Owen's Blog

So ASP.net Fitnesse has been on the back burner for a serious amount of time with me, it’s starting to loose focus mainly because I’ve been in maintenance mode on a project that suffers from really bad planning, and has been no where near using unit tests, let alone giving me an opportunity to introduce them to the wonders of automated acceptance testing.

However I am still interested, no doubt Andy has run on ahead and created a whole system by now, but I thought it might be a good idea to do some more thorough system planning.

The first step of which needs to be identifying the personas involved in using the system:

Rob:

Rob, chief architect for DontCallMeSoftware, counts himself as a pretty well rounded kind of developer, an oxford trained scientist he moved into computing for the money and realized he actually quite enjoyed it, now however he’s becoming more and more frustrated. None of the users of his products are very happy, they constantly complain about features that don’t do the right thing. Oh and he doesn’t like people, they just don’t behave right.

However when he asks them to elaborate or put down what they feel he thinks he understands, only to find out when he implements the features that the user meant something completely different.

On top of all this Rob want’s to spend time with his real life outside of work (and have time for some World of Warcraft) so he doesn’t like spending too much time struggling through user requirement documentation.

Nowadays he’s just taken to sticking post it notes on his face to hide from the users in the office.

What Rob needs from the system, is a frictionless environment that allows him to quickly see within a couple of hours if the direction he’s going is the correct one according to the users.

Laura:

Laura is VP to the MD of product development at DontCallMeSoftware, she loves to sit in long meetings and wear large shoulder pads, also she knows enough about moccachinos to write a book on the subject. She’s in charge of new products getting budget and approval, and getting them off the ground with technical leads and project managers, a job she hates, she would much rather be checking her blackberry for juicy gossip from HR.

She feels she doesn’t have the time to think about the “requirements” for new projects, she knows what she wants and she wants it now, but she doesn’t have the time to sit and write down all the things that have been communicated by upper management. She just wishes there was a way everyone could telepathically get what she means.

Dave:

Dave thinks he’s cool, just graduated from the Comp Eng course at an obscure university in the middle of England. He attended a graduate recruitment fair in the big smoke and yay he got offered not one but two interviews. After much soul searching he decided to take the one in a testing consultancy (how hard can it be to break things?) from there he’s been working too many hours for his liking. He’s fed up that projects keep running late, and there’s no consideration of test plans before the project is undertaken… if only they’d just allow for some full regression tests most of the bugs would be fixed! People are getting fed up of his constant whining about problems. Management love his can do attitude, and as such have tried to give him more and more of an analyst role.

Ok so I might have taken the persona’s a bit too humorously, but generally they represent the tech, the business and the intermediary. Three markets I think ASP.net Fitness should be aimed at.

Personally I think our main persona is Dave, if we get Dave up and running he will be able to implement automated tests early in the process and use it as a good communication tool with Laura, and then if we make Dave our target super user, the process should become seamless for Rob.

Ok so that’s the start… more to follow

Photos courtesy of Stock.Xchng

I think I’m loosing it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I keep forgetting things, the most trivial of things get missed and forgotten and despite being aware of it I can’t stop doing it.

Yesterday i left the house with the heater on all day, the frikkin house could have burnt down! Honestly, what’s wrong with me.

Either it’s forgetting to check the whole shopping list before going to the checkout (and inveriably missing something) or just plain fogetting to switch things off. I’m seriously worries about my memory.

I used to leave lights on all the time, I was aware of that one but I’m sure I’ve never been this bad…

What can I do… I don’t seem to be able to get out of this cycle.

So I was doing some ironing last night and ER was being watched by Katy, I wasn’t watching it you understand, and there was a character being introduced “Dr Kevin Moretti” played by Stanley Tucci (who I know from bit parts in The Road To Perdition and The Terminal). Katy takes a dislike to the character (what can I say, she gets into dramas) but I can’t help but side with him.

He’s unapologetic about wanting change. I want change too, and I’m fed up of the bog standard excuses:

• It wasn’t my code that did that.
• It’s a legacy thing.
• I didn’t want to have to rewrite everything.

As professionals in computing we need to stop proffering up these responses and take responsibility, we need a ultimatum for sea change, if I see bad smells in code I will not leave them to rot, I will change as much as I need to to make the code as good as I can.

We can do better.

If any of you subscribe to my twitter tweets (and as twitter tells me who my watchers are I know none of you do) you’d know about my ordeal this week trying to get hold of a working XBox 360.

I decided on Friday that I was going to put the money down and get hold of a Next Gen console and my penchant for Live gaming made it a 360 (that and the fact Guitar Hero 2 was available) so I went home with the box on Friday night, only to plug it in and it give me an error message. Which I looked up and found that the hard drive was screwy. But hold on, why were the batteries already in the controller, and the remote, and why was the box not sealed… hmm something felt fishy.

Well anyway on Saturday I took the console back and got it replaced this time with a new box with a seal! So happy that the matter had been resolved I lugged the console home (man they are heavy). Only to find out that the console had EXACTLY THE SAME ERROR!

So Sunday, rather pissed off I picked up my third console of the weekend. Which mercifully worked (I got them to test it in the shop.) So I finally got to play last night, and I’m happy I can get my guitar hero fix at home instead of relying on my next door neighbor or Katy’s brother in law

Only problem is I have to play via my video capture card on my mac, which doesn’t fully support pal 60 so I have to watch in semi mono-chrome (no red seems to be symptom) while Katy watches TV.

Ah well what can you do?

I hate working on failing projects, I’ve only just come round to the realisation that the application I was working on in London was a failure, we all seemed so happy with the fact that developing was nice, we met the feature list and we were all working well as a team that we missed the salient points: we didn’t sell many copies, we didn’t have one user absolutely impressed with the product, we were trying to please everyone and in the process ended up pleasing no one. So until a few months ago I would have told you that the project was a success, now I’m sure it was a failure.

Now I find myself working on a project that’s sinking like the titanic, luckily for my own reputation I turned up after it hit the iceberg (that happened about 2 years ago and they’ve been furiously bailing water since) now I have to see if I can inject a dose of reality (the sea is rising fast, we’re bailing slow) and see if we can make a success from failure (guys if we take some of the wood that’s still above water and fashion it into a new boat it can carry us survivors easy).

But easy persuasion is a utopia that I can’t help feeling is slipping away from me. Ah well lets keep fighting the rising tide and hope we can have a boat to float at the end. Ok that might have been one metaphor too far.

So Wellington .net usergroup tonight, and the talk was all things silverlight.

I’m not overly impressed by the “run it in a browser” bandwagon, and video doesn’t float my boat yet but a couple of things did make me happy.

1) design is central: all the demo application were really well designed from a user interface point of view, less cognitive friction, more cognitive snowboarding! Really great to see that Interaction Design is becoming more and more the norm for showpiece applications, I just hope that the corporate’s can take some notice.

2) Lightweight, no more install for applications is a big shift, it’s a great model that really should be used by all, even if you’re not running in a browser the install is the worst part of application usability.

3) Client side storage, I see this becoming huge, no mater what anyone says, Internet will never be ubiquitous, all present and all knowing, there are going to always be blackspots where we can’t get access, so the more apps that move towards being able to cache offline the better. I really want an online version of Word that can load local documents.

4) People around who care more about the experience than about maintaining monopoly: this is from Microsoft, and works on a Mac, sure they may have had their hand forced a bit but the dynamic shift is huge, and only a good thing.

5) did I mention the interaction design thing?

I’m excited a bit if only because we are all seeing the fruition of dirt cheap computing power, I need to use it in earnest to really be positive about the platform.