Just In Time Design
We don’t perfect design in our programming until we’re sure we’re going to keep it.
Here is a link to the article from 2003 that impressed me, which I mentioned in the video.
We don’t perfect design in our programming until we’re sure we’re going to keep it.
Here is a link to the article from 2003 that impressed me, which I mentioned in the video.
In the last post, I used SAS Enterprise Guide to filter out a couple of ‘bad’ records that came from test data, then I created a summary table of the number of questions answered and the percentage correct. Then, I calculated the mean percentage correct for the around 84%. That seemed a bit high to me….
Intimidated by your latest programming task? Code taking longer than you think it should? Here’s a tip – When I was in college, flow charts were what the “cool kids in computer science” did – a phrase Darling Daughter Number One has informed me is oxymoronic. Seriously, when I took Fortran and Basic in school…
I was supposed to be teaching statistics to undergraduate Fine Arts majors this semester but I’m going to Santiago to open a Latin American office for 7 Generation Games instead. I’m a bit disappointed because even though when I was younger and got asked at cocktail parties what I did for a living, I would…
I was using a macro this week written by Feng, Yu & Xu and there were so many less-used and advanced techniques in it I thought it would be a great example to use for teaching SAS. ** ** Nifty thing one computing the caliper width ***** ; Like with other propensity score macros, it…
Tried reading in a file with 360,000+ records times 279 variables with SAS On-Demand using SAS Enterprise Guide. It was on one of my office computers that has a pretty slow Internet connection. I was using a different computer at the time so I just let it run. After 29 minutes, I gave up, did…
Sometimes, you can know too much programming for your own good. Yesterday, I was working on analyzing a data set and can I just say here that SAS’s inability to handle mixed-type arrays is the bane of my existence. (In case you don’t know, if you mix character and numeric variable types in an array,…
Transcript (with a couple of ‘ands’ taken out and sans the hand waving):
What I wanted to talk about, though, was just in time design and programming. I read something from IBM about 10 years ago, and I was really impressed because I thought they were kinda ahead of their time, and I was surprised that it came from a big company. The idea is that you do programming, you do design, as you need it. Often people will see things that I put on my blog, things that I’m working on, and say very insightful correct comments that “you need to do this”, “you need to do that”. And they’re absolutely right: the reason we haven’t done it, whatever it happens to be, is that we’re a really small company. So if we’re, say, working on the storyline, and we’ve got the movies done, and they go from the movies to an input page, where they have to answer a math problem, and then they go to study something before they take a quiz to go back into the story… each of those parts needs to be done. Yes, there’s probably better ways to do the quiz than SurveyMonkey – one of the things I spent a lot of time doing was replacing the way we had originally done the quizzes – but until we’ve tested out whether that kind of design is what we want to do, working on perfecting each individual part of it is probably not the most cost effective use of our time. And cost-effective use of our time is something my next video blog is about…
What an incredibly nice thing to do. Thank you.
Ah, the Kaizen of programming. I agree iterative development is the way to go because it allows all kinds of feedback loops to be baked in. The downside is every new iteration with the client gives them a chance to feature creep the hell out of it if they feel they have the chance to (which could be a good or bad thing depending on the circumstances).
On large scale projects, it’s not uncommon at all to prototype a product in Ruby on Rails then go back later and rewrite it in Java for performance (if it really needs to scale). Twitter did this.
Iterative development is the _smart_ way to do it.
However, if you post a blurb of code on your blog specifically discussing its problems, be prepared to hear what’s wrong with it, regardless of your stage of development. 😛
Honestly, I *appreciate* hearing what is wrong, because there is no guarantee that when we get to that state of development we will think of everything.
On the scope creep – it also prevents us from the opposite. I’m working on a project now where I can think of all kinds of cool stuff but maybe the client wants bare bones.
AnnMaria: my pleasure. My hands are happy and it turns out to be fairly easy to transcribe with html5 video and 0.5x playback on youtube :).