Decisions and why you should remember them

Posted by frenk

Jim is a developer and is working on the GUI. His GUI has several buttons. Jim decides that the buttons will have the default operating system’s look and feel, which is gray and not too appealing.

The product manager sees the GUI and tells Jim to change the button’s color. They will definitely look better with a blue hue. Jim makes the change.

After two weeks Jim notices that the user can change the application background, and the blue buttons look fugly with any background color except the default one. He shows the product manager the proof that the gray buttons were slightly less sexy but worked better with any background.
The manager is convinced and tells Jim to switch back to the original buttons.

Everyone is happy, except six months later the product manager is using the application and notices the gray buttons. They look dull.
His mind his busy and overloaded: he doesn’t remember the discussion that took place months ago. He calls Jim and tells him to make buttons blue.
Jim’s mind is slightly less busy, he remembers there was a reason why they changed back to the gray buttons. Unfortunately he doesn’t remember why.
He has no way to convince the manager that the gray buttons are better. He walks back to his place and makes the buttons blue again.

Two weeks later…

I admit this example is idiotic, and many things could be said about GUI standards, precise specifications, etc… but that’s not the point.
The point is, you often take decisions that don’t look like decisions. They are not so important to require a formal meeting and nothing formal is written about them. Those “hidden” decisions look innocent but they often make one waste a lot of time.

That’s why I now have a “Decisions” folder on my desktop with plain .txt files that hopefully won’t be needed but probably will.

(And if you are thinking that source control takes care of this, you are only partially correct according to my experience. If your software is quickly evolving, getting back and working a 6 months old piece of code usually takes a lot of time and effort.)

n-th attempt

Posted by frenk

In the past few years I have failed several attempts to keep a blog. This time I promise I will try a bit harder.

The truth is that when I don’t have anything interesting or relevant to say I usually shut up -it’s the way I am. So despite my efforts I doubt you’ll ever find a daily 300-word post here. This doesn’t mean I’ll never write anything interesting :-)

Let me briefly introduce myself, just to let you know who is writing. My name is Francesco De Vittori, I’m a software engineer and a complete bike nut. I got a Master degree in computer science at the Lausanne Swiss Institute of Technology, then I got married and we moved (back) to the Southern Switzerland, near Lugano.
Since then I work at Board Lab where we make a kick-ass software, mostly with the latest .NET stuff. We are a small team but we sometimes manage to make the big vendors cry.

This blog will be mostly about software and geek stuff, but also about bikes and other random subjects like photography and life.