Carnegie Mellon Design Recruiting Event

February 21-22

http://www.design.cmu.edu/confluence/

So is that why Vista…

Why does Vista Suck? Blame Automated Testing

“This isn’t to say that automated tests are useless… far from it. However, if your requirements for “tester” are the same as your requirements for “programmer,” then you’re not really doing testing.”

However, there were lively pro/con comments….

Use Cases for Process and Product

What if we took a use-case approach to defining our design and dev processes? Would that give us a different perspective of how we would like to work?

Sometimes a use-case needs to be documenting in text. Other times a workflow does the best. And in still other cases, would a prototype be more appropriate? When something is very well understood, do you need to textually define it or can you just build it?

A nomenclature (meta data) for a use case seems also to be a needed thing. Some are very finite others are at a high level. Some are self contaned (can be completed in one-sitting) others are extended across time and multiple steps.

Use-cases should be able to be used for products as well as software. Anything requiring user-interaction, could use use-cases as a tool.

Thoughts?

Cooper article: Aha!

Amazing article Eric found that gets at the soul of our approach.

From Cooper -Digital Product Design firm in San Francisco

http://www.cooper.com/insights/journal_of_design/articles/design_engineering_the_next_st.html#part2

“The Triad … Interaction design is design for humans, design engineering is design for computers, and production engineering is implementation.”

“And that is exactly what programmers at all levels and in all sub-disciplines of computer programming do: they design code at the same time as they build it. If we could untangle these two parts of the programming job, we could begin to defeat the apocalyptic horsemen.”

“Software is the only medium where the construction materials are entirely the same as the design materials: source code…. In no other medium is this true and it is this watershed more than any other that defines the post-industrial era.”

“In my 30 years experience designing and building software, I have learned that the most expensive software to build is the wrong software. You might think that I’m describing the situation where you build the wrong software, have to throw it away, and then build the correct software. Actually, that’s not a bad thing to do at all, as long as it’s disposable code.”

“Currently there is a pitched battle raging in the programmer world between conventional engineering methods and Agile methods… Both methods are correct, but only when used at the correct time and with the correct medium.”

“By getting the right people doing the right jobs in the right sequence, the whole process becomes more predictable, faster, and less costly.”