Grumpy Old Programmer

(stackoverflow rep: 7576, Project Euler 83/257 complete)

Reading Joel’s¹ Duct-Tape Programmer article this morning (in the interests of full disclosure I should admit without additional prevarication that I have a large roll of “Duck” tape in the second drawer of my desk as I type) one sentence smacked me metaphorically between the eyes:

“Shipping is a feature”

I was transported back a couple of decades to the time when the bank for whom I was then working discovered that it was building not one but two settlement systems (the things that ensure that what traders agree should happen actually does) in two locations: London and Zurich. In London we were targeting our DEC VAX/Oracle platform, while the Swiss were designing with their local Tandem Non-Stop installation. And we’d both have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for that meddling CEO…

It was decreed that The Wise Men (external auditors) be appointed to review the two projects and pronounce which should live and which should consign its members to the dole queue.

The Wise Ones duly decamped to Zurich to spend a few weeks working through the cabinets of meticulously-detailed standards-compliant design documentation that had been lovingly crafted over the past several months, with coding about to start. Then they came to see us. It didn’t look so good.

What documentation we had was months old (from a previous, aborted start of the waterfall) and coated in Tipp-Ex. Remember the white error-correction fluid we used all the time back in the 20th Century? When we still wrote “memos”? After a week of vagueness and frustration a set of presentations were scheduled for the Friday, at which we proposed to try to fill in the gaps.

London won.

Yay us, but how? On most objective measurements we were deficient when compared with our continental rivals, even we agreed on that. But on that Friday afternoon, I got to stand up to summarise the differences, positive and negative between the two projects, as seen by the London team. I think what may have swung it was the part where I got to say “our system has been settling trades since 3 o’clock this morning”.

In about nine months, one team had done everything by the Book (don’t know the title, but I bet it had “Structured” in it) and had reached the point where they had, well, a book. Lots of books, in fact – they’d worked really hard. In the same time, we built a system and even better, shipped it. I don’t think anyone had written any Agile books by then – even if they had, we hadn’t read them.

Our team hadn’t done an awful job by any means, you understand: there’d been a few weeks of up-front requirement-gathering/scoping.  We had a massive data model that we Tipp-Exed down to the minimum needed. We had an outline architecture that, through luck or judgement, proved to be appropriate. Probably best of all, though, we sat with our users while we built their system. Better, as we built different features we moved around so we were always within speaking distance of our domain expert (I don’t think we’d done the whole “domain” thing then – we just called them “users”). So  we seldom got very far off track while stuff got built, and we were, with hindsight, feature-driven and relatively lowly-coupled/highly cohesive at the component level, all Good Things. Mostly written in COBOL, too.

Looking back, we were lucky: we didn’t manage to repeat the magic and fell back into time and cost overruns with the next couple of large projects. At least we were still being paid, unlike our erstwhile colleagues in Switzerland.

---

¹ I call him by his first name because we share so much; we’re only a few slots apart on page 13 of StackOverflow as I write this. Page-mates, don’t you know.

As may well become apparent over time, I’m not too enthusiastic about Lotus Notes. It’s fair to say that, had I remembered that my current employer is a corporate Notes user, I would have tried to negotiate a higher salary by way of compensation.

Be that as it may, for a developer Notes is a glorious nugget-laden river of blogging opportunities. The client software on my work PC was recently upgraded to version 8.0.1, which seems pretty current. I think, therefore, that it’s fair game.

Let’s look at one aspect that I noticed and delve a bit. In a mail folder, there are columns, as you would expect, some of which use small graphics to provide information. It’s a common UI metaphor. These are the column headings I see:

Nothing surprising there, I think we’d all agree. Look at the paperclip toward the right side. What would you expect it to denote? If you muttered “attachment” then award yourself a small non-monetary prize.

A slightly harder question, now: what would you expect to see when a message has an attachment? A paperclip? Another prize. Moving swiftly on, and for the hat-trick, what do you expect to see if you hover your mouse pointer over such a paperclip icon? Something like “1 attachment(s)” or “114K attachment enclosed” or some such? Whoops, hit the bar.

What you get is this:

…which, I trust we can all agree, is exactly what it is. Perfectly accurate and utterly useless.

What can we glean, in a sort of software-archaeological sense, from this? I’m thinking we can make the following predictions, in vaguely ascending order of likelihood:

1. Within the Notes team at IBM there’s a standard that says non-textual elements should have tool-tips (or whatever the Eclipse/Java name for such things is).
2. If there was a formal specification for this element of the program, it was incomplete. Or worse, the spec’s author thought “Paperclip Icon” was appropriate and nobody thought to question it.
3. QA within Notes is non-existent or pitifully understaffed.
4. The Notes development team is woefully inexperienced and/or has very little interest in delivering a quality product, choosing instead to ship a (bad) copy of Outlook (which has its own flaws, let’s not deny it) to institutions who have yet to acquire the corporate gumption to obliterate it.
5. The Notes team don’t eat their own dogfood, for email at least. Let’s face it, who would?

Which is quite a lot for one funny little tooltip.