Vu360, the latest Pathfinder product, was launched by our client the Blue Book of Construction earlier last month.
It’s an Internet-tethered desktop application that enables easy viewing, markup and takeoff of PDF and TIFF documents for the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Some of the features include:
Read more »Sometimes I write these just for me.
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, tomorrow I’ll be speaking at WindyCityRails, and I need a checklist of all things I don’t want to forget, and all thing things I want to do to make the talk great.
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The value of wireframing even with incomplete information
The task of wireframing in application development, as I’ve come to know it, should begin after user research has been performed, and a complete set of requirements gathered. But what happens when, for whatever reason, you just don’t have access to user research, or a full set of requirements? What if all you have are some rather unspecific, vague notions of what the user should and should not be able to do? Is wireframing at this juncture useful? I say yes. With incomplete or even almost non existent information about target users and or requirements, wireframes can still be a valuable tool in the interface designers toolkit.
The key to a wireframe’s usefulness is that it is a visual document. Presumably it will be presented to one or more product stakeholders, and they will have the opportunity to review it and comment. Having something visual to respond to is one of the easiest ways to generate ideas, and identify incomplete specifications. A good assumption is that if a product’s requirements are incomplete, someone at the wireframe review will notice the gap by responding in the context of the visual presentation. “Where is the Cancel button? Oh…not in the requirements? Well it’s obvious that on this screen the user will need to be able to cancel, so we have to add that as a requirement.”
In this way, a wireframe can be an ever evolving document, which begins by starting the requirements conversation. Of course ultimately, just prior to feature development, the wireframe should have all of the necessary specifics so that the developers can use it as a guide (along with the relevant user stories).
edge case city: requirements and testing dates for HR business logic
We have an internal application that does staffing, time entry, and now Paid Time Off (PTO) accrual, scheduling and management. It is quite nice, as it has replaced three existing systems, and replaced a number of manual, tedious tasks. I started it last year, as our current system was very inefficient. It was a simple Ruby on Rails app that I was able to get working in a few weeks. Over time the functionality grew.
We recently added in PTO accrual and functionality to debit PTO time. In doing so in a test driven manner was great, as we could put all the edge cases. What we found was that many of the requirements were plentiful with edge cases. For instance, we get paid on the 15th or end of the month, unless that is a weekend. Then we get paid on a Friday – Except if that Friday is a holiday, then the previous Thursday – Except – if that is also a holiday…. So it is really the previous non-weekend, non-holiday on or before the 15th or end of the month. The same holds true to determine the beginning of the billing period. If the Monday is the 2nd, than for some operations the effective billing period start is Tuesday the third…. Ugh…
Our initial thoughts were filled with visions of lots of very similar tests for all contexts that do things depending on the start or end of a billing period. We didn’t want to have lots of duplicate test code to test all edge cases, so we decided to extend the Date object to have a few helper methods to do the complicated logic in one place. We get the full range of the billing period start and end, and then trim off any holidays or weekends. What this did, was allow us to test the complicated logic in unit tests with a full set of complicated edge cases. We created many crazy examples of billing periods starting and ending on weekends, holidays, and holidays before and after weekends. This created a very robust set of methods to be used anywhere in the system.
We then mocked a call to each Date helper method everywhere in the system where it cared about what day it was, and weather it was the start/end of a billing period. We had only a few edge cases now: is it the true effective billing period start/end, or not. Our tests could then focus on the guts of what it actually did, regardless of the effective date.
This demonstrates how powerful unit testing is, and how mocking can really keep your tests concise. It made not only our code cleaner, but our tests cleaner. It reduced duplicate code, and increased our assurance that the code will function as designed.
That being said, it still doesn’t change the fact that implementing HR logic in any language is a pain in the ass. I have worked on a couple of systems for accounting departments in the past, and their business requirements are much worse than HR. Dealing with job codes, general ledger accounts, etc can make your head spin. All I know, is that without TDD, this system would be buggy.
I’m addicted to TED talks. There have been many nights where I’ve stayed up way too late watching them. For those who are unaware, TED is a yearly conference where world leaders and thinkers gather to share their ideas and spread their passions and work. I’m someone who gets fired up listening to outher people’s passions. I love hearing about what gets other people excited, what makes them tick, what makes them want to share with the world.
One of the more interesting talks I’ve listened to recently is by Tim Brown at the Serious Play conference of 2008. Tim talks about how the elements of play can improve creativity and productivity in our workplace and life. I found the lessons learned from this talk something that can be very directly applied to software development, and taking some of these nuggets of teaching can help me be a better thinker and worker.
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It’s time to play “Ask A Tester Person”, where I answer questions that I’ve gotten via email or otherwise about Rails Testing topics.
If you have a question for Ask A Tester Person, send it to railsprescriptions at gmail.com.
I’ve got two questions today:
Read more »I was starting up one of the Adobe apps the other day when this somewhat troublesome message was displayed:
Ack! On the one hand, good for them for alerting me that an error had occurred. On the other hand, what’s up with that message? I had no idea what I could do beyond clicking ok (and after reading the message I wasn’t sure all was ok). A bit unnerving, but it did get me thinking about how applications deal with error messages.
The idea that non-technical users will be viewing error messages is one of those things that tends to be overlooked. You’re so focused on getting all the features up and working that dealing with errors on the presentation layer are often left out of both design and implementation.
Even if time is crunched on a project, however, here are three scenarios you should always cover in a user-friendly fashion:
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Code Ownership is a well known term in software development. Depending on how you define it, it may be a good thing or bad. When a developer sees code-ownership as him/her owning a piece of codebase that only he/she understands enough to make changes, it is generally a bad thing. It is only when everybody is free to modify the code with a sense of responsibility that he/she should leave the code cleaner than how they found it, it is a good thing. In my view, code-ownership is a good thing when viewed as a responsibilty as opposed to a right. I view it as a Collective Code Ownership where code is not owned by a single person or pair but is owned by an entire team.
So, the question is: How to determine if your project/organization has that collective code ownership culture. And what team members (including managers 
) can do to create/encourage it.
Does your project have collective code ownership?
Here are few things you may want to ask yourself to determine if your organization/project has collective ownership culture.
Quite a while ago, I wrote a blog post which included some code which allowed you to use ActiveRecord without needing a database table.
I recently needed that functionality again, so I converted that code into a plugin and put it on github so that I could easily include it in another project. While doing this, I also cleaned up and simplified the code quite a bit.
The github page is here: http://github.com/AnthonyCaliendo/acts_without_database/
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Last week I presented at Agile 2009 a workshop for those new to Agile entitled: The Agile Game: An Experiential Workshop. I love this workshop because it allows those new to Agile to experience the rhythm of an agile project in action and learn first hand many of the practices in a non-threatening, non-technical, and fun way. I have used this workshop for clients a number of times and it works. The feedback from this session was overwhelmingly positive too. Comments such as, “Fun game, good to demonstrate how teams do and don’t work together” and “Very, very, practical way to get concept through” are always great to see.
Recently I had been wondering if Project Management was a questionable career choice. I have spent the last couple of years surrounded by talented individuals who seemed to be able to work fine without me. The test is always when the project manager (me) goes on vacation. Has the team fallen apart? Are they forgetting all of the practices they were doing? Is stuff getting delivered to clients? I was finding that I had a backlog of chores when I came back, but overall things were still humming along.
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