Can’t you just…

Continuing the thoughts on vexing problems, one difficulty when it comes to discussing software is talking about the size of software. I’m not really talking about productivity metrics – good or bad – like source lines of code or function points, rather the fact that the complexity of a problem looks different depending on who’s doing the looking.

Sometimes, a problem that’s very simple from a business perspective can be incredibly complex technically. One product I worked on could be summarised very quickly: let people interact with marketing campaigns by sending and receiving messages on their mobiles. The small amount of logic between send and receive – allowing the campaigns to operate as quizzes, votes, or auctions – could be detailed on an index card.

But that simplicity was backed by a huge amount of technical complexity to make it work. “Can you just send this message to everyone who got the quiz question correct?” Well, yes, but as it’s a picture message we need to work out how to make it look good on the recipient phone, change it to fit those criteria, and then send it. What makes it look good – and indeed how we can get the information to make that decision – depends on the device, but also which network it’s on, and maybe whether it’s on pre-pay or post-pay and whether they use HTTP, WAP or e-mail to send messages to that device (which might be different from how they send to other devices on the same network). And even after we’ve gathered that information, it may be wrong as some devices claim to support image formats that they can’t render, or image sizes that they’ll actually reject or fail to display.

On the other hand, sometimes the business problem is a lot more complex than the technical problem. If you’re a mobile app developer, any length of problem definition about exciting disruptive apps can be reduced to “so you want to display data from a web service in a table view”.

And then at other times, “can’t you just” gets stymied from left field. Why yes, we could simply do that, and it would be good for the business, but this regulation/patent/staff shortage means we need to do something else.

About Graham

I make it faster and easier for you to create high-quality code.
This entry was posted in Business. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.