Telecommunications Software and Services Entrepreneur. Small Company CEO.
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Installing

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But still, my scheme for creating and saving user config files and data locally to preserve them across reinstalls might be useful for--wait, that's cookies.
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SalientVoice
3854 days ago
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And blogs.
Delray Beach, Florida USA
superiphi
3865 days ago
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ha :)
Idle, Bradford, United Kingdom
aaronwe
3866 days ago
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Now if they'd just invent a mobile RSS reader that shows alt-text on xkcd cartoons. :-P
Denver
samuel
3865 days ago
Pretty sure Android's going to see this feature first.
aaronwe
3864 days ago
Nice! Although I do appreciate the tradition of someone posting the alt text as a comment for everyone on mobile.
marcrichter
3867 days ago
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Hah! :D
tbd
yeeliberto
3867 days ago
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The funny thing is people complain there is no app for their phone about some website. Maybe they need to know about a RSS reader.
PaulPritchard
3867 days ago
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You can't reinvent the wheel too many times.
Belgium
jtgrimes
3867 days ago
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Alt text: But still, my scheme for creating and saving user config files and data locally to preserve them across reinstalls might be useful for--wait, that's cookies.
Oakland, CA

WHERE’S THE FUN IN THAT? A startlingly simple theory about that missing Malaysian Airlines jet….

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WHERE’S THE FUN IN THAT? A startlingly simple theory about that missing Malaysian Airlines jet.

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SalientVoice
3921 days ago
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Plausible.
Delray Beach, Florida USA

Carney: "We Don't Have Specific Data" For People Who Have Paid Obamacare Premiums

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QUESTION: You started out by saying 5 million people have enrolled. Is that the correct word, "enrolled," since we still don't know how many people have actually paid their premiums. Is it that 5 million signed up, will we get the information on who is actually enrolled and paid their premiums?  CARNEY: CMS is working to provide more detailed data on who had already paid their premiums, what percentage of the population of enrollees that includes. We can point you to major insurers who have placed that figure at 80 percent, give-or-take, depending on the insurer, but we don't have specific data that is going to be in a reliable enough form to provide.

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SalientVoice
3921 days ago
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Which of course also means that you can't know if someone is covered when they walk into a doctors office.
Delray Beach, Florida USA

Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality

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Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company.

The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline explain their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.”

I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees.

In the early days of print, you had to understand the tech to run the organization. (Ben Franklin, the man who made America a media hothouse, called himself Printer.) But in the 19th century, the printing press became domesticated. Printers were no longer senior figures — they became blue-collar workers. And the executive suite no longer interacted with them much, except during contract negotiations.

This might have been nothing more than a previously hard job becoming easier, Hallelujah. But most print companies took it further. Talking to the people who understood the technology became demeaning, something to be avoided. Information was to move from management to workers, not vice-versa (a pattern that later came to other kinds of media businesses as well.) By the time the web came around and understanding the technology mattered again, many media executives hadn’t just lost the habit of talking with their own technically adept employees, they’d actively suppressed it.

I’d long forgotten about that meeting and those looks of contempt (I stopped building websites before most people started) until the launch of Healthcare.gov.

* * *

For the first couple of weeks after the launch, I assumed any difficulties in the Federal insurance market were caused by unexpected early interest, and that once the initial crush ebbed, all would be well. The sinking feeling that all would not be well started with this disillusioning paragraph about what had happened when a staff member at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the department responsible for Healthcare.gov, warned about difficulties with the site back in March. In response, his superiors told him…

[...] in effect, that failure was not an option, according to people who have spoken with him. Nor was rolling out the system in stages or on a smaller scale, as companies like Google typically do so that problems can more easily and quietly be fixed. Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law.

The idea that “failure is not an option” is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers. That sentiment was invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13; no one said it at the time. (If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.) Even NASA’s vaunted moonshot, so often referred to as the best of government innovation, tested with dozens of unmanned missions first, several of which failed outright.

Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying “Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.”

* * *

The management question, when trying anything new, is “When does reality trump planning?” For the officials overseeing Healthcare.gov, the preferred answer was “Never.” Every time there was a chance to create some sort of public experimentation, or even just some clarity about its methods and goals, the imperative was to avoid giving deny the opposition anything to criticize.

At the time, this probably seemed like a way of avoiding early failures. But the project’s managers weren’t avoiding those failures. They were saving them up. The actual site is worse—far worse—for not having early and aggressive testing. Even accepting the crassest possible political rationale for denying opponents a target, avoiding all public review before launch has given those opponents more to complain about than any amount of ongoing trial and error would have.

In his most recent press conference about the problems with the site, the President ruefully compared his campaigns’ use of technology with Healthcare.gov:

And I think it’s fair to say that we have a pretty good track record of working with folks on technology and IT from our campaign, where, both in 2008 and 2012, we did a pretty darn good job on that. [...] If you’re doing it at the federal government level, you know, you’re going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other and there’s all kinds of law involved. And it makes it more difficult — it’s part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs are over budget, behind schedule.

It’s certainly true that Federal IT is chronically challenged by its own processes. But the biggest problem with Healthcare.gov was not timeline or budget. The biggest problem was that the site did not work, and the administration decided to launch it anyway.

This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem. The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.

Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.

This is a perfect fit for a culture that communicates in the deontic language of legislation. It is also a dreadful way to make new technology. If there is no room for learning by doing, early mistakes will resist correction. If the people with real technical knowledge can’t deliver bad news up the chain, potential failures get embedded rather than uprooted as the work goes on.

At the same press conference, the President also noted the degree to which he had been kept in the dark:

OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.

Healthcare.gov is a half-billion dollar site that was unable to complete even a thousand enrollments a day at launch, and for weeks afterwards. As we now know, programmers, stakeholders, and testers all expressed reservations about Healthcare.gov’s ability to do what it was supposed to do. Yet no one who understood the problems was able to tell the President. Worse, every senior political figure—every one—who could have bridged the gap between knowledgeable employees and the President decided not to.

And so it was that, even on launch day, the President was allowed to make things worse for himself and his signature program by bragging about the already-failing site and inviting people to log in and use something that mostly wouldn’t work. Whatever happens to government procurement or hiring (and we should all hope those things get better) a culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn’t well equipped to try new things.

* * *

With a site this complex, things were never going to work perfectly the first day, whatever management thought they were procuring. Yet none of the engineers with a grasp of this particular reality could successfully convince the political appointees to adopt the obvious response: “Since the site won’t work for everyone anyway, let’s decide what tests to run on the initial uses we can support, and use what we learn to improve.”

In this context, testing does not just mean “Checking to see what works and what doesn’t.” Even the Healthcare.gov team did some testing; it was late and desultory, but at least it was there. (The testers recommended delaying launch until the problems were fixed. This did not happen.) Testing means seeing what works and what doesn’t, and acting on that knowledge, even if that means contradicting management’s deeply held assumptions or goals. In well run organizations, information runs from the top down and from the bottom up.

One of the great descriptions of what real testing looks like comes from Valve software, in a piece detailing the making of its game Half-Life. After designing a game that was only sort of good, the team at Valve revamped its process, including constant testing:

This [testing] was also a sure way to settle any design arguments. It became obvious that any personal opinion you had given really didn’t mean anything, at least not until the next test. Just because you were sure something was going to be fun didn’t make it so; the testers could still show up and demonstrate just how wrong you really were.

“Any personal opinion you had given really didn’t mean anything.” So it is in the government; an insistence that something must work is worthless if it actually doesn’t.

An effective test is an exercise in humility; it’s only useful in a culture where desirability is not confused with likelihood. For a test to change things, everyone has to understand that their opinion, and their boss’s opinion, matters less than what actually works and what doesn’t. (An organization that isn’t learning from its users has decided it doesn’t want to learn from its users.)

Given examples of technological success from commercial firms, a common response is that the government has special constraints, and thus cannot develop projects piecemeal, test with citizens, or learn from its mistakes in public. I was up at the Kennedy School a month after the launch, talking about technical leadership and Healthcare.gov, when one of the audience members made just this point, proposing that the difficult launch was unavoidable, because the government simply couldn’t have tested bits of the project over time.

That observation illustrates the gulf between planning and reality in political circles. It is hard for policy people to imagine that Healthcare.gov could have had a phased rollout, even while it is having one.

At launch, on October 1, only a tiny fraction of potential users could actually try the service. They generated concrete errors. Those errors were handed to a team whose job was to improve the site, already public but only partially working. The resulting improvements are incremental, and put in place over a period of months. That is a phased rollout, just one conducted in the worst possible way.

The vision of “technology” as something you can buy according to a plan, then have delivered as if it were coming off a truck, flatters and relieves managers who have no idea and no interest in how this stuff works, but it’s also a breeding ground for disaster. The mismatch between technical competence and executive authority is at least as bad in government now as it was in media companies in the 1990s, but with much more at stake.

* * *

Tom Steinberg, in his remembrance of his brilliant colleague Chris Lightfoot, said this about Lightfoot’s view of government and technology:

[W]hat he fundamentally had right was the understanding that you could no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t understand technology in the same way they grasp economics or ideology or propaganda. His analysis and predictions about what would happens if elites couldn’t learn were savage and depressingly accurate.

Now, and from now on, government will interact with its citizens via the internet, in increasingly important ways. This is a non-partisan issue; whichever party is in the White House will build and launch new forms of public service online. Unfortunately for us, the last new technology the government adopted for interacting with citizens was the fax; our senior political figures have little habit of talking to their own technically adept employees.

If I had to design a litmus test for whether our political class grasps the internet, I would look for just one signal: Can anyone with authority over a new project articulate the tradeoff between features, quality, and time?

When a project cannot meet all three goals—a situation Healthcare.gov was clearly in by March—something will give. If you want certain features at a certain level of quality, you’d better be able to move the deadline. If you want overall quality by a certain deadline, you’d better be able to simplify, delay, delay or drop features. And if you have a fixed feature list and deadline, quality will suffer.

Intoning “Failure is not an option” will be at best useless, and at worst harmful. There is no “Suddenly Go Faster” button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks.

Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.

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SalientVoice
4035 days ago
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Well said. But also a metaphorical indictment of operationalizing society through legislation (central planning) and sustaining it through legislative process (rather than dynamism).
Delray Beach, Florida USA
acdha
4039 days ago
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“Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.”
Washington, DC
gazuga
4038 days ago
Also: "An effective test is an exercise in humility; it’s only useful in a culture where desirability is not confused with likelihood."
acdha
4038 days ago
That's great, too – I read that piece wanting to make a bunch of signs for past workplaces…
adamgurri
4039 days ago
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Fantastic.
New York, NY
tewhalen
4039 days ago
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Seems almost correct. I think it's telling, though, that many engineering types seem to think that political or legal constraints aren't *real* constraints.
chicago, il
adamgurri
4039 days ago
Shirky isn't really an engineering type. If you read his works it's more social science than engineering.
acdha
4039 days ago
I didn't really get the idea that he was rejecting political or legal constraints but rather the way people interpret them as requiring known-bad waterfall thinking — which, by sheerest coincidence, means the senior managers don't have to learn anything new and can blame workers rather than the project structure.

Demanding slower development cycles for apps

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Now!

Daniel Jalkut discusses the rate of software/app updates in Stagnation Or Stability?:

As an onlooker, it’s easy to associate dramatic change and motion with competence, and quiet refinement with laziness. We must draw on our own experiences attempting to build great things to appreciate how much work takes place in stillness, to have faith that even though things may appear stagnant, a benefit of frictionlessness is resulting. An app at rest may be in that long, arduous phase of becoming finely crafted.

Daniel’s post is a response to the recent Michael Lopp article R.I.P. Things, in which he explains that he’s dropping Things as his productivity app mainly because of its lack of updates. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. How our expectations about app pricing and rate of change is placing unfair (and damaging) unproductive) pressure on developers to release new versions of their apps constantly — even if it’s just change for the sake of change.

The other unintended consequence of this never-ending update cycle is that we’re starting to see evidence of what Chris Bowler calls App Fatigue:

I must admit, I’ve felt a bit of what I term app fatigue in the past year. What is this? Simply the lack of desire to either a) pay for another version of an app I already own or b) go through the steps required to update this app and become accustomed to the changes.

My own feelings about this remain wildly erratic at the moment. Sometimes I’m on Michael’s side. Like most people I was champing at the bit for Tweetbot 3, and as much as I appreciated the “It’ll be ready when it’s ready” line, my impatience got the better of me. Yesterday Apple “finally” updated their last built-in app for iOS 7. But we’re still stuck with an ugly WhatsApp, orphaned versions of OmniFocus, Tweetbot and Instapaper for iPad, and a Foursquare that hasn’t been updated in weeks — weeks, I tell you. What up with that? I turned off automatic app updates because I love going to the App Store and checking what wonderful new things I’m going to get today.

And then, at other times, I’m with Chris Bowler. OmniFocus runs my life, so I shouldn’t complain about paying $20 for the gorgeous new iPhone version, but it ended up being quite the grudge purchase. Same with Fantastical 2. And I know that my insatiable hunger for new features every day is probably doing more damage than good. Because Daniel is right: “An app at rest may be in that long, arduous phase of becoming finely crafted.” But if we show up at a developers’ doors with pitchforks every couple of weeks, demanding our new features, there is no time for the app to be at rest. Eventually, Experience Rot will set in, and it will be our fault:

As more features are added, it becomes harder to make the overall design coherent and sensical. Soon features are crammed into corners that don’t make sense.

I guess I’m preaching to myself here. I’m hoping to convince myself to be a bit more patient with app developers, and give them the time they need to slow down and refine.

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SalientVoice
4039 days ago
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Interestingly, I sense that this is what's driving Apple iOS development. I saw the iOS 7 release as polishing.
Delray Beach, Florida USA

The U.S. Government is Developing A Useful Software Engineering Management Case Study

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Obamacare’s tech rollout has crashed. As a software CEO with lots of software background and absolutely no insight into the actual Obamacare project, I’m regardless noticing a couple quick lessons peeking out from the media noise. They largely point to some failures in project governance.  So in that spirit, here’s a couple tests from which to assess the software projects that are presented to you. Actually these tests derive from very old lessons in building software systems … this is just a new chance to air them out.

1.   Dates without details. It would appear that lawmakers set deliverable dates without a functional scope for the software system (or even a defined technology architecture). Further, over the first couple years of the software effort, lawmakers were still changing policy, the functional requirements, and other externalities regarding the system. This next statement is painfully obvious to software managers but it needs to be said:  you can’t set a reliable date for your dev teams if you don’t have a functional scope. 

2.   Change without costs.  Functional requirements can and do change. Software design is iterative learning and adaptation. This is unremarkable. But there are always costs to changes. These costs show up as a slipped dates, productivity reductions from software refactoring and regression testing, software architecture problems (including performance and scalability) from not being able to restructure the foundations to accommodate change, and quality problems from increased fragmentation of software testing (or the minimization of testing for schedule reasons). If your system is “evolving” and costs and dates are not moving you should worry. 

3.   Resources to get acceleration. Massive resources don’t necessarily yield proportional increases in software development outcomes. This Obamacare dev effort has been remarkeably expensive and resource intensive.  Here is something that has been long understood in software development.  Fredrick Brooks defined it.  He developed the idea of The Mythical Man Month (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) a few years back. Metaphorically it states as untrue the following:  if one woman can make a baby in 9 months, then nine women should be able to make a baby in one month.  On a more practical level, the deployment of people on your software projects at some point will increase your coordination costs without accelerating the project (it can even slow it down). The trick is how to figure out that tipping point. There was a natural or optimal time frame by which to deliver this health care software platform.

4.   Numbers and diversity of stakeholders (and use cases).  It’s hard to model economic systems in software. Software cannot have infinite and changing use cases. Even if it can they won't all be in Release 1.0. So you must constrain the software. It must do less. But if you do less, the software will naturally constrain choices within the economic system and thus make it less complex, less dynamic, less innovative, and less adopted or even avoided. You must whittle down the core stakeholders and use cases for a first phase project. This national health care systems project seems like a government version of the 1990’s era of the mega-ERP software projects. This era saw massive corporate spending on meta enterprise resource planning systems and related process reengineering (along with lots of consultants of course). Then one day it became apparent that a focus on integrations and middleware between disparate smaller best of breed systems was better than deployment and retro-fitting of large monolithic platforms.

5.  Staged Rollouts. They just threw the big red switch to "on" for zillions of people. Very brave. In the real world, you stage rollouts of software to mitigate risks. If your development team goes for an all or nothing deployment, it's important to remember that one bug delivered to 310 million peoples is, well, millions of customer support phone calls (and then lots and lots and lots of marketing to overcome the ill will). Your simple management rule is this: the cost of bugs grow exponentially after they get deployed to customers. Look carefully at the scope of your team's testing and the open bugs before software rollouts. And regardless, stage software rollouts to an initially small but expanding group of customers, while incrementally fixing and extending the software features. 

6.  Scalability and performance. It’s clear that server capacity planning and volume stress testing was insufficient for Obamacare (or alternatively and less generously the planning was sufficient, the problems were indicated, and it was rolled it out anyway).  More generally, when a system cannot handle user transaction volume, there are several possible reasons; the first involves the technology and tool stack used to build the software, the second is the software and data base design itself, and the third is network and server environment.  Working backwards, money solves network and server problem easily, then software re-engineering will slowly (but at some expense) improve performance (unless structural software rewrites are required), and a bad software development tech stack decision is a disaster and points to a redo (bad choices include wrong programming languages, wrong data base technology, tool sets, etc). 

I’m sure there’s more.  What’s interesting about these tests is that any world class software engineering manager knows them.  So the Obamacare team either hired poorly for project governance, organized such that the project management could not control the processes and resources (and therefore outcomes), or management simply overruled the dev teams. So management vision has once again met engineering realities. And once again engineering realities have one.  Taxpayer dollars are helping write a great software project management case study!! 

 

 

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