I enjoy listening to Bach’s Cello Sonatas when I’m coding, surfing the net, or writing.. The album is playing even now. The music has a magical quality and it took me a while to realize what that is. The answer is logic and simplicity. The same basic pattern is repeated multiple times with different embellishments. As I was pondering this, I started thinking about Sha’s paper and controlling complexity with simplicity. Bach would probably have found it very interesting.

Sha says “we can exploit the features and performance of complex software even if we cannot verify them, provided we can guarantee the critical requirements with simple software.” Bach’s sonatas are the musical equivalent to this software-related statement. Each has a beautifully simple core melody which is surrounded by increasingly complex variations at each repetition. It is this core that makes the piece work, providing continuity and a firm base on which everything else can rest. The extra pieces are perfectly crafted, but they don’t need to be. I can see a musician improvising on them without breaking the overall structure.

The first time I read Sha’s paper, it didn’t quite click. It made sense, but there was something missing. Now, thanks to music written three centuries ago, I can understand it better and hopefully apply the principles in my work.

So I pulled out my old faithful Radio Shack EC-4027 programmable scientific calculator and had a good look at it. There are four rows of function keys above the number pad, with an additional level of functionality over and under each key, including the numbers and all operators. This thing can aparently do integrals, logic, binary, hex, and oct notation, and calculate statistics. And it’s not even a graphing calculator. I’ve used it extensively during my high school and undergraduate studies, which were heavy on mathematics, but have I touched even 25% of its capability? What do “FSE” and “M.CK” mean anyway? I suspect that I could have been just fine with a simpler model. Looking at it now, I still feel a sense of satisfaction peeking through sheer bewilderment.

This week, I had a chance to play with the new Apple operating system, which in my opinion is suffering from feature-creep. How many ways should there be to display search results? I got lost very quickly, and all I really wanted was to find a file by name. In its defense, I have to say that Leopard is well designed and reasonably intuitive. If I really wanted, I would have probably figured out the search features just by poking around.

I agree with the article that it’s really hard to provide as much funcionality (value for money) as possible without making a product unusable. People like gadgets and buttons, but when do you stop? How many tool bars should an application have? How many keys, clicks, shortcuts, and commands should accomplish the same task? I have a feeling that there is no good answer and that I will most likely spend the rest of my career trying to figure this out.

There’s also a very interesting analogy about buying medications. An average person doesn’t have the knowledge to assess whether or not a drug is safe to use or not, but if it is a prescription, they can be sure that it has been endorsed by the FDA. Personally, I would rather pay a bit more for prescription vitamins rather than buy them over the counter because the over the counter ones are not regulated. Back on subject, there is no equivalent of the FDA in the computer software world and no way for a product to be certified.

Having an overseeing entity for the software industry is quite intriguing. Of course, it’ll probably never happen. Still, if I was going to buy a text editor, or a cell phone, or any other product that has some software running it, I would feel a whole lot better if it had a sticker saying “Certified.” This would be especially comforting if the sticker was present on a side of an airplane, or an ATM, or a medical device. On the down side, getting any software into production would take a lot longer because of all the testing and certification issues. But, it would create more jobs too. Someone has to verify that the product meets standards.

The article proposes “standards blending,” a way to pick and choose bits of different standards that fit a particular product. They say that “if the goal is to demonstrate that a system cannot exhibit behavior A under conditions X, Y, and Z, it might be necessary to tap into several different standards and abide by their requirements to obtain the evidence of meeting the intent.”

In my opinion, it is dangerous to take bits and pieces from different standards to make one that fits. Each standard, such as IEEE 1473, is developed over a long period of time, with a lot of work and testing. It is the way it is for a reason, and if a product needs to be IEEE 1473 compliant, it should comply with the whole thing. Going back to the FDA analogy, a drug could be compliant with regulations except that it uses a chemical in the shell coloring that hasn’t been fully tested. If such a drug was allowed to go to market, then it would set precedent for other deviations and eventually ruin the FDA credibility.

A manager may demand respect from his/her employees but show none in return. Or, he may treat them well during a meeting with upper management, but disrespect them in day to day work. An employee at any level can appear to be nearly perfect to upper levels and outside contacts, but can be rude to his underlings. Then there’s also gossip, sabotage, lies, etc.

I think a person should strive to maintain personal integrity regardless of position in the company and treat everyone with respect, even if they feel that the recipient is not deserving of it. This is especially important for management and upper management because the higher up you are the more chance you have to make a difference and the more people notice what you say and do.

Dr. Maxwell writes that “People Do What People See”, if done right, can be a very strong motivational, training, mentoring, and values principle. If you want to motivate your staff to learn, take a course or learn from a textbook yourself. If you are mentoring someone, open up your life and let them see how you handle the situations. It would be beneficial for you also because you’ll have to do the right thing. Dr. Maxwell writes that “a company might spend a great deal of time formulating impressive-sounding values statements and core beliefs, but these principles don’t mean anything unless the leaders in the company – from the corner office on down – model them consistently.” He also includes a quote from Paul O’Neil, who is a retired Alcoa chairman and former secretary of Treasury: “If people can find even trivial examples of deviation, those deviations will become the norm. You really have to be almost religious in making sure that you don’t do something someone can point to in a negative way.”

Part 1  Part 2

 There’s a lot of good information, but what I liked most is that agile makes it very hard to hide bad news. We’ve all been there. The project is going downhill, but you are too afraid to tell the boss. You try some heroics in desperate hopes of rescuing it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. When the boss finally hears of this, it is often too late to make changes to the project plan.

Agile makes progress very clear. As the team moves through iterations, everyone can see how much work was done, how much is left, and if the schedule is slipping. With this information readily available, management can make adjustments while there is still time.