Posted Dec 21, 2012 17:30 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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Even if the engineer warned someone of the consequences, middle management deemed those inconsequential... =D
And they were right! This was engineers mistake, not a management one. Someone probably forgot about Iceberg principle and showed demo which looked good enough to be released. Don't do that! Management is not competent enough to discuss such things. Don't ever forget about the rule: build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished.
It's surprising how often seemingly competent software engineers forget about this simple rule and how much grief this produces in the end.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones
Posted Dec 22, 2012 11:40 UTC (Sat) by lab (subscriber, #51153)
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> Someone probably forgot about Iceberg principle and showed demo which looked good enough to be released. Don't do that! Management is not competent enough to discuss such things. Don't ever forget about the rule: build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished.
> It's surprising how often seemingly competent software engineers forget about this simple rule and how much grief this produces in the end.
Oh my God. I'm highly embarrased to admit, that only now did I read that piece for the first time. I'm banging my fist against my forehead, for making this mistake so many times, and getting frustrated by it. Thing is, as a programmer I have been in denial about my surroundings really being that 'stupid', and refusing to accept it. But it's blindingly obvious, and I've known it all along. I think you (well, Joel) just saved a good chunk of my sanity going forward.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones
Posted Dec 26, 2012 22:29 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
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The implications for the design phase are fairly important too.
Our UX person prototypes things with pieces of paper printed in a haphazard way. Instead of a flashy series of screens, the users are looking at pieces of paper they can cut up with scissors or scribble on with a pencil, and as Joel points out, they can't help but notice that none of this _exists_ yet, it's just pieces of paper and so they don't get the erroneous impression that it's set in stone and asking to change it will mean a delay or increased costs.
The haphazard printing also means when your question is "Is this phrasing clear?" or "How should these things be grouped?" you don't get feedback about typography, iconography, image formats, or how slow the demo machine is.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones
Posted Dec 27, 2012 9:31 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
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I had a boss that had an incredible difficulty with that. Whenever I built an electronic prototype, he wanted to ship it, and I had to explain that the thing did not work, just gave the illusion of working... And then he wanted to know why I was "wasting my time" with the prototype...