If I asked you to fill out the following form to get information about an LDAP server that you were supposedly giving me access to, would you know what type of information to type in?
Chances are you could enter the first value, but the second is a little tougher to understand. It would be useful to be able to give supply an example to show you what type of information is correct, right? But how do you put in examples while keeping it clear to the user that they're just examples and need to be replaced with something else?
Continue reading "Smart example values in form fields" »
Admit it: one of the least favorite parts of our jobs as developers is coming up with time estimates for our work. Joel Spoelsky describes it this way:
Why won't developers make schedules? Two reasons. One: it's a pain in the butt. Two: nobody believes the schedule is realistic. Why go to all the trouble of working on a schedule if it's not going to be right?
If you're like me, and don't have the data available to do evidence-based scheduling, to produce estimates you basically make a guess based on past experience. And we all know how accurate those guesses are. (Usually, not very accurate at all. I worked with a project manager once who confided to me that all of the PMs at the company would take the developers' estimates and then double them to come up with what they felt was a more realistic schedule.) Sometimes I feel like it's like a serious job endeavour and more like a game of Name That Tune for software ("I can code that feature in... 6 hours, George!").
So around here at Ping Identity, we don't have to rely on time estimates so much. Instead, the engineering team has started using a metric called "Whitneys", measured on what we call the Whitney Complexity Scale. It's named after its creator, technical project director Brian Whitney.
Continue reading "The Whitney Complexity Scale" »
