” rule, I’ll add another caution to the letter name issue: not only are there memorability issues, but phrases like “intelligent enterprise technology” don’t work that well in acronyms because they put two vowels next to each other. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard someone call us “IT Solutions” because they don’t hear the E.

Speaking of our company, I”d be curious to get people’s impressions of our new corporate website.

Choices reduce satisfaction...

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:08:48 GMT

Joel Spolsky writes an interesting perspective about how introducing choices in a software interface can make the UI worse. He uses the example of the new Shutdown UI in Windows Vista, and points out that there are seven states of Shutdown (Switch User, Log Off, Lock, Restart, Sleep, Hibernate, and Shut Down) that are exposed to the user, together with two shortcut icons, at least one of which has indeterminate meaning.

The scary part is that I have been doing software engineering for so long that I would be among the chorus of voices asking for separate Sleep and Hibernate options. The issue of choice vs. simplification is not a trivial distinction. Every engineer and product manager thinks giving more choice to the user is great, and every one of them is saying under his breath, “Because it means I don’t have to guess what the user is really going to do, and therefore I can pass the complexity on to the user.” This is busted behavior.

In defense of the Vista team, and I do (I hope) still have friends there, the implementation pictured here is better than the current implementation in XP, where to Restart, Lock, or Sleep you first press a button on the Start menu labeled Shut Down. But Joel’s point remains: unless you fix the underlying confusion in the user interaction model, cleaning up the menus is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is one area where the Mac doesn’t do a better job, by the way, but at least all the menu options are easily accessible, and the default sleep/wake behavior is much more intelligently implemented than on a PC. (My MacBook Pro can sleep overnight without a problem, while my Dell will drain its battery if I put it to sleep with a full charge.)

Thanks to the Product Marketing blog for the link.

Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to ... write code?

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:41:49 GMT

Hooblogger Luke Melia shared this Shaker proverb that has applicability to software:

If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it.

If it is useful and necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to enhance it by adding what is not an integral part of its usefulness or necessity.

If it is both useful and necessary and you can recognize and eliminate what is not essential, then go ahead and make it as beautifully as you can.

— Shaker saying (Shaker Built: The Form and Function of Shaker Architecture (This origin is dubious)

I’d love to get the actual origin of this, but it’s starting to get some circulation in the software community.

Will there be karaoke?

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 19:09:45 GMT

One of the fun things about working in the software industry is that occasionally you run across some really creative marketing approaches. One company in our space is Pink Elephant, an IT consultancy based in Canada that has really helped to educate the IT market in North America about the importance of process-driven IT management and about the ITIL standard in particular. Their name is great: memorable, with a faintly boozy overtone... just like their conferences.

Which is why I was amused to get a flier for their annual IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition, occurring next February in Las Vegas. The theme? (Leadership, Optimization, Validation, and Excitement). As if that weren’t enough, all the tracks have Beatles song titles in the name (e.g. “You Never Give Me Your Money: ROI and the Financial Realities of ITIL”).

Which brings up two questions:

How long before Apple Corps (or the current Lennon/McCartney song catalog owner) sues Pink for unauthorized use of their copyrighted materials?
Will there be karaoke? Cause I sing a mean “Got to Get You Into My Life.”

XPM?

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:09:23 GMT

Interesting article over at Pragmatic Marketing on Extreme Product Management. The question that I’ve heard from some people, including former product managers, is how relevant product management is in an “agile” environment where people’s tastes (and the competitive landscape) appear to be changing daily. This article outlines some points of conflict between product management and agile development organizations that I’ve experienced.

A particularly painful challenge is this one: “My developers want me available every minute of the day to answer their questions. I have no time to visit customers.” The product manager’s role is to be in the middle of a bunch of different constituencies, but sales and engineering are the two primary ones for most product managers and it can be too easy to get into a situation where the product manager, in trying to expend effort for both constituencies, ends up satisfying neither. The paper’s concrete recommendation for this challenge, to provide market context through documentation and/or presentations to the team, is an interesting one; the rest of the recommendations are also interesting and worth exploring.

New phase for Peregrine

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 16:28:01 GMT

News.com: HP to buy Peregrine for $425 million. That HP is building out its IT Service Management toolset is unsurprising; most of the company’s ITIL strength is in service delivery with availability and capacity monitoring, while its core service desk capabilities are weak or nonexistent. That’s a problem in this market, where the service desk is increasingly becoming a process center of excellence for IT Service Management and is an important part of any ITSM offering.

But that they would acquire Peregrine? Word on the street was that Peregrine was coming out of its near-death experience after its 2002 accounting scandals. But the company has still essentially lost much of its former market leadership. HP has gone into a lot of deals with Peregrine, so they must be pretty comfortable with their technology. The deal price is about 2.2 times annual earnings, so while not a bargain, it’s not a rip-off either. And the deal puts HP eyeball to eyeball with BMC, who purchased the other market leader, Remedy, from Peregrine three years ago. What a weird market.

Disclosure: My firm, iETSolutions, is another major player in this market, and my comments don’t reflect the opinions of the firm.

Peer review process artifacts

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 17:10:45 GMT

High time, I think, that I started a dedicated news item department for software development. For one thing, I’m increasingly thinking about software processes as we move further along the planning for our next release. For another, I tend to think about and comment on these things a lot already, in departments like Internet, and I’m too categorical a thinker to be happy with that grab-bag category.

So to kick it off, a link to a site that’s been in a tab of my browser for weeks: Goodies for Peer Reviews from Process Impact. This is a set of documents, provided as shareware, that includes both sample artifacts and a strawman process. Unfortunately, the process is so well defined as to be almost useless in a small firm, but at least it provides good food for thought as well as showing some considerations that may need to be managed for larger teams.