Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Dog Show Quality

tl; dr – I'm ranting about arbitrary judgement

I've been enjoying the occasional horse ballet this Olympics. Back in my dim and distant, I learnt to distinguish some of the more obvious of the tiny communications and balances necessary to keep half a tonne of twitchy muscle in shape. At this remove, and especially when watching experts through my lo-res crystal bucket, I now see very little, but one can only admire the quality of the riding, the riders, and the ridden.

Dressage is exacting, it gives joy, and it's an extraordinary skill gained through dedication and talent. Once upon a time there might have been a working reason to get your horse to trot in goosestep, but in the arena those practicalities are subverted into competition. Criteria are set out, judges judge, competitors are measured and ranked. Everyone's an adult, everyone's there by choice, the horses love it – so what's the harm?

None at all, at a guess.

It's not quite the same in all competitions. For instance, competition requirements which set out strict parameters for dog breeds have led to a variety of unpleasant canine complaints as certain breeds of dog have become caricatures of their ideals, or as unmeasured and unexpected emergent properties have popped up (or out, as the case may be). Preset breed standards make it relatively straightforward to judge objectively – but the social act of judging the quality of a dog against those criteria can drive the breed as a whole, indeed the community of breeders as a whole, into unexpected and unwanted unpleasantness. But hey, if that's your bag, go to it.


My interest here is in software and systems and the people who make them. I'm using the situations above as a leaping-off point for an extended metaphor concerning software development and development processes. Be forewarned: I'm not about to respond to commentary from lovers of dressage or of dogs.


Occasionally, I'll be on site, or in a lecture, or talking with a colleague, or reading a paper, and the words "Dog Show Quality"* will pop into my head.

Dog Show Quality is where "Quality" is its own goal. A measured characteristic, where the measurement is made against an arbitrary set of criteria which don't have any necessary relevance outside the narrow limits the criteria themselves describe. You can measure it objectively, and you can use it as a goal for incremental change – but that goal may worsen your situation over time.

Something that is judged to have good Dog Show Quality is not necessarily rubbish. Indeed, it may in itself be best of breed. It's the measurement that is rubbish, and in being rubbish, leads to rubbish. It's not a bad thing to say "Every line of this software has a test", but "Every line of all our software must have a test" is no guarantee of goodness, and defining "Quality" as "Every line has a test" is just a small and noxious step away.

I tend to think Dog Show Quality most often when confronted with ossified software development process. Where signoff matters more than assessment, where knowing where the documents are is more important than what's in them, where spelling is more important than sense. When I talk to the Divisional Champion of Quality Assurance, and they care far more about adherence to process than whether their rotten product creaks, crashes, destroys data and chews the faces off their users' children, I'll think Dog Show Quality.

Dog Show Quality is mostly pointless and sometimes harmful. Making working systems is an exacting and skilled pleasure, but it's also done for money and directly affects real people. If, in the pursuit of quality, your judgement relies on measurements and you continue to measure the relatively unimportant, you're indulging yourself. Get over it, or get a green blazer with brass buttons and hand out rosettes. Your choice.



* There's nothing original under the sun, and this phrase has popped into my head unbidden for years. You may have read or written something similar. If you think I've simply written a cover version of your work without attribution, then I'm really sorry. I've searched, and I've not found your stuff. Please let me know, and if I've stood upon your shoulders to write this, I'll make a clear acknowledgement and link to your ideas.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Session timer

tl;dr - here's a thing to help you explore within the limits you set yourself


@eviltester* just asked me where I keep my session timer.

I don't appear to keep it anywhere.

Sorry about that. Fixed now.

If you want to use it**, try this page: http://www.workroom-productions.com/2timer.html

I use it*** to keep me on the rails. Here's how:

If I've decided that an exploration is worth 60 minutes of my life, I load it up, change the number in the circle to 60, and hit start. If the phone goes or someone arrives, I hit pause. I want to see how much of my gamble budget I've used, because that knowledge changes the game. Proportion matters more than minutes. Various numbers show up for reasons useful to me – elapsed time, excess time. There are two (pretty much identical) timers, because I run distractions as mini sessions.

I don't want to change the timer while it's going, and I don't trust my hands to avoid the error, so I've made it so one can't (easily) change the timer while it's going. It doesn't go bing because 1) I don't care that much if I go a bit long and 2) I have a timer, so I already know. If you change the system clock, it won't complain, but it won't be much use either, and midnight's not well handled****.

If you work in a similar way to me, it may be handy. If not, it won't.

The timer is ten years old, and can be a bit of a pain with CPU as it's written in AS1 and published for Flash 5. The world and his dog uses iOS now, or HTML5/JS, or if stuck in flashland (as I am) AS3 and FP10+. Use as you wish. Feedback always gratefully received.


* also eviltester.com and elsewhere if you dig a little
** a more-useful-for-work version than the one I deploy in my workshops
*** if I use it. I don't use sessions for testing so much. I do use timed sessions for exploring documentation, investigating ideas, writing, prototyping, rehearsing and sketching. And (non-IT use) cooking, of course. For that, I use a kitchen timer.
**** Hint: it may be time to go to bed.



Monday, August 06, 2012

Contextual spelling

tl;dr simplicity can hide depth


Some people expect that, as they discover more, they get closer to finished. But exploration can instead take you further from where you started.

Got a Mac*? Try this...

I open a new TextEdit document. I type "contact sant". On my machine, the word "contact" is highlighted as a spelling problem. I note that if I change "sant" to "Sant" or "san", "contact" is no longer highlighted. Perhaps one gives more context, one less. If so, I've bracketed a sweet spot, which is good to know. I might come back to this.

Because I'm in Text Edit, I suspect I'm actually using Apple's Cocoa text. The same problem shows up in MacJournal. However, it does not show up in Mail or Evernote. I'll not follow this particular path of enquiry for now. Maybe someone else can inform me.

That's two paths ignored. What I want to do is to dig deeper into spelling. If I flip open the Edit:Spelling:"Spelling and Grammar" panel, the alternatives to "contact" offered are "kontakt" and "kontant". If I change "sant" to "santos", I'm offered** "contacta", "contacte", "contacto", "contacté" and "contactó".

I note that a drop-down box says "Automatic by Language", and to my mostly-monoglot eye, the first suggestions look more Germanic, the second more Latin. Though neither TextEdit nor MacJournal allows me to set the language of a text fragment, it's clear that the suggested spellings are from two different non-English dictionaries***, and that the choice of one excludes others.

Could it be that Cocoa text decides what language a text fragment is in before it goes off to get spelling suggestions? Is it really deciding from four letters?

Over to you.

SpellingandGrammar1-2012-08-6-12-18.jpg


* I'm still on Snow Leopard, v 10.6.8. You may not be. You'll know better than I.
** actually, nothing changes immediately. I need to close and re-open the "Spelling and Grammar" panel to see the new suggestions. Yeah, I'm not exploring that, either.
*** so that's three in total, smart-alec.