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One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

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Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

#21

Post by noir_lord »

RyanZAG wrote: post #4

Good article, makes an important point about complexity. Just want to add one extra thought though: he or she will run reports against the usage data to find out whether a given feature is often used. That data can then be run past the product managers who can help decide whether it's sensible to just drop the feature. It's important to be careful here, and it's one of the traps that is very easy to fall into (see Gn…

You could also drop a feature used by 1% who just happen to be the 1% who make the buying decisions or are vocal.

I call these User Landmines (they are quiet right up until you step on one).

Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

#24

Post by betenoire »

emingo wrote: post #13

The first comment on that page sort of made me face palm... but then it got me thinking. "Simplicity of usage should always win over simplicity of coding. The purpose of a product is to solve the end user's pain, no one should give a dime about the engineer's problem. IMHO that was the genius of Steve Jobs, he could take any pre-exiting product and increase its complexity by 50x while simplifying its usage by 10x." I…

The two are not mutually exclusive, and solving both of those is what makes programming hard and fun.

Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

#25

Post by marcosdumay »

emingo wrote: post #13

The first comment on that page sort of made me face palm... but then it got me thinking. "Simplicity of usage should always win over simplicity of coding. The purpose of a product is to solve the end user's pain, no one should give a dime about the engineer's problem. IMHO that was the genius of Steve Jobs, he could take any pre-exiting product and increase its complexity by 50x while simplifying its usage by 10x." I…

> Simplicity of usage should always win over simplicity of coding.

In a superficial assessment, yes, usage is the objective of software, and it should be as complex as needed to enable its users to have an optimal perfomance.

But then, most software is built in an environemnt where people don't even know* what problem they want to solve beforehand. Ading complexity too early makes it very hard to change your software and leads to a situation where you completely optimized some work that shouldn't be done at all, while the important work got harder because it was overlooked at first.

* They have a general idea, and even that is wrong sometimes.

Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

#26

Post by obviouslygreen »

DanWaterworth wrote: post #16

In my experience, practically everyone agrees that software should be simple, but not everyone agrees on what simple is.

Unfortunately, that hasn't been my experience. Everyone wants software to be easy, but most people (by which I mean clients, management, and anyone else who's ever asked me to build software) have no opinion one way or the other about simplicity: They want it to do exactly what they want, the way they want, regardless of how technically feasible or user-friendly that ends up being.

Simplicity is an ideal I see a lot more among tech people (myself included), and while I think it's nice to aspire to, it's definitely not something I've seen as a request, requirement, or even preference among the kind of people who are willing to pay others to build things. They want what they want, not a simple implementation of what they need.

Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

#27

Post by andrewcooke »

kryten wrote: post #9

Whammed in the face with: "Subscribe to receive future articles right to your inbox" Tab closed. To hell with them.

something in one of chrome, ghostery, disconnect or adblock removes that, fwiw (and maybe it's just because it's timely, but it's actually one of the better posts i've read in this kind of thing).

Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

#28

Post by swalsh »

emingo wrote: post #13

The first comment on that page sort of made me face palm... but then it got me thinking. "Simplicity of usage should always win over simplicity of coding. The purpose of a product is to solve the end user's pain, no one should give a dime about the engineer's problem. IMHO that was the genius of Steve Jobs, he could take any pre-exiting product and increase its complexity by 50x while simplifying its usage by 10x." I…

Its a false duality. It assumes complexity is zero sum, either the user has it or the programmer has it. In my experience this is not true.

Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

#29

Post by kryten »

andrewcooke wrote: post #27
kryten wrote: post #9

Whammed in the face with: "Subscribe to receive future articles right to your inbox" Tab closed. To hell with them.

something in one of chrome, ghostery, disconnect or adblock removes that, fwiw (and maybe it's just because it's timely, but it's actually one of the better posts i've read in this kind of thing).

I have adblock and ghostery. It still appeared for me.

Perhaps I should use noscript as well :)

Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider

#30

Post by thezilch »

DanWaterworth wrote: post #16

In my experience, practically everyone agrees that software should be simple, but not everyone agrees on what simple is.

As another child comment identifies, we should not confuse simple with easy. Clients want easy software, and they have little care or understanding of the complexity. That's OK, on its head, but it is our responsibility to share and teach this side of the software's lifecycle with "management" and "junior" developers. Rich Hickey, author of Clojure, had a great talk on simplicity and easiness of software [0].

[0] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

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