Plan-B for Software Documentation

Two weeks ago I read a post on a software contractor mailing list, seeking candidates for usability testing of a government related software. The company was local and there was a reasonable compensation promised but most of all I was curious to see how such things are done. So I responded with an e-mail.

Tony Brown from SoftPlex responded promptly with a short questionnaire to test if I was a match for the software they wanted to test. I answered the few questions and seemed to get to the next round with a couple of more questions. I made the cut and was invited to a session at Monday morning 8am in Boston Downtown.

I arrived ahead of time at the testing facility, where I met Tony Brown in person. I was led to a room with a long table and a laptop and a few video cameras. The room was also equipped with a huge one sided mirror, the kinds you know from police movies in the interrogation room. I was asked to sign a form, consenting with being watched and filmed for the purposes of the the study. Then I was introduced what I should test and that it was the usability of the software under scrutiny, not my ability to succeed or fail. I had to fulfill a sequence of tasks on a website, mostly finding information. I was asked to speak aloud my thoughts and reactions.

For about an hour I tried to fulfill task, mostly assume you are looking for information about subject A. Where would you look and let us know when you think you found it or gave up. The atmosphere was comfortable and I didn’t feel intimidated by being watched. It was funny though to talk all you thoughts aloud.

After the session finished I asked Tony how many candidates he uses to make such a test. He replied that usually after 4 to 5 a pattern emerges that yields useful information. He said typical costs of such a usability study would be between $5,000 and $10,000 depending on the complexity of the questions and if one rents such a facility with the double sided mirror and cameras or does it at the clients premise with less equipment.

I can definitely say it was an interesting experience and I learned a bit about the value of usability testing. Based on my experience I’m heavily inclined to use his services, when the time is ripe to make my current project consumer ready.

Second day of BarCampBoston started out a bit slower. Many had not come back for a second day at least not very early. May be I missed some important sessions on the bar on the night before.

• Today I enjoyed a very energetic session about “Powerful, Pointed Presentations”. In essence cater to the emotions of your audience to get both halves of the listener’s brain involved. Also, the obligatory slide-show print-out should be avoided and replaced by a text document presented after the oral presentation has finished.
• It was also time to jump into the ring and educate fellow BarCampers about Open Document Format, why the State of Massachusetts did mandate it and what the role for OpenOffice.org is in this development. Unfortunately my session was at the same time as “Newbie on Rails”, which did draw the bulk of the crowd.
• More BarCampers were interested in the topic “Solving Spam by signing messages with PGP” which I offered. I have this idea in my head for more than two years and I wanted to here what other have to say about it. I think the basic issue with spam is the ability to falsify the sender. If all (or most) e-mail is signed with PGP, then everybody can filter on that signature (which can’t be falsified) and so determine if that e-mail is important to him or not. Here are some of the arguments:
  • You create your own signature, and publish the public key. Your signature becomes more trustworthy through other people signing it with their signature.
  • One also needs to be aware that by signing some else signature I do not claim this person is not a spammer. I only authenticate that he is who he says he is in the signature. All I verify is her name and her e-mail address. But this gives any recipient the ability to forcefully filter on that identity.
  • If we get to the point that most e-mail is signed and I mostly care about e-mail signed by a someone I know already, then I would blacklist all unknown senders. This can be solved by prioritizing e-mail according to the trust level of the signature and the distance between me and the closest signer of the signature to be checked.
  • One member of the audience did say that e-mail lists would brake the signature by adding their own footer, such as Yahoo. However, they can either add the footer in a mime compliant way or resign the message with their own key.
  • Another member pointed to HushMail having implemented an interesting PGP signed web-mail trust. I got to check this out soon.
  • Many agreed the key to such a system is two-fold
    • We need a wide spread filter, preferably a spamassassin filter. This filter needs to verify the signature of the e-mail and then use the trust vote in the my key-ring to apply the filter I defined.
    • The second component would be E-Mail clients, such as Thunderbird, to come integrated with PGP and the ability to create or load a PGP key with every profile one creates.

I really enjoyed this BarCamp and look forward to the next one. Mike Walsh said planning is in progress for one in fall 2006.

I want to thank Monster for hosting us and the other sponsors for making it possible. If one thing I would improve for next time, it is a better scheduling system, that is available via the net. Especially in the Monster location, where the event was spread out between three disjunct locations this would be a great plus.

Finally http://barcamp.org/BarCampBoston is here. I had high hopes going to Maynard and I was not disappointed. The crowd was mainly 25+ and had a slant to the professional, rather than the geek with college credentials. However, the first day was a lot of fun.

The folks from Monster Inc. welcomed us and we started the day with a breakfast, studying the big scheduling wall and watch it change every ten minutes as new events were posted and others were moved around. A good start was the introduction round, where a microphone was passed around and everybody who wanted introduced him- or herself shortly. The elevator speeches were definitely professionally presented.

• My first session around 11 am was called “From idea to realization”, held be Sudha Jamthe. She told the story of her remarkable experience raising 1 Mio in 40 days in the heydays of the bubble and what she learned how the VC and Angel investor world works. She said she sees many hopeful entrepreneurs who are hopeful because the some VC told them “If you improve this function on your software we can fund you”. She said in her experience this stage can last up to three years (with changing VCs in the process) and no successful funding. She said, you need to get at least one customer that buys the product to overcome this cycle. Her best advice was to not avoid the VCs but use their advice and do not pin your hope on the money. Sudha also said, the best advisers for a start-up are those former entrepreneurs that are back into some kind of corporate executive job. They are not focused on investing and money and they are not high paid professional advisers. But the miss the entrepreneurial spirit and if you can bring some of your enthusiasm to them it rewards them for helping you and sharing their wisdom with you. Off course your idea must catch fire in their mind. All around an excellent session.
• Shimon Rura, gave a thought provoking session about better UI’s. He applied some psychological insight to the topic. One that stuck in my head was give the user immediate reward. Every step must present some useful information. In other words avoid long navigations paths and query only forms. Instead list the most useful information right away and allow for further filtering or deeper navigation.
• Another excellent brainstorming session was held by Andy Singleton from Assembla. He wanted to explore the vision of a Software reactor. His basic assumption was that all resources, like people, talent, QA, code, etc. are abundant and if qualified in the right way and given the right incentives one could build an awesome virtual software organization (a software reactor). The crowd wasn’t really convinced that all resources are abundant and we tested this assumption quite a bit. I certainly had the feeling that Andy went home a step forward in his thought process of this issue (or should we call it a business model?).

All in all, the first day was shock full of great sessions and a multitude of one on one’s.

Read more about the second day at BarCamp Boston.

Laszlo Systems invites the Boston developer community to an evening of pizza, beer and OpenLaszlo AJAX development on Thursday, June 8th. They will present a preview of the new DHTML runtime for the OpenLaszlo platform and have the chance to meet other Laszlo advocates. Please register or sign up to present your latest OpenLaszlo project.

Who Should Attend
OpenLaszlo (LZX) newbies and seasoned Laszlo veterans alike are welcome.

Where and When
Optaros
60 Canal Street, 4th Floor (Map)
Boston, MA 02114
Phone: (617) 227-1855

Cost: Free. Pizza, beer and non-alcoholic drinks will be provided by Laszlo Systems.

June 1st was once again PHP Meetup Boston night. Mark Withington, the organizer had invited Mike Potter from Adobe’s Developer Relations team to present about the upcoming Flex 2.0 web-application framework and how to use it with PHP back-end applications. Mike gave an impressive overview of Flex 2.0 and how easy it is to create impressive user interfaces with a few lines of xml and ActionScript.

Here is what I took away from this meeting:

1. Flex 2.0 is a really impressive development and expected to be out within the next 60 days. See for yourself, what Mike did with Flex2.0 and Drupal. He also demonstrated an open source PHP-Flex bridge, called AMFPHP. Flex 2.0 competes with open source projects such as OpenLaszlo and ZK1. However, Mike thinks it is the stronger platform. He said that a basic command line SDK will be free and the Flex 2.0 developer IDE based on Eclipse will be less than $1000 per developer license.
2. Mike described another project that my interest. The project is called Adobe Apollo and is expected to come out by the end of the year. He described it as a stand alone flash application engine, that can be used to package Flash (and Flex) based applications to be installed on a user’s desktop. The really cool statement to me was that it also should run AJAX based applications.
3. Mike also did a cool demo of 3D objects embedded in PDF documents and animated through JavaScript. He showed off an impressive 3D rendering of a turbine which he was able to pan and rotate as well as to have the turbine wheel spinning, while doing so. And all this in a 300K document you can e-mail and print (w/o the animation off course).
4. Triggered by a question from the audience, Mike briefly introduced Adobe’s AJAX framework, called Spry. This also looks very powerful and I have to revisit this topic, once I learned a bit more about it.

This was an evening really well spent. I learned a lot and met a bunch of great people. If you are a PHP developer or a software developer in Boston, I highly recommend to go to the PHP Meetup.