Good At Looking Around

People are good at looking around. When our so-called defined processes fall apart, we rely on the fact that people are good at looking around. I nominate that instead of apologizing for having to have people look around, we rely on their natural ability and build easier processes that take advantage of it.

I just ran into a third example of this yesterday, regarding project management. There are very few books that talk about taking this sort of ability into account. (If you beat me to it, all the better for you and the world.)

Example 1: The ManagingComplexLinks example of cross linking entries in the address book.

Example 2: ManagingComplexLinks example of traceability from use cases to classes. I have never seen any other maintainable way to manage traceability than to rely on people's ability to look around.

Example 3: This is a little less looking around, but I don't have the name for it yet. It has to do with looking around and using common sense. Talking about project management, the goal driven project management technique and iterative development. You take a generic milestone-based project management technique, and simply make less obvious milestones than Req'ts, Anal., Des., ... The milestones are more like "showed UI to users", "reviewed class designs with database developers". You allow for the fact that people can think, infer, put pictures together, etc.

Example 4: Using a single, main Responsibility statement in design documentation, as opposed to writing paragraphs. People can go from a simple responsibility statement to the method names and infer a lot, and their looking around is a lot better informed from the simple responsibility statement.

--- AlistairCockburn

JeffMcKenna tells a great story about consulting with the SydneyAustralia? TrainDispatch'ers. There are many great aspects of the story, like they'd spent 18 months on ObjectAnalysis? and hadn't found a 'Train' object. The apropos part of the story is that the control room was located above the switching yards, with lots of fancy displays. When everything was going to hell, though, the dispatcher just opened the window and stuck his head out to see what was going on.

Kind of like trying to find out what it is like outside by watching the "Weather Channel" instead of just "Opening the front door and "LookingAround".

And, of course, there's the book LookingAround by WitoldRybczynski.

-- JimCoplien