Summa

In part 1 of this series, I discussed the benefits of usability testing on enterprise software projects and outlined a general approach for integrating the practice of usability testing into a typical Scrum project (see diagram below). In this post, I’ll lay out a 3-step process for performing a usability test on an enterprise project, and highlight how it can can hook into the standard elements of Scrum (e.g. burndown, backlog, etc.). Here we go…

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Agile software development is about team code ownership, collaboration, and sharing ideas to get stuff done.  You want to ride the Agile wave, but half your team is in one city and the rest are in another.  How can you get your guys and gals to collaborate over the wire?  Recently I’ve been working on a project like this and I’ve found a few things that can make your team efficient, collaborative, and successful in an Agile environment.

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It is not enough that we deliver systems that are merely functional, they must also be usable. Paraphrasing from usability expert Jeff Attwood, to the users of the system, “the interface is the application”; it is their most visible window into our work. Whether we finish on time, on budget, or in scope can be immaterial if the final deliverable is frustrating or inefficient to use.

On most enterprise applications, in my experience, usability is promoted via a number of low-cost methods: following usability standards, deferring to user interface specialists, trusting our intuitions, or simply conferring with customers and business owners. And while these methods are sufficient in most cases, when usability is a high priority, there is simply no substitute for actually watching people, without interference, use the software we build. This is the practice of usability testing.

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One of the “softer” sides of development is time management. We do this on both a macro scale (project planning, estimates, what goes into the Sprint, etc.) and a micro scale (what am I going to work on today?). Most developers on most days are concerned with micro time management — and many good project managers realize a lot of important decisions get made there as well (”it seemed like it would be a quick to fix so I went in and did it” or “Gina came over and asked me about this defect so I fixed it.”). This is especially true of programmers on many projects, a few teams, and with some maintenance and support involved in their work.

I do not profess to have a solution — I thought I would share three strategies that I have tried over my career (I am sure there have been others). If you want to try one of these, great! Let me know how it goes! If you have another approach, please share or email!

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How do you design your UIs?

• Paper and pencil — don’t forget the large pink eraser
• White board — with obligatory digital photo of white board
• PowerPoint — development team can’t always reproduce what the designer wants
• Working HTML with CSS and javascript — development team is done before the first page is designed
• We don’t, we just dive right into coding — no comment

After all these years, developers and project managers are still craving a fast, maintainable, electronic approach to UI design.  The process always seems to be slow and cumbersome and the finished product never quite matches the mockups anyway.

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Over the last few weeks, during downtimes between meetings and so on, I have spent several hours deleting unused and duplicated code. By the time I was done I’d killed around 500 lines of code (out of a 20,000 line project). So you shrank the codebase by a couple percent. So what? Why would I ever bother doing that?

Well I’ll tell you, deleting code provides a number of wonderful benefits — some purely mental, and some very practical.

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So how do we manage this communication chasm? We all agree that having some software tools is good for the business. We all agree that there is a cost to develop custom software. But as we go deeper, we don’t understand much. The developers don’t understand the business domain and the business folks don’t understand the software domain. One way to look at this is by observing the growth in the number of details over the course of development.

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Summa is proud of our history of consistently delivering successful outcomes for our customers. Our reputation is built on being a trusted business partner that can be counted to “get it right the first time. “ Our track record of delivering success is illustrated by the fact that 90% of our customers have done repeat business with us. But this level of consistency and achievement does not just happen by itself, so how does Summa do it? There are three main factors that contribute to our strategy for success: having the right people, using the right technology, and utilizing the right methodologies.

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