Matt Heusser’s Blog
Testing at the Edge of Chaos
How we make decisions
Last week, Apple announced it’s iPad. If you haven’t heard the annoucement, you can go watch the eight-minute YouTube advertisement, or Steve Job’s 30-minute public announcement. It’s okay. It’s worth it, and I can wait.
… time passes …
Now, I didn’t come away from that video wanting to buy an iPad – it’s for consumers, people who surf the web, watch video, listen to tunes, etc. My focus is less on consuming and more on putting out new material. So it’s designed to support an entirely different group of people.
No, what I wanted to do was to buy shares of Apple Computer Corporation.
Which brings me to the topic of today’s blog post – how we make decisions. You see, we like to think that we make decisions rationally, in a sort of cold, hard, unemotional way. Line up the pros and cons, evaluate each one, and off we go.
But it’s not like that all. Sure, we may use facts to guide our decision making, but even then, as my friend Michael Bolton likes to point out, we tend to decide on how we feel about those facts. For example: Tell any executive that you expect 80% of your paying “members” to renew next year, or that you expect 20% to not renew, and you’ll likely get two different reactions.
So here are the facts I responded to about the iPad:
(1) Apple computer has a history of integrating it’s hardware and software offerings – the iTunes store, for example, has both music and video. Downloadable books seem like the next logical step.
(2) Amazon’s Kindle product has proved the market for a book-reading device. I also have some confidence that Apple can do it better; after all, they’ve been a hardware/sw company from year one. (There is even an old “kindle 3″ parody, worried about the dumbing-down of society that ends with tag line “It plays movies instead of books”)
(3) Apple has a history of innovation, new products, and even new categories. The iPod, for example, has sold 250 million copies – and Apple is incredibly good with price points and using new technology, to get users to upgrade every two to four years. The have a fan base so strong that, as another parody claimed “I’ll buy almost anything that is shiny and made by Apple.”
Sounds like strong reasons to invest right?
Well, there is another side. About a year ago I got another device – a netbook. It was shiny, small, a neat. It was also slow and hard to sync my files back and forth from different devices. Within a few months, I realized that I had a thin, small, cheap laptop. It wasn’t a category killer at all.
Moreover, Apple has been hyped lately; it’s trading very close to it’s 52-week high, which could mean it’s over-priced. If the iPad doesn’t take off, it might just be time for Apple’s stock to a hit. And Apple does have misses, or at least near misses – remember the MacBook Air?
If I wanted to, I could easily line up a set of facts against Apple just as strong as the reasons for investing it. On some level, investing is a bet that involves prediction, and telling the future accurately is probably best left to the weather guy on channel eight … but don’t go out past a couple days; then things start to get fuzzy.
But there is one more trick to decision making: If you know the value system or the culture and a little basic information, the decision they will reach is often predictable. I won’t say it’s entirely satisfying, but I have said to senior managers and executives things like “when nine months go by and this software hasn’t shipped, you can always call me” or “If this software doesn’t exist by February, just ask me and I can build something that can ship in a month.” (Both of those organizations had cultures that led to analysis paralysis.)
Most of us gather information in a way that leans toward Organic or Mechanic. When we have enough information to make a decision, the additional facts don’t matter – we rationalize them to fit the decision we have already made.
In that case, gathering additional facts is a kind of waste.
And that knowledge helps me make my own decision.
So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to purchase some stock in Apple Computer.
A few of my favorite things – IV
As a thought experiment, I would like to describe nation at a point in time. I’ll let you figure out the nation and time …
-> The country was once, uncontested, the most powerful in the world
-> … But it became embroiled in foreign wars
-> Became dependent on foreign military assistance
-> Created an oppressive tax structure
-> Increased the rift between the haves and the have-nots
-> Moved from a manufacturing economy to an entertainment economy
-> Saw a decline in family values and traditional morality
-> Saw a decline in math and science education
No, I am not talking about the United States of America in the 20th Century – I am talking about the Roman Empire in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and fourth centuries.
Actually, if you enjoy little compare/contrast exercises from history, you might enjoy Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Although the wording is long-winded and archaic (it was printed in 1788), the information is very insightful.
If you want the dessert without slugging through thousands of pages, there is an Gibbon’s abridged version on Amazon that you can read on a plane ride.
Why is Decline and Fall one of my favorite tools? That’s a tough question. A few months back when I was creating this list and sharing it with a few close associates, Harry Robinson went as far as to challenge me, writing:
A question: are those really your favorite testing tools, or do they mainly make for quirky talk material (especially the Gibbons)?
I suppose that is a resonable concern. There are plenty of testing “experts” who are all flash and little substance. Then again, what do tools do, if not enable you to do better work in less time? So I suppose a valid question would be having read the decline and fall, what would you do differently?
Start out with me worried about the state of my nation, and it’s future. Decline and Fall paints one way that the fall could happen. The decline in math and science education is especially worrisome to me. Yet when I look at the formula for our educational system, which is a lot of low-to-middling paying jobs that are provide considerable job security, high student-to-teacher ratios, heavyweight teaching methods established by a federal bureaucracy, “objective” standardized tests that teach facts and not evaluation … I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
I don’t see an easy answer. Next year, my elder daughter will be KinderGarten age, and she will probably do that at home, which will probably continue throughout elementary school.
Home Schooling? Really? Five years ago, that was not even on our rader. Thank you, Henry Gibbons.
A Few Of My Favorite Things – IV
I am vaguely disorganized.
No, please don’t jump out of your seat and tell me that I “Have” to get more organized.
I don’t buy it. I’ve run a successful regional software conference with my methods; they seem to be doing just fine.
I used to tell a story about how I felt bad or guilty for being so disorganized, until I saw David Parker’s Office at Salisbury University. Dr. Parker was is one of the best problem solvers I have ever met, and he had literally two feet of paper covering his entire office. He was promoted to Department Chair the year after I met him.
Yet many of the organization folks still don’t buy it. That was an exception; being “Organized” is “right.”
Ok, I’ll try again. One more time: My creative output is an order of magnitude higher than any ‘organization evangelist’ that I have ever met. When I read storys of Euler, Guass, Einstein, Joedel, Escher, Newton … they sound a lot more like me than the organization people.
Personally, I value the Creative Chaos. Heck, it’s the name of my blog.
At the same time, I recognize the consequences of that kind of thought-life style. Things do get missed. Things do get forgotten. When I get an idea in my head (a hundred years ago, they would say “when the muse strikes”) I zone out of the real world until I can get the idea down, or, worse, I lose the idea.
Ugh.
So here’s the tool of the day: 3×5 Index Cards.
I use index cards for everything.
Blog ideas
Testing ideas
Managing evolving requirements
Moving from a vague and floofy requirement to something concrete
Getting those concrete requirements in some sort of priority
Article ideas
Presentation ideas
Bullets points
Things to come back to
Groceries to pick up on the way home
Things to not forget
No, they aren’t organized. My ’system’ consists of the blank cards, a wallet-like holder, and a place to stick finished cards. I also have a box for requirements cards.
There are piles of index cards all over, and things still get lost, but less things get lost, and I can swap ideas out of my head with less fear of losing them.
For me, index cards aren’t an organization strategy; they are a way to compensate for my lack of organization.
My next step will probably be to get a notebook, so there is a sense of order and history to the notes; this might help me recollect ideas later. The problem is that the notebook will have to be about the size of a PDA, or I won’t carry it with me …
Still, today’s favorite tool is a 3×5 index cards. If you want one single ridiculously cheap tool to start trying today, there’s my number one suggestion.
A few of my favorite things – III
I promise to talk about testing tools, so next up is a Digital
Voice Recorder with PC Link. This particular model records and transfers to PC in WAV format, which can be converted to MP3 with any tool such as Audacity.
Here’s the backstory:
When I started by career, occasionally I heard decisions that didn’t seem to make sense that would require code change. Several times I put comments in the code like this:
//On 12/20/1997, Bob Smith directed that
//the HMO and PPO business
//should be treated identically
//for purposes of BAH.
Of course, six months later, some one would ask why we were treating HMO and PPO the same, and it wouldn’t be in the requirements, and I would dig out that comment.
That never helped me. Ever. Really – Bob would say “Gee, I don’t remember telling you that” and nothing would change. I would still have to change the code, and the department still had “Egg on it’s face.” (Or some other analogy)
About a year ago I got a voice recorder to record presentations and podcasts and such, but I started using them as a requirements technique about nine months ago. At the beginning of the meeting, I make it clear that the purpose of the recorder is for my own notes, that I will *NOT* be using the recordings as a conversation. At the end of the conversation, if we have changed a policy, I turn the recorder on again and do a formal one, where we have a short discussion about the change, the pros and cons, the final decision, and who is involved. I ask “Do I have the right decision makers in the room?” and get verbal agreement.
THAT recording gets checked into version control, right next to the requirements doc.
Those kinds of discussion are easy to capture, easy to throw away, and I have found that anyone in the room can use a voice recorder – regardless of title.
But here’s the secret – even if I promise to throw away the notes, we behave differently when we know we are being recorded. We tend to think things through a little bit more and come to a better decision.
That is the real purpose of the device; not as a CYA tool when someone makes a bad off-the-cuff decision, but as a prevention technique, to make sure we make the right decision in the first place.
Now that is worth the seventy bucks.
A Few Of My Favorite Things – II
If you watch enough presentations, you start to see things that detract from the message. The speaker has to plug in, power up, and press control-shift-F9 a bunch of times. He has to try to make smalltalk in this period – smalltalk that he didn’t expect to do. During the talk, he may have to turn around to face the screen (away from the audience) to read the bullet points. Another annoyance is when the speaker only reads the bullet points; the information tends to come out clipped and awkward. (See Peter Norvig’s hypothetical If Lincoln had PowerPoint for an example)
My take on that is that if all the speaker is going to do is read the bullet points, I might as well have downloaded the powerpoint from his website and saved the conference fee.
More than annoyances, some things just cause an awkward pause in the discussion. Drinking a glass of water can be natural, but powerpoint forces some things, like slide transitions, to be awkward. The speaker finishes his thought and has to walk over to the laptop, click the down button, and check to see if it worked; or worse yet, spend the entire talk in front of the podium to avoid that problem.
Or, for fifty bucks, you could get a
Wireless Presenter
That particular model comes with a laster pointer; mine doesn’t have the laser pointer, but they can be helpful and you only save ten bucks by skipping that.
Or course, when I use these, I turn my head to verify that the slide worked, but that’s about it. Occasionally, I have accidentally advanced a slide when I didn’t want to, and not noticed it until later.
Still, it’s a tool that helps make the presentation seamless, and it’s cheap and small, and it’s not a trick or manipulation.
That’s enough presentation tools for now. Tomorrow: Testing tools …
A few of my favorite things – I
I’d like to start a short series on my favorite tools. No fluff, just stuff.
Tool #1: Google Reader. This is like TiVo for blogs. You search for, find, and list your favorite blogs, and it updates itself with a GMail like interface when new posts come out. Because Google indexs, well, everything, you can have it notify you when any website changes.
If you’ve avoided using an RSS-feed reader because they can be annoying or weren’t mature yet, try Gooder Reader.
Of course, it is free.
