Archive for April 2008
Morrison goes alpha and Mozarrt ends up being quite a challenge.
The first subsystem, Morrison, has developed far enough so that it has reached its alpha stage. Thank you Lucho! It took twice as much time (as it is always the rule in software development, right?), but we are all very happy with the results. The only bad thing is that we cannot see it working yet. The reason? Morrison, being the subsystem in charge of managing email messages, can only be put to action when other subsystems actually use it. It is up to Henry now to play with it as part of his development work in the Hendrrix subsystem (the one in charge of account management).
On my side, I just finished working on the most challenging requirement-documentation for a piece of software that I have ever done: The Mozarrt Subsystem. I cannot tell you just yet what is this subsystem about, but I can assure the challenge didn’t reside on how innovative or complex it is. As a matter of fact, Mozarrt is probably just a set of functionalities that you may have seen in many other websites already. So, why did it end up being such a challenge? I was only able to reach the level of abstraction (or generalization if you prefer) that was required after several trials. I had to write and rewrite the use cases of this system three times before I was happy with the results. It took me almost two weeks to end up with just nine use cases and a few dozen documents containing interface requirements. Probably the task wasn’t the challenge. I was the challenged one!
The lessons: First: Never allow your brain to feel cozy when the first use case you write for a major system ends up being a blue-level use case (also know as sea-level). It has got to be white (cloud level)! Second: It is not a good idea to allow a use case to “run” specific steps from another use case. A use case should incorporate other use cases in full, but not just part of them.
Alex
Of Mozarrt and other updates…
This weeks I started to work on the documentation of the use cases and user interfaces of yet another subsystem. This new subsystem is going to be called Mozarrt. I love the name. Henry selected it as he is going to be working on it.
German just finished implementing WSDL (Web Services Description Language) in the core of Merrcury. Unfortunately CakePHP, which has been amazing in other fronts, was lacking documentation and features in here. As such, it took German more than a week to get this done. German is now resuming work on the core of the Web Subsystem.
Lucho in turn is now focused on the l10n (localization) and (i18n) internationalization features that both Morrison (the email subsystem) and the Web core will use. I will take us a few more weeks, but we have decided to go that way. I will allow us to customized Merrcury for any region or partner whenever we want with relative little effort. Version 1.0, however, may be just in English and targeting the US market.
Alex
960 pixels wide instead of 760
Originally we had decided to go with a site that had a width of 760 pixels. There were two reasons: 14% of internet users still have display screens at 800×600 and we thought it would be easier for users with iPhones to browse a narrower site.
Well, we were coming across several challenges trying to fit all the information we want to show in just 760 pixels of space. We definitely wanted to go with a width of 960. The only limitation is the iPhone. So, during the past few days, we worked doing several experiments with iPhones, including having sites with several columns. The conclusion is simple: If your site only has one column of text, having a width of 760 pixels doesn’t make much of a difference over 960 pixels. In both cases users will have to zoom the text and scroll left and right, constantly, to read through the text.
As a result, we decided with Maestro to go with a new width of 960 pixels for the common browsers and, in the future, work on templates specially designed for PDAs like the iPhone. I hope this strategy works well.
Alex
