Lone Gunman

Among the many valid responses to the Quora ques­tion of why soft­ware devel­op­ment task esti­ma­tions are often off by a fac­tor of 2–3, Michael Wolfe, CEO of Pipewise, describes exactly why this is with­out once men­tion­ing ‘soft­ware’ or ‘project’.

Instead, Wolfe elo­quently pro­vides undoubt­edly the best anal­ogy I’ve ever heard for explain­ing the dif­fi­culty in pro­vid­ing esti­mates for soft­ware projects: a cou­ple of friends plan­ning a coastal hike from San Fran­cisco to Los Ange­les and start­ing their journey.

Their friends are wait­ing in LA, phone calls have already been made push­ing the date back…

Man, this is slow going! Sand, water, stairs, creeks, angry sea lions! We are walk­ing at most 2 miles per hour, half as fast as we wanted. We can either start walk­ing 20 hours per day, or we can push our friends out another week. OK, let’s split the dif­fer­ence: we’ll walk 12 hours per day and push our friends out til the fol­low­ing week­end. We call them and delay din­ner until the fol­low­ing Sun­day. They are a lit­tle peeved but say OK, we’ll see you then. […]

We get up the next morn­ing, ban­dage up our feet and get going. We turn a cor­ner. Shit! What’s this?

God­damn map doesn’t show this shit!. We have to walk 3 miles inland, around some fenced-off, federally-protected land, get lost twice, then make it back to the coast around noon. Most of the day gone for one mile of progress. OK, we are *not* call­ing our friends to push back again. We walk until mid­night to try to catch up and get back on schedule.

Of course, this isn’t exactly a new anal­ogy: it’s apply­ing the ideas behind Benoît Mandelbrot’s paper, How Long Is the Coast of Britain?, pub­lished back in 1967, to soft­ware esti­ma­tion. Still, it works perfectly.

If you like Wolfe’s writ­ing style and want to read more, he runs a blog called Dear Founder.

Update: And of course, there’s always O.P.C.

Five neu­ro­sci­en­tists trav­elled into deep­est Glen Canyon, Utah, to con­tem­plate how tech­nol­ogy has changes their behav­iour. Some were scep­tics and some were believ­ers, and by tak­ing this forced break from their com­put­ers and gad­gets (there was no mobile phone recep­tion or power) they were deter­mined to find out whether or not mod­ern tech­nol­ogy inhibits their “deep thought” and can cause them anx­i­ety.

This bit of self-experimentation and cog­ni­tive reflec­tion is a bit too light on the con­clu­sions for my lik­ing, but this arti­cle, from The New York Times’ Unplugged series that exam­ines “how a del­uge of data can affect the way peo­ple think and behave”, does have this that’s worth think­ing about:

[By day three] the group has become more reflec­tive, qui­eter, more focused on the sur­round­ings. […]
The oth­ers are more relaxed too. Mr. Braver decides against cof­fee, bypass­ing his usual rit­ual. The next day, he neglects to put on his watch, though he cau­tions against read­ing too much into it. […]

Mr. Strayer, the believer, says the trav­el­ers are expe­ri­enc­ing a stage of relax­ation he calls “third-day syn­drome.” Its symp­toms may be unsur­pris­ing. But even the more skep­ti­cal of the sci­en­tists say some­thing is hap­pen­ing to their brains that rein­forces their sci­en­tific dis­cus­sions — some­thing that could be impor­tant to help­ing peo­ple cope in a world of con­stant elec­tronic noise.

“If we can find out that peo­ple are walk­ing around fatigued and not real­iz­ing their cog­ni­tive poten­tial,” Mr. Braver says, then pauses and adds: “What can we do to get us back to our full potential?”

“Third-day syn­drome”. I like that, and it rings true. Week­ends away to nearby cities don’t do it for me in terms of dis­en­gag­ing and allow­ing free thought; I need at least four days.

One more com­ment that was a bit too close for comfort:

Tech­nol­ogy has rede­fined the notion of what is “urgent.” How soon do peo­ple need to get infor­ma­tion and respond to it? The believ­ers in the group say the drum­beat of incom­ing data has cre­ated a false sense of urgency that can affect people’s abil­ity to focus.

To keep the peace on the ever-expanding Stack Exchange Net­work of online com­mu­ni­ties, own­ers Joel Spol­sky and Jeff Atwood intro­duced the timed sus­pen­sion of dis­rup­tive users’ accounts. Over time the trans­parency of the timed sus­pen­sion process proved to be occa­sion­ally inef­fi­cient when dis­cus­sions arose regard­ing the mer­its of cer­tain sus­pen­sions. This led the admin­is­tra­tors of the com­mu­ni­ties to inves­ti­gate other ways of mod­er­at­ing prob­lem­atic users.

What they found were three fan­tas­ti­cally devi­ous secret ways to effec­tively con­trol trolls and other abu­sive users on online com­mu­ni­ties: the hell­ban, slow­ban, and errorban:

A hell­banned user is invis­i­ble to all other users, but cru­cially, not him­self. From their per­spec­tive, they are par­tic­i­pat­ing nor­mally in the com­mu­nity but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer dis­rupt the com­mu­nity because they are effec­tively a ghost. It’s a clever way of enforc­ing the “don’t feed the troll” rule in the com­mu­nity. When noth­ing they post ever gets a response, a hell­banned user is likely to get bored or frus­trated and leave. I believe it, too; if I learned any­thing from read­ing The Great Brain as a child, it’s that the silent treat­ment is the cru­elest pun­ish­ment of them all. […]

(There is one addi­tional form of hell­ban­ning that I feel com­pelled to men­tion because it is par­tic­u­larly cruel – when hell­banned users can see only them­selves and other hell­banned users. Brrr. I’m pretty sure Dante wrote a chap­ter about that, somewhere.)

A slow­banned user has delays forcibly intro­duced into every page they visit. From their per­spec­tive, your site has just got­ten ter­ri­bly, hor­ri­bly slow. And stays that way. They can hardly dis­rupt the com­mu­nity when they’re strug­gling to get web pages to load. There’s also sci­ence behind this one, because per research from Google and Ama­zon, every page load delay directly reduces par­tic­i­pa­tion. Get slow enough, for long enough, and a slow­banned user is likely to seek out greener and speed­ier pas­tures else­where on the internet.

An error­banned user has errors inserted at ran­dom into pages they visit. You might con­sider this a more severe exten­sion of slow­ban­ning – instead of pages load­ing slowly, they might not load at all, return cryp­tic HTTP errors, return the wrong page alto­gether, fail to load key depen­den­cies like JavaScript and images and CSS, and so forth. I’m sure your devi­ous lit­tle brains can imag­ine dozens of ways things could go “wrong” for an error­banned user. This one is a bit more eso­teric, but it isn’t the­o­ret­i­cal; an exist­ing imple­men­ta­tion exists in the form of the Dru­pal Mis­ery mod­ule.

Years ago (and still, for cer­tain prod­ucts) con­sumers decried the idea of planned prod­uct obso­les­cence in indus­trial design: the inten­tional engi­neer­ing of prod­ucts to have a lim­ited use­ful life, such as with prod­ucts pro­duced with sealed-in bat­ter­ies or fridges that will only func­tion for seven years.

In recent years, how­ever, the need for planned obso­les­cence has moved from the sup­ply side to the demand side, with con­sumers them­selves requir­ing that their gad­gets don’t last so long that they become a bur­den: it’s desired func­tional obso­les­cence. Writ­ing about the influ­ence this has on our con­sump­tion habits, Rob Walker takes an inter­est­ing look at trends in prod­uct obso­les­cence and the rise of func­tional obso­les­cence as a demand-side phe­nom­ena rather than a supply-side one.

Con­sider that most ubiq­ui­tous gad­get, the mobile phone. […] The typ­i­cal Amer­i­can gets a new one every 18 months. […] The prob­lem, if that’s the right word for it, is that new devices per­form more func­tions, faster—and peo­ple, as a result, want them. […] The light-speed inno­va­tions in con­sumer elec­tron­ics have turned many of us into ser­ial replac­ers. A dealer in vin­tage home-entertainment equip­ment recently con­vinced me that it used to be pos­si­ble to buy a top-notch stereo sys­tem that really would func­tion admirably for decades. Imag­ine, by con­trast, that tomor­row some com­pany unveiled a cell phone guar­an­teed to last for 20 years. Who would gen­uinely want it? It’s not our devices that wear thin, it’s our patience with them.

The very real prob­lem of elec­tronic waste makes peo­ple like me hes­i­tate to replace good-working-order pos­ses­sions. Yet at the same time, we like to stay cur­rent with new tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions. So rather than pro­vide evi­dence of some cyn­i­cal cor­po­rate strat­egy, our gad­gets’ minor mal­func­tions or dis­ap­point­ing fea­tures or unac­cept­ably slow speeds largely pro­vide an excuse to replace them—with a lighter lap­top, a slim­mer tablet, a clearer e-book reader. Obso­les­cence isn’t some­thing com­pa­nies are forc­ing on us. It’s progress, and it’s some­thing we pretty much demand. As usual, the mar­ket gives us exactly what we want.

Three nec­es­sary ele­ments must be present for a behav­iour to occur: Moti­va­tion, Abil­ity, Trig­ger — and under­stand­ing this is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing how to change behav­iour. That’s accord­ing to B.J. Fogg and his team at the Stan­ford Per­sua­sive Tech Lab, as described by their Behav­iour Model.

To make behav­iour change eas­ier the team iden­ti­fied the fif­teen ways that behav­iour can be changed, described each with pre­ci­sion, and related them to a spe­cific “psy­chol­ogy”. Together this infor­ma­tion became the Behav­iour Grid:

To use the behav­iour grid and to see the detailed infor­ma­tion and advice for each behav­iour type, fol­low the nec­es­sary steps in the use­ful Behav­iour Wiz­ard tool or view the grid directly.