The Inmates Are Running The Asylum- Chapters 3-5

I don't remember if we had color or not... but, why not?

The Inmates Are Running The Asylum: Alan Cooper
Summary

We're readings Part II of Inmates, "Wasting Money", "Dancing Bear", and "Customer Disloyalty". As an aside, Inmates was published in 1999 according to Amazon. I was probably in the 6th grade in 1999. My school still had labs with the old IBM two 5 1/4" floppy computers with Oregon Trail. I feel like things may have changed between then and now. A lot.

Wasting Money talks about how development can spin through a million dollars quickly. And rambles. The core seems to be "management will try to force a deadline, development will say 'ok, but we're cutting these things', management says yes, and somewhere in the middle the vital feature doesn't get coded". This all happens because management through a deadline out, and everyone tried to stick to it. I think. He then moves on to say that iteration is the evil cancer within modern development practice.

Dancing Bear seems to summarize how various categories of software fail, and how they could be made better. I think part of this may also be saying that web applications are a fad.

Customer Disloyalty talks about customers and what the customer wants. Kind of. It starts off by looking at what makes a product "good", ie is it viable, capable of being produced, and desirable to an end user. Desirability isn't something that can be easily retrofitted, and without it from the start the entire software piece wanders into the forbidden territory of god-awful software. He goes on to list 3 companies and how they relate on the tri-axis of good software, and apparently Apple has been known for integrating design for a long time. Who knew?


Discussion:
1. Why is this paper interesting or significant?
It has decent business advice- you don't want to give a user a product that leaves a bad taste in their mouth, whether or not you're the only one that can offer a given product or service.

2. What are the faults of this work?
When I'm reading this book I feel like it's all based on logical fallacies and failures in communication. The differentiation between features and goals, feels like its based on a misunderstanding of features- it feels like he's saying "Ohh yes, your product spec will say 'runs in IE, Chrome, etc', 'has user accounts', etc", when most of the specs I've worked within are more "How is the user going to use the system".

I don't think he has a basis for his statements on iterative development. It sounds like he comes from ye olden times when you spent 2 years in development in a black box and then released... which isn't the case for a lot of software today.

Retrospecting on it, I feel like the discussion of survivors is more tailored to older generation computer users (or... y'know, the majority of users). Basically, the people who didn't have a web account somewhere online by the end of high school. The internet itself is one giant beta testing playground, I feel like it has desensitized us to some issues, and simultaneously exposed developers to much better interfaces.

3. What is the possible future work extending from this work?
THE FUTURE IS YESTERDAY! And possibly better analysis of software with respect to desirability axis; but I don't really feel like this has been anything new.

Edit:
In retrospect, it was 1st/2nd grade that had Oregon Trail PCs... don't get me wrong, it was Hearne, by 6th grade the old computers were still there, but in modern society it was still the days of IE5.5ish and Win98SE.