by Aaron

Is the "last-minute-panic" part of the "nature" of software development?

What is it about many software development projects that cause smart people to suggest that a last-minute-panic is in fact just the nature of doing software development? Someone used nearly those exact words today in an email to me, which spurred me to thinking this evening about the issue in general.

Rarely is the last-minute-panic just a minute, rather it is a week or more of extra stress, long hours, and weekend work. I’ve only ever worked in the software industry, so I can’t compare to other industries that might be creating products. No matter how many books are published about the topic… the panic is still far too common place.

I know I’ve been part of projects where there was this panic, long hours, etc. However, it’s never sat quite right with me — it felt, wrong.

What have you done to combat this issue? Do you follow some particular methodology that nearly eliminates this problem? Or, do you practice feature cutting, or … what? Is doing software development that unpredictable, or is it somehow the nature of software developers …?

I’d really like to hear what you’re doing (successful or otherwise). Leave a comment or link here from your own blog.

(Updated to fix typo and clarify one tiny thing)

by Aaron

Your data submission contains illegal characters

Slap.

The project name contains illegal characters

From Shutterfly.

I had just typed the name of a project to save in a text field and pressed the “save” button. There were no mention of any characters I couldn’t use. But, it was clear (only because I’ve seen programmers make stupid choices like this in the past), that the apostrophe I had used in the project name wasn’t allowed.

Don’t subject users to silly restrictions like this. What kind of architecture/design doesn’t allow apostrophes to be used in the name of something like this? I realize file systems have some interesting restrictions — but if this isn’t being stored in a database … then, yikes, what are they doing? If I had not already invested a lot of time uploading photos, selecting photos, etc., I would have abandoned them entirely and moved on to their competitors (with what amounts to be the world’s most unreliable uploader from what I could tell — I had to try to upload some photos 6 or 7 times before it was successful!!!!!),

(Just so happens that I was signed up as a new user and had a whole bunch of free prints from Amazon — so I couldn’t complain about the price. However, I’ll not return to them.)

I hope the prints turn out better than their web site design and implementation.

by Aaron

Information Density and Edward Tufte

From a dry (college professor style) video from Edward Tufte regarding a common data density design issue on the iPhone.

image

(screen shot taken from his video)

He mentions the cartoony interfaces and how many applications on the iPhone do not properly take advantage of the 163 DPI screen.

Looking at the weather example though, I’m not sure that his “fix” is what the average person wants as is. His suggestion, which does get me thinking (the whole point of his books and lectures), is that he’s blown the “at a glance” weather and temperature feature of the original design by making the graphics and fonts too small. When I’m looking for the weather, I’m most commonly interested in today’s weather (or the current weather). A 5 day forecast, although interesting, becomes less useful as general data as the number of days from today increases.

Although I appreciate a good satellite image as the next person :), the image is too big. I see no reason to not have a full size version available as a single “click” or gesture, and thumbnail the image for the rest of us. Increase the font sizes of everything else on the screen, and hopefully return the small weather icons to a usable, again, at a glance size.

How would you change the UI? (Or do you like Edward’s as-is?)