I’m Running Out Of Things To Hate
If I were to give a name to the “theme” of the work I’ve been doing on TroopTrack for the past year or so, I would have to call it “Getting Rid of Things I Hate.” Here’s what I’ve been doing:
- Making controllers restful
- Making the user interface easy to use and consistent
- Fixing bugs
- Removing or simplifying needless complexity
- Replacing home grown bits with plugins/gems as appropriate
My prioritization process has gone something like this:
- What parts of the app make me want to punch my monitor?
- What do I have a good plan for fixing?
- What will matter to my customers?
A year ago the list of answers to #1 was really pretty long. Today, it’s down to just two bits – TroopTrack’s homegrown authentication system and the user_profile controller and views. This is not to say that TroopTrack is now perfect, but the remaining problems do not reach my punch-the-monitor threshold required to be on the list of things I hate.
Is This a Quality Metric?
I think it is. It might be a good idea to keep a list of all the things people (including you) really, really hate about your product. Consider opening this list to developers, product owners, testers, and yes, customers. Set some threshold for what you mean by “hate”. It needs to be stuff that is more than just irritating. It needs to inspire rants, push people to take walks to calm down, tempt ex-smokers to reach for a pack, etc.
Getting Past Hate
I think I will have 0 punch-the-monitor features left by mid-September at the latest. Then what?
Will I take a break and just tweak the app for a bit? Will I launch into new development for features I haven’t thought of yet? Will I focus on marketing and business development, something I’ve completely ignored for the past year?
Maybe.
One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the applicability of TroopTrack to other things. Even though it is currently focused on Boy Scouts, it has the capability to support any organization that has similar needs to a Boy Scout troop. Some examples I’ve thought of include:
- Paramilitary organizations like the Civil Air Patrol
- Church youth groups
- Home school education providers
- Girl Scouts
- Scouting program outside the U.S.
TroopTrack has finally reached the point where adding support for these organizations is simply a matter of configuration, not coding. Perhaps it’s time to start adding support for them as well.
Another thing I’d like to do is really flesh out the capabilities of my web page editor. I want to create a catalog of hooks back into the application so they can make data-driven web pages using their troop data. I also want to give them some more flexibility in the design and layout of their pages. I don’t really know how to do this yet, so it’s a good opportunity for some learning. Perhaps I will finally conquer the dreaded javascript.
Stumble it!
2 responses so far ↓
1 Joe Strazzere // Jul 26, 2010 at 8:44 am
“Is This a Quality Metric?
I think it is. It might be a good idea to keep a list of all the things people (including you) really, really hate about your product. ”
So instead of the old saying that “Quality is value to some person whose opinion matters”, you could say “Quality is the absence of too many hated attributes of your product in some person whose opinion matters.”
2 David Christiansen // Jul 26, 2010 at 9:25 am
Hah! It does seem a bit perverse to have a product with things you hate in it… but I’m not saying it’s THE quality metric, just A quality metric. I think you meant it tongue-in-cheek, but just in case I’ll clarify. I would not redefine quality to mean the absence of things that make you want pound the keyboard with your forehead. I might use it as a quality indicator though – it seems fairly useful to know that certain parts of your product are profoundly sucky.
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