CSS Techniques I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Websites

Tim Wright and TJ Kelly have written about CSS Techniques in NOUPE on 18-Dec-2009. To quote:-

CSS is the best thing to happen to the web since Tim Berners-Lee. It’s simple, powerful, and easy to use. But even with all its simplicity, it hides some important capabilities. Ask any designer, and they’ll tell you that the majority of their code headaches are caused and ultimately solved by CSS.

All designers at some point in their career go through the process of encountering a weird display issue, searching for a resolution, and discovering a trick, technique, or hack could have saved them hours of frustration—if they had only known when they started.

Tree Testing - A quick way to evaluate your IA

Dave O'Brien has written about evaluating Information Architecture organization with "Tree Testing" in "Boxes and Arrows" on 5-Dec-2009. To quote:-

A big part of information architecture is organisation – creating the structure of a site. For most sites – particularly large ones – this means creating a hierarchical “tree” of topics.

But to date, the IA community hasn’t found an effective, simple technique (or tool) to test site structures. The most common method used—closed card sorting—is neither widespread nor particularly suited to this task.

Some years ago, Donna Spencer pioneered a simple paper-based technique to test trees of topics. Recent refinements to that method, some made possible by online experimentation, have now made “tree testing” more effective and agile.

Future scenario: starting a new job

James Robertson has written about the ideal "assistant" in "Column Two" on 8-Dec-2009. To quote:-

Her email inbox has a message from Morris, the intranet. Hmm, “welcome to the business Sarah!”, it seems even the intranet is friendly. Firing up “Morris”, Sarah spends a little time familiarising herself with the system she’s expecting to spend a fair bit of time in.

Part of Morris displays the standard corporate links and tools, but the right-hand half of the page seems to be just for her. There’s a prominent box linking her to an induction package, including a few get-up-to-speed videos, some recorded by other staff members.

Included in her online to-do list are a number of induction items, and she expects these will keep popping up over the next few months. Clicking on one of the tasks, she goes into her staff profile, and fills in a few easy details. The rest can wait for a quiet time over the coming week.

Noting that she’s involved in sales and customer service activities, Morris has suggested a few office groups she might want to join. Not today — too much too quickly — but Sarah does click the checkboxes so she can keep an eye on what’s being talked about, before she works out which groups to join.

She’s already been signed up to her local project group, and browses through the profiles and activities of the team members. Seems like there’s a fair bit happening, with a big report delivered last week. Better add that to my favourites.

Sarah’s also been recommended a “buddy” in a similar role, and she reads through their profile. Looks good, let’s have lunch. Now to unpack the mobile.

Software engineering is dead, long live engineering of software

David M Williams has written about "Software Engineering" in ITWire on 20-Jul-2009. To quote:-

Tom DeMarco is co-author of one of the most timeless and seminal works on creating software, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Yet, this month DeMarco suggested to the IEEE Computer Society that maybe software engineering has had its day.

This first line of this 1982 title has been quoted extensively in the ensuing 27 years. DeMarco wrote, “You can’t control what you can’t measure.” To solve that problem software engineers have bravely attempted to uncover and analyse as many software metrics as possible.

Yet, DeMarco now reveals with the passage of time he has become uncomfortable with the views he originally espoused.

“Implicit in the quote (and indeed in the book’s title) is that control is an important aspect,” he says, “maybe the most important, of any software project.”

“But it isn’t.” He now says, citing examples of GoogleEarth and Wikipedia as impressive software products that proceeded without much control.

To illustrate his changed reasoning DeMarco refers to two hypothetical projects. Both will eventually cost about a million dollars. Yet, Project A will produce value of around $1.1m and Project B will produce value exceeding $50m.

It’s obvious that Project A absolutely must have tight controls. If the budget is exceeded or the software is delayed or the quality is lacking then the project runs a real risk of running at a loss.

By contrast, Project B has such a vast difference between its cost and its expected return that control can be relaxed. Obviously, matters of costs and deadlines and quality remains but ultimately the project is going to turn a profit. It would take things to really go haywire for it not to.

Thus, DeMarco muses, in reality the more a manager focuses on control the more likely they are to be working on project that is actually striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

The problem of managing software development, then, he continues, ought not to be about such tight control and metrics as software engineering would stipulate. Instead, software teams should work on projects that deliver genuine value and managers need to reduce expectations for how much they will be able to control the project.

....a software team ought to go about incrementally adding pieces to the whole of the project in order of relative value, documenting and testing as they proceed, ready to package and deliver the product at any time the project manager dictates it is finished.

DeMarco says it still makes sense to engineer software, but that’s not actually what the term “software engineering” has come to mean.

Finding a Fair Price for Free Knowledge

Peter Eckersley has written about "Intellectual property in the Digital Age" in New Scientist on 24th June 2009. To quote:-

TEN years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it, but will our legal and economic system ever allow it?

This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term "intellectual property". As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.

So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism?

Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics?