John D. Mitchell's Blog

February 2005 Archives

Anatomy of Insanity

CNet reports that Microsoft is offering $5 (yes, 5) for data loss due to it's new AntiSpyware software that's in beta testing. Gee, thanks. That will buy me a cup of coffee so I can calm down after you destroy my data. Yeah, sure.

This is another case of how Microsoft (and so many other organizations) just doesn't understand (or care) how enormous an impact their buggy software has on users. This goes part in parcel with the wonderful example in my old blog entry Anatomy of Insanity? Of course, they will claim that this offer is somehow helpful to the customers but, I must say, it's just plain insulting. Why not try something revolutionary like actually writing high-quality software?

Use less milk?

My little girl has this habit of pouring way too much milk into her bowl of cereal. Then, she whines and complains when we tell her to drink up the extra milk after the cereal is gone so it doesn't go to waste. Yesterday, she got quite snippy when I dared to suggest that she try pouring less milk into the bowl.

Gee, she sounds like a lot of managers and developers of software.

Though, to be more precise, in most software situations, it's not that they pour too much milk but, rather the converse: trying to eat way too much cereal for the given amount of milk. Of course, it gets even worse when we're asked to eat random weeds from the edge of the parking lot instead of cereal because the powers–that–be misheard some "guru" talking about the miraculous recuperative abilities of mountain goats who eat nothing but weeds.

In terms of software estimates, why are we, as an industry, so far off? Is it merely incompetence or perhaps fibbing to say what the suits want to hear or are there more subtle things going on, too? I think it's exactly the same problem that my little girl has... She can see the surface of a pile of cereal in her bowl and as she pours the milk, she sees the milk run off the surface and disappear, by the time she sees the milk level come up towards the surface of the cereal, it's too late.

Now, some folks might say to eat more, smaller bowls so you don't run into that milk hiding problem (which is related to the burning your mouth on the hot sauce hiding under the cool layer of cheese on your pizza :-). Others might advocate pouring some amount of milk into the bowl first and then pour the cereal to match. Anal-retentive types might do a myriad of studies (i.e., waste a lot of milk and cereal) to figure out some magical metric by which to precisely predict the proper amount of milk to use for the average cereal according to the preferences of some imaginary average person.

Me, I like an adaptive approach: Pour some cereal, pour some milk, mix it all up, and taste it. If there's too much milk, add a small amount of cereal. If there's too much cereal, pour a wee bit more milk. If it's exactly right, look for the Candid Camera folks (especially if I used up the last of the cereal and milk simultaneously :-). Gee, for some reason, this tastes the same as another process.

Bon apetit!

Successive Embellishment

Growing up, one of the things that I was taught was that embellishing was wrong. That was confusing to me since the actual definition of embellish is: "To make beautiful, as by ornamentation; decorate." Of course, my mom and various "teachers" really meant to teach me that telling lies is a Bad Thing(tm). Alas, like so many of us, precision in language isn't much of a priority — we over-rely upon the communication of our emotionalism to impart our intent.

In Spiral Learning, Kathy Sierra talks about the need to and benefits of iterating quickly through the entire cycle of learning. If I may be so bold, what she's talking about is the notion of Successive Embellishment. Basically, start small and simple and then iterate. But, rather than the traditional view of us following the spiral inward, tighter and tighter, we're going the other way: we follow the spiral outward, embellishing what we've already done — not only makes it more beautiful but also more valuable.

Your homework, should you accept it, is to connect Successive Embellishment with the notion of Passionate Curiousity.

Passionately Curious

What do you really look at when you're hiring people?

Does your team fall into the various mental traps that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his latest book, Blink? I.e., do you look for people who fit your conscious and/or unconscious biases? Wouldn't it help if, like the symphony committees, we only hired people based on their ability to code where we could not see them?

Does your team fall into the hiring hubris fallacy that Joel talked about recently? Is this just another example of the Lake Wobegon Effect where organizations are trying to make themselves feel better? Wouldn't it help if we only hired people we thought were better than us?

Does your team fall into the Certification Fallacy -- believing that a certificate means that a person is good/qualified/etc.? Do you only look for resumes that have the ridiculous laundry lists of keywords that the HR people can put into their filtering software? Wouldn't it help if we actually looked at what the actual work that a person has produced?

Or, is your team tragically hip and hires open-source commit sluts? Wouldn't it help if we actually spent some time working with people and the software that they've worked on?

When it all comes down to it, aren't we really looking for how we connect our true passionate curiosity with each other?

Software Freedom Law Center

Eben Moglen heads up this new organization, the Software Freedom Law Center, to "provide provide legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software." The center has been established with a $4 million fund raised through the OSDL.

Note that the free assistance is only available to eligible (i.e., non-profit) F/OSS projects that can't afford their own legal representation. The center will also provide services on a fee basis.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.