From: Bryan Moss (bryan.moss@dial.pipex.com)
Date: Sat Jul 10 1999 - 09:06:17 MDT
Billy Brown wrote:
[Defects per LOC]
> In essence, a defect is anything that makes the program different from
> the spec it is built to. It could be anything from a bug that crashes
> the program to a typo in a dialog box. Different organizations classify
> them differently, and make different decisions about borderline cases,
> but all of the more organized software companies have fairly good
> written standards that their development teams must use. [...]
The thing I don't understand is *when* you do this count. Do the
programmers just keep a log of every mistake they make? Do you count your
defects up after the product ships. For instance, in this e-mail do I count
just the errors per line when I send it or while I'm typing (I just went to
type 'while' and started with an 'h' - 'started' just went through about
three different erroneous phases - 'phases' just came out as 'pahses' - I
just misspelled (correctly) the misspelling of 'phases'... and so on)? In
short, when do you stop correcting and start counting?
> Unfortunately, there are good reasons why OpenDoc never went anywhere.
>
> Your first problem is that it introduces truly horrendous user interface
> problems. Either the UI has to be capable of handling any possible
> component (in which case the components will be too standardized to
> allow for much innovation), or the components get to draw their own
> windows (which leads to dialog-box hell).
The UI could handle any possibility but as I said the programmer would have
to be removed from the interface. You would have to use a standardised
document object model so that, in the true spirit of Opendoc, components
acted on documents. The UI would be a challenge for sure, but it's about
time someone did something in UI-design rather than just speculating about
the wonders of speech-recognition. (Won't speech recognition interfaces
require this sort of component-based model anyway?)
> Your second problem is that most users don't want things to work that
> way. They don't want to have to figure out how to juggle the various
> components on their computer, picking the right combination for whatever
> it is they are doing at the moment. They want you, the programmer, to
> do that for them. Thus, such a system doesn't have much appeal for
> users.
This requires self-organising interfaces. Self-organising interfaces
require semantics-rich documents. Semantics-rich documents require
context-aware user environments. Context-aware user environments require
self-organising interfaces.
> Since most programmers don't want it either (I'd rather invoke the
> component through code), that doesn't leave you with much of a market.
It's worth trying, I think. What I'd like to see is a test-bed for this and
other ideas. A semantics-rich context-aware self-organising user
environment with a hyperlinking file system. I've got it all worked out,
now all I need is an army of programmers with too much time on their hands.
BM
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