simondelliott

What happend whilst you were Whilst your on the golf course.

Ive just read this article and …. this point of view is totally out of date

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/silicon/news/20/~3/398719685/0,39024673,39289155,00.htm

The author of this article says that there are only three successful collaboration technologies that penetrate the boardroom Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and the BlackBerry.

He has omitted the Internet, the penetration of which is so complete that it is easy to overlook it. If you include it, you will see that it shows the results of many millions of different collaborations using tools like wordpress, joomla, svn and good old notepad.

The generation of people who make the 99% of this content not only reject playing golf as a way to communicate, but they also reject the notion of a boardroom.

The exclusive and location static nature of the “boardroom and golf” means of communication is in comparison to the “basecamp and msn” form of communication, far slower, which all things being equal places the boardroom style of business at a commercial disadvantage.

If the author of this article is looking to the future of business, then he (Im guessing he is a he) should be looking to the technologies that are going to replace the boardroom not those that are going to get past its security coded doors for the short time that it still exists.

I do enjoy golf

Technical architecture drawings

Firstly I am a big fan of pen and paper.  A blank sheet is the best tool for a clear mind.

Secondly, index cards …. I use these almost every time that I am designing, you can CRC card with then, you can story card with them, you can plan a presentation with them, you can use them to carry water, you can support heavy objects with them …

For flow diagrams or software component diagrams I deliberately try to keep it simple and just use shapes in Visio, or Open Office.

I do however have a large number of shapes that I have made over the years, its a good idea to start collecting these as and when you make them. It really cuts down the time to make a diagram if you have a good libuary.

After a traditional flow diagram, the diagram that I find best describes a step by step procedure is a sequence diagram.

These diagrams are great for both software and people process and can often help to find glitches that cannot be seen with a traditional boxes and lines style flow diagram. I also find that when you talk someone through your thoughts with a sequence diagram, it really gets them to lean forward and understand the concept that you are trying to convey. I used to just draw these with either Visio or a proper drawing package (Flash, illustrator or Photoshop), but now I use umbrelo.

I recommend to any professional that uses diagrams to convey complex ideas, that they simply learn the standard drawing package, which is adobe illustrator. It is reasonably accessible to the beginner, but it can go much, much further.

Your diagrams will look much better
and as diagram styles change faster than drawing packages, over your whole career you will have less learning to do.

I prefer to use a wiki to publish the diagrams so that when others see them it invites them to comment and contribute to the problem that is being described. When you do this you invariably find that you have to render the diagram to an image so that it displays on the web page.

To make life easy for the possible contributors I have found that I have had to simplify the tools that I used to create the diagram, photoshop is a good choice as nearly everyone knows the package, but I guess visio would do just fine.

Design simplicity and the trouble with requirements.

I design products are either highly involved with the user interface on consumer devices or designing web portals that sell consumer media products, and I keep coming up against requirements wars.

The problem that I had with “requirements” was it was always less risky to add to them than to remove them. Political business people who did not care for the consumer user experience would often pile in a whole shed load of requirements that in some way benefited their department (sometimes this was just to halt development till their department could publicise a rival solution)

Inexperienced product managers and marketing people who were uncertain about user behaviour would always add bells and whistles till the original product concept was hidden in a miasma of crap

The result was always the same;
A requirements document that was compromised, with no design simplicity.

This often resulted in commercial failures, and blots the good name of my development.
Where as … the things that we “just did” and that managed to get highlevel backing often made headlines and were always met by rave reviews.

Agile offered me mild relief, as I could control scope or even back out of committing to products that were clearly plagued by too many stakeholders and requirement bloat, and I could do this even after development had started

The problem is that someone who is seeking to mitigate risks will see a small requirements set as a risk, where as this is not compatible with reality. Design simplicity is a great way to reduce risk, it is also a great way to make “nice to use” products.

My belief is not that it was the process of requirements gathering or the format of the requirements that causes the problem, as I over a number of years I changed this again and again trying to improve the number of hit products.

What I want to be able to understand is how the traditional requirements gathering procedure is compatible with increasing the risk so that a company can be commercially competitive?

A happy motivated company that is making good products operates at the highest comfortable level of risk.

The solution is … don’t have the traditional approach to requirements, make a list if you like but certainly don’t use it as your major design document. Instead make a diagram or picture or animation or movie or podcast or wiki or even code – any thing that best expresses the essence of the design

I want to Chrome, I want to go Chrome

We have lived with Google chrome for nearly two weeks and everyone is talking about it.
Half of us think it’s great, the rest are wondering what Google are doing with their data.

I’ve been looking at it and I have to say that it’s a great product, the design is sublime, it installs perfectly and it works on all my personal and work systems. To be impartial I tried to install IE8 but it never even got past the company firewall.

The release of chrome is shows that we have not only left the old world behind but that we have arrived somewhere new. Innovation lead companies like Google are taking on the old process lead companies like Microsoft, as Dorothy would say “Were not in Kansas now Toto!”.

One last question … What If Google really is evil?

Architecture to take on design risk

Some of the most successful projects that I have worked on have started life as a “one day” radical hack. Normally with little more guidance than something along the lines,

• “I wonder why the boot sequence is so slow ..”,
• “wouldn’t it be good if …”
• “thats never going to work, why don’t we …”

If you look at TDD in isolation it smacks of upfront design cost, and I often feel that the investment in the test safety net itself leads to a practices that may put the programmers off of experimenting with radical and risky change.

I do write tests, and most often I write them before I write the code, but I have always had this nagging doubt that I am wasting my time, especially when working on a politically unstable project that may get canned or shelved.

It seems that Kent Beck also shares a similar love of just getting stuck in and seeing if a single days works is worth a go http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/JustShip.html

What tips and tricks are there for encouraging your programmers to efficantly think out of the box, and to take on a riskier change (in a controlled way)?

An introduction to the wiki

Olympic media consumption

The BBC iPlayer is currently serving 5,000,000 streams per day to just UK residents and the uptake is increasing 3 times faster expected.  

The Olympic marketing fact file for 2008 shows that the 2004 Athens Olympics had a “cumulative viewing” (analogous to number of streams) of 34.4 billion.

A rough estimate; less that than 1% of total 2008 Olympic media consumption was online.

It would not be outlandish to suggest that a significant proportion media consumption during the 2012 Olympics will be online. If its 10% or even 20% then there will need to be massive changes in the media delivery platforms.

This is a good opportunity for high tech companies and network vendors,

intermercial – Interactive Comercial

An Inetermercial is an interactive comercial

Essentially during a piece of video passive comercial, the audience is prompted to interact. Here is a great example of an infomercial for holland cassino.

This was made using the Mistral interactive TV authoring tool. Which without a shadow of doubt one of the best pieces of software in the world ever.

review of google chrome

Thoughts from my first 5 minuets of using google chrome

Ok so Ive checked it out on my windows box and I must say its very impressive. My corporate system is very secure, and chrome seems to have coped with the proxy very well. Here are my notes.

• design is very simple and plane, this really adds to the experience, i like the use of the 70′s style shape on the tabs, but the logo looks like a pokeball
• ubuntu – Disaster ! its not supported
• All the standard short cut keys work
• Hotmail – Works, just fine, even behind the proxy
• bbc and google; Hung at resolving proxy, but when off the proxy works great. – works just fine
• very responsive
• iPlayer works just fine

Overall I think its a pretty good browser, far better than the one that we made for OpenTV !
If the mighty google make a ubuntu version I may just switch.