Category: essays

WWDC 2019 keynote

WWDC 2019 keynote

I’ve written a lot about work/life balance, including this one: Slow down and improve your health and job.

Monday this week was the first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, featuring a keynote address highlighting new products soon to make their way out the door.

But I felt like turning it off after the opening movie.

As background, there is a lot of concern about the intrusion of technology on our lives and how it affects us. Apple has recently claimed to care about balancing the use of technology and brought us great features like Screen Time to help:

Screen Time, these new tools are empowering users who want help managing their device time, and balancing the many things that are important to them.

iOS 12 introduces new features to reduce interruptions and manage Screen Time

According to the WWDC opening video, writing apps appears to … READ THE REST

Shareholders vs employees

Shareholders vs employees

Many large companies with excess cash do share buybacks or offer a dividend. Both of these are intended to benefit shareholders. However, the waters are muddied in that some employees are also shareholders.

Let’s look at the numbers for Apple.

Cook said that Apple had returned $27.5 billion to shareholders last quarter

Apple […] also approved a 77 cent dividend per share.

Apple stock spikes after reporting strong guidance and earnings beat—CNBC—April 30, 2019

As of September 29, 2018 , the Company had approximately 132,000 full-time equivalent employees.

Apple Form 10K—SEC—September 29, 2018

I’ll extrapolate a little since I couldn’t find complete numbers.

  1. $27.5 billion x 4 quarters = $110 billion in yearly share repurchase
  2. 77 cents x 4.72 billion shares x 4 quarters = $14.5 billion annual dividend
  3. $110 billion + $14.5 billion = $124.5 billion given to shareholders yearly

Divide that by the number of employees. Check my … READ THE REST

Don’t forget soft skills when interviewing engineers

Don’t forget soft skills when interviewing engineers

This is based entirely on personal experience, but I thought it might be useful to others. Tech companies tends to do highly technical interviews in engineering and overlook the soft skills. Over the years, when I’ve been given the freedom to do so, I tend to focus more on soft skills. Here are some things I often ask. There really aren’t right and wrong answers, but it’s more about how they handle what is thrown at them.

How do you think code should be tested?

Here I’m generally looking for a few things:

  • Recognition that having only engineers testing their own code is not adequate. If they think it is, I will usually point out that if you know how your code works, it might be hard to stumble upon bugs. Then I see how they respond.
  • Familiarity with the different types of testing and their strengths and weaknesses. For
… READ THE REST
How to easily create documentation

How to easily create documentation

Some undeniable truths about documentation:

  • People hate to write it
  • People really need it

When someone needs some help, it can consume a lot of resources, especially when a company is continually hiring new people or losing people to other teams or companies.

There are a couple types of documention:

  • Simple questions and answers
  • More detailed documents

The usual way things are done

Simple questions and answers are done in person or in chat, usually lost forever except to the recipient of a chat who could search their chats.

Write emails containing more detailed information to someone, a group of people, or a mailing list.

Proposed way

  • For short questions and answers, create a page on your wiki (e.g. Confluence) for frequently asked questions and quickly add it after providing it to someone in email and chat.
  • After sending an email, create a wiki page and paste in the contents
… READ THE REST
Ideas for better quality software

Ideas for better quality software

I’ve been around long enough to see many different efforts to improve software quality fail. Often the ideas are fairly one-dimensional rather than wholistic. I’ll give you one example.

Let’s say there’s a decision that everyone must use continuous integration in the next release. Even if it’s not sold as a panacea, there seems to be an implication that it’ll definitely lead to significantly improved quality. And it’s not to say that it couldn’t. But the problem is that for continuous integration to be very successful, it requires other things like good development practices and perhaps a suite of unit tests.

Having said all this, many could be done in isolation.

Better source code management practices

Most of this revolves around source code management. A common way to use tools like git is to do the following:

  • Branch for a bug fix
  • Branch for feature work
  • Branch for releases as
… READ THE REST
My hierarchy of testing

My hierarchy of testing

This comes from a long career in software testing where I went through more than a dozen full release cycles

I’ve executed and observed 5 major types of testing, seen the bugs they catch, and seen the overall quality of projects that rely on different types of testing. I don’t have objective data to back any of this up, so this is purely my subjective observations. After you read this, you’ll see that I value the subjective very highly in testing despite the fact that pretty charts and graphs can be compelling.

I think this is important because everyone has scarce testing resources and needs to get the best bang for the buck. Many companies invert their emphasis and I think that goes a long way to explaining why much of the software out there is poor quality.

So, here are what I see as the five types, in order … READ THE REST

Why does rebooting fix everything?

Why does rebooting fix everything?

This comes from a long career of software testing where I went through more than a dozen release cycles, noting which testing methods work best.

We’re all familar with the following troubleshooting steps when encountering a problem on our computers or phones:

  • Quit and relaunch an app if that’s where the problem lies
  • Log out and log back in (on a Mac)
  • Reboot

In fact, it’s often the first thing many people try. And for me, I reboot all my devices every morning.

More often than not, the problem goes away. Why is that? Well, a few possible things can explain it:

  • Sometimes caches can be cleared on reboot that were causing problems
  • Sometimes background processes were running that were affecting an app you were running
  • The overall system became constrained for resources and rebooting starts everything from scratch

But I’d offer another explanation: It’s because of how software … READ THE REST

How to use dogfood testing

How to use dogfood testing

A number of companies use the word dogfood testing to describe part of their software testing process. I believe it’s a powerful and essential part of testing as I mention in My hierarchy of testing. However, it means different things to different people, so I wanted to describe how I think it should be used to make the most of it.

As great as QA engineers can be, it’s sometimes impossible to cover the breadth of a product and ensure high quality. Dogfood testing is the practice of installing reasonably current builds of a product on your own device(s) and living on them. Everyone has their own unique way of using their devices so it can be a great way to tease out bugs that otherwise would be very difficult to find. Historically, many of the most important bugs I’ve seen have come out of this process.

An … READ THE REST

Common software usability issues

Common software usability issues

This is based on working in the software world for quite some time, ranging from technical support to consulting to quality assurance to software engineering. And from observing people at every chance I get. While some things improve in software, some pesky things stay the same and repeat themselves whenever a new application is created.

Here’s my list of things that I think most software needs to get better at doing. Most of the examples will involve tapping on a touchscreen device, but are often applicable to clicking with a mouse or trackpad. They are in no particular order.

Tap tolerance

You may be uncoordinated, elderly, or an a train when you tap on your screen. Your finger may shift a bit when you tap just because that’s how your body works. There is typically a threshold of movement after which the tap is registered as gesture rather than a … READ THE REST