Over Engineered Richard Shaw We have a piano in the dining room at home which means we don’t really have room for a dining table. We searched for months to find a gate fold table which could be left folded against the wall most of the time, but all we could find were ones that looked like they’d just been lifted from a Victorian home. Eventually we found one at the Ideal Homes exhibition in London, ironically made by a company a few miles from home in Leatherhead. It was very expensive but we had to have it because the leaves were fitted with pistons which slowly lift each leaf once it they have been given a manual start. The piston isn’t strong enough to keep the leaf in an upright position for use, so you still have to scramble under the table to fold out the gate, therefore rendering the piston pretty pointless – over engineered if you like. I’m thinking about this now because we’ve just bought a new suite for the front room and the two poufs have magazine storage compartments inside, and you’ve guessed it the lids have pistons on them. These are a little more useful because they keep the lid up while you rifle through months of magazines trying to find the article you are after, and prevent the lid from falling on your head. It turns out they are not the only pistons in the house, we have a soft closing toilet seat which is essentially a piston too. I think this clearly falls into the over engineered category, I’ve certainly never worried about the toilet lid falling on my head. All of this got me wondering about what else we have that is over engineered and whether I’m guilty of doing it too. How do you open a document on your computer? Double click on it, right click on it and select Open from the menu, open the application first and then select the Open command and search for
these functions, although now that we’ve added them it seems pointless taking them out, it’s not like a piston which adds to the ongoing production costs. At a recent conference I sat in a talk about the IOT or Internet Of Things for the uninitiated. I find it hard to understand the value of a lot of IOT applications – do I really want to change the temperature of my home heating while I’m on the train going home? But one example did sound pretty useful for a manufacturer of way that I’ve forgotten. white good. Surely we don’t need all those ways I bet your washing machine has to open a document. You can make a about a dozen wash programmes and I very good argument that the piston also wager that you have never used examples add to the desirability of the most of them. So why do they exist? product and make them sexier in some Because somebody thinks somebody way – it was the main reason for us uses them and it looks impressive on the buying the gate fold table after all. But marketing material. The IOT example in does the number of ways I can open a the conference suggested that every time document in Windows affect whether I somebody starts a wash the machine buy it or prefer iOS instead. should send a message to the cloud If some people use the options and indicating which programme was being find them useful or easier then what’s used, so that half of the buttons can be wrong with adding them? It makes the removed when version 2 of the machine software more complicated that’s what. is designed. Somebody has to spend the time writing So should I add instrumentation like the alternate functionality, somebody this to my software, so that I can remove else has to test it, if you have some of the Edit options? comprehensive documentation As it happens my software already somebody needs to add it to the user has instrumentation – every call to the manual or online tutorials, and if it fails server is logged in the database so that it will take time and resources to fix it. we can see which functions are used Having said that the latest web site more than others and more importantly data entry tool I’ve been working on has we can see which ones perform badly almost as many ways of editing a record i.e. slowly. However, it doesn’t matter as Windows has for opening a how you select Edit on the UI it always document. You can double click on it, logs that the same edit function has been right click and select Edit from the executed on the server. context menu, single click to view the It’s given me something to think record and then press the Edit button in about but like most people I think I’ll the view window. continue to over engineer my software in After reading what I’ve said above the hope that each extra option I add will you are probably wondering why I did attract or please at least one of my users. that. Well, I guess it’s because we think our users expect it. December 2014 It’s a lame excuse and it would be better to know whether our users do use the file, or maybe you drag it onto the open application. That’s four different ways to do the same thing, and I can’t help thinking that there’s probably a fifth