“Software is essential today. One perspective on it isn’t enough!”
(Richard Seidl)
As a tester, you keep running into software that does what it is supposed to do (the implementation matches the requirement and the test case) and is somehow still rubbish. Too bloated, too complicated and simply not well thought through. Error-free is still a long way from good software.
I was going to bring up my “favorite software”, MS Teams, which since the pandemic has become the gold standard for collaboration in large corporations and enterprises. And that is not because it’s good software 😉
A Bad Example: The Camper Van Software
But there is another piece of software bugging me right now: the one in our camper van. A textbook example of software without “digital design”. It has already added some great entries to my “oh no” list, the one I keep for my talks on good software. First, a few basic bugs:
- While driving, the ventilation in the living area sometimes kicks in at full power
- I foolishly connected a second iPhone, and now CarPlay doesn’t work for either of them… or let’s say: sometimes one of them works
- The camping mode, which is supposed to stop the van from lighting up like an American Christmas tree when you open the door, is unreliable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t (workaround from a forum: the engine has to be running. Sure.)
Fine, as a tester I can deal with that. But as a user, there is more:
- There are three control panels, and it’s hardly clear what to set where
- The on-board computer, CarPlay included (when it works), takes a good minute to start up
- The settings for Wi-Fi, eSIM and most other functions are so unintuitive that even as a software engineer I sometimes have to sketch decision tables to figure out the logic behind them.
Shouldn’t be rocket science, right? And everyone knows examples like this: the ticket machine (or the hundreds of ticket apps), the self-checkout at the supermarket, the ERP software at the office, …
Software is for everyone. Not just for us techies. But we take that view far too rarely.
Questions That Lead to Good Software
Good software is not error-free software. It is software that supports users in what they are trying to do. And we may, no, we must keep asking ourselves:
- What does the software really need?
- What does the process look like from the user’s point of view?
- How could it be designed better?
Or, heretical as it sounds: couldn’t we even leave out or remove features? Warning: saying this in meetings may cause gasps and emotional reactions!
So: let’s build better software!
