You might want to look a this Price comparison between Busan and Paris.

This is a way to engage in a discussion with my French and Korean readers.

Here is my theoretical/biased/undocumented/partial point of view of why Korea is a better place to live for a Frenchman.

Security

Better :

• You have a much much higher chance to be attacked in the French subway than taking a bomb from North Korea
• Streets feel safer
• More respect between people

Worst :

• I you watch too much TV you might get influenced about Pyongyang’s actions

Transports

Better :

•  Taxi is much cheaper and frequent
• Oil price is lower
• More alcohol controls at night
• Better roads and lights are on !
• Better subway, cleaner, no strikes
• More bus, better time estimation

Worst :

• Same traffic jams
• Don’t drive : you’ll die.
• Few people really wear seatbelt

City

Better :

• More larger streets
• Clearer indications
• No dog sh..

Worst :

• Too much billboards
• Some small streets smell really bad
• No historical places or old interesting places in Busan
• Less parks, but many mountains

Technology

Better :

• One of the fastest Internet infrastructure on earth
• 4G-3G everywhere. Phone always able to catch network.
• Edge-2G ? What’s that ?
• Phone plan cheaper and less blocking

Worst :

• Too much technology ?

Services

Better :

• Your are a king. 
• Employees smiles. For real. Impressive. Never saw that before.
• Anything can be delivered anywhere, cheaply, real fast
• Postman does everything in his power to give you your parcel. Don’t have to go to post office 48h after he came.

Worst :

• Hard life for people working in services
• It makes you impatient and demanding sometimes

Shops

Better :

• Always find some place open
• Supermarket still open at 11pm !
• Incredible service
• Everywhere

Worst :

• Loud music and advertising in some streets
• Some article are much more expensive

Restaurants

Better :

• 50% cheaper
• Healthier
• Faster
• Better service (see my previous article on the subject)

Worst :

• More and more junk food. But, hey, you have the choice not to go !
• Wine is so expensive !

Accommodation

Better :

• More shops and commodities around
• No bedbugs (personal note after a year of suffering)
• Cheaper
• Larger

Worst :

• More appartement than house
• Less protection when renting
• 2 years in advance to rent sometimes

Health

Better :

• Appointment in the day (in France 3 months some times for a dentist)
• Cleaner, calmer
• Very efficient and dedicated employees
• More employees
• Choice between traditional and modern healthcare, no prejudice between the two

Worst :

• More expensive

Education

Better :

• Real culture of personal development
• Aim for the best
• First school is not a babysitting place, it’s where learning starts
• Less or no babysitting required
• Many baby/child friendly places

Worst :

•  Very expensive !
• Big burden for kids, starting early

Administration

Better :

• So quick, no comparison possible (10 minutes for obtaining national number  for our daughter)
• Lot of employees that smiles and are nice (yes it could be)

Worst :

• You should speak Korean, it helps

Ambiance/Population

Better :

• Apparently less social status division
• More respect
• Less touching between people

Worst :

• More division between generations/age

Work

Better :

•  Risk friendly / fast environment
• More innovation, less tax

Worst :

• Less protection
• Too much hierarchy
• Less less vacations

I’ll edit and correct this article from time to time.

Please give me your opinion on the real fact.

Did I forget a category ?

Actually you have to add 2 Korean languages : ko(korean) and ko-KR(South-Korea). Very disturbing.

PS/ Sorry for the short article. I’ll post a detailed tutorial if needed.

Since I don’t have time to review them now, it’s just a personal note and an encouragement.

Is there any book you want to hear about on this blog ? Do you agree with my notation ? What do you encourage me to read next ?

What career path guided you to Paris ?

I studied my PhD at UPMC (Paris 6) where my PhD advisor proposed me an
opportunity to study in France while I was a master student at KAIST,
Korea. Basically the overall conditions (e.g., reasonably short
duration of PhD study, full funded scholarship, and no mandatory
course work) were fine and I decided to move here at June 2007.

What is your level of French and do you work in french  ?

Unfortunately, the level of my French is still very poor. I have tried
several times to learn French but it was very hard for me to manage
both of conducting my research and leaning French. My career path is a
little bit different from other typical students who may learn French
and then apply to universities or other schools.

As you may know, because you also work on computer area, many people in
engineering areas are familiar with English, so that I have not had many
problems while using English in France. Additionally my advisor mentioned that
learning French is not obligate. Anyway after reading some books on basic
French grammar and living here for four years, I could sometimes
follow-up the context of dialogues when French people talk. Now I work
at France Telecom R&D, Orange Labs and the researchers with whom I
work can speak English well. However, definitely, I always feel the
needs of learning French to make better relationship with others.

What major differences do you see between France and Korea ?

I believe that the main difference is caused by two cultures each of
which is quite different from the other.  Also I think that different
background of two nations make some differences. We can find some (or
many perhaps) unique properties in a country which were not found in
another country. For instance, in France, when one exits a door, s/he
holds the door until another comes. But I cannot find such behavior in
Korea. I thought over this issue, not much seriously but for a while,
and my personal hypothesis is that a building in France used to have
a big and heavy (front) door, so that it is natural for French people
to hold a door for the next person not to hurt. However, a door in
Korea is much lighter than on e in France and this difference may lead
that a French guy feels uncomfortable when s/he visits to Korea.

What do you like / dislike in France ?

It may be the issue of two sides of a coin, front and back. If I
should choose one example, I would like to talk about the attitude of
slowness. The slowness could bring perfectness and completeness but it
could make a person lazy. We also have a similar example, the attitude
of fastness, which may allow both of speedy response and faulty result
at the same time. I want to introduce a Korean known phrase, which
well describes this situation, “il jang in dan” which means that
everything has one side of goodness and another side of badness.

Thanks to Jong Gun for this insight !

However medium sized independent restaurants are not in good shape in my opinion. They are not expensive but not cheap, food is good but not extraordinary, tables are sometimes empty and service is slow.

Here are 5 tips from Korean restaurants to inspire our French ones.

[Cet article est disponible en français]

A Menu That Calls You

The offer must be clear and invite the consumer to spend some time and money here.

Too many time the price column is more used than meals descriptions. What a shame.

By the way the menu should be written in as many languages as possible and with illustrations.

Tourists are ready to eat french food if they are able to order. Otherwise they’ll go to international franchises they know.

In general the style and image of the restaurant must be refined :

The “2ème café” at Seoul offers meals a little expensive but not that much. Hence because of a refined design the customer do not only look at the price but also the place.

There is a very developed practice in Korea that maybe to much for us : fake meals in front of the restaurant.

Impressive with realism.

Is that all ?

No.

A developer must be creative. Because creativity is the heart of human activity. Combining what you know to build something that does not exist yet.

A screenwriter must  master some methods.

Either in the Hollywood business or in the indie productions. A writer must have a sense of  what are the basic principles of human mind. Even if he wants to go against them. How many wannabe screenwriters have I heard saying : “I don’t want to lean gimmicks/tricks or how to do a movie, I just want my imagination and my guts to guide me”.

Yeah, right ! Your movie doesn’t work because you don’t even know what a dialog is.

Inspiration

There is more than one way to code a feature. And There is more than one way to write a scene.

In front of a blank page both the developer and the screenwriter are the same. They need inspiration.

Brainstorming, finding idea and a purpose is the key. Sometimes it happens really fast. But there is always a moment when they stop and choose an angle of attack.

If they don’t they create cliche…

Cliches

Cliche appears when a screenwriter relies to much on what’s already in his mind.

Beware of your memory and imagination. It’s just a combination of what is already there from experience or from other people’s work.

But sometimes other people’s work is not appropriate for the situation you work on.

And for a developer, always attacking the same problem with the same solution can be dangerous. Especially if he doesn’t unit test what he codes, thinking that it’s basic.

Sometimes it’s not their fault…

The Good The Bad  and The Ugly

1. The producer orders a movie to a screenwriter (in Hollywood and Europa Corp. at least)
2. The director changes every part of the screenplay except for the color of the main character eyes (in France at least)
3. The editor changes the order and meaning of the scenes
4. The sound designer and music composer adds their style
5. The viewer has no idea what was in the screenwriter’s mind

A developer has also a project manager, co-developers, integrator, testers and finally a user.

Is it a problem ? Some would say it’s team work, others producer work. Depends on how much micro-management the producer is doing…

Bloopers

One of the worst movies are those when the universe is not coherent. This is a proof that the screenwriter has not taken care of reading it’s own work.

Even in a science fiction movie, you must be coherent. That’s how you make people follow your story.

What’s more annoying than a character finding a car exactly when he needs it, with no previous reference to it ?

In software development the coherence is checked by code review and unit tests. Code duplication is one of my nightmare.

Constraints For Creativity

To much freedom when writing is never a good help for inspiration. Constraints are good.

They help the developer to focus on the essential and to respect budget.

They help the screenwriter writing stories with a meaning, not only good puns.

When you feel stuck with too many options : put yourself under some arbitrary constraints. For example : I must finish this before 5pm. I must use only one dialog in this scene…

Style

At the end I would say that even a developer must have a “Style”. A way of coding that is smart yet understandable.

Evaluate Your Position

Situation	State	Solution
Your team wants to do unit test but you do not encourage them		Allocate budget and tell them how much you now consider unit test as useful.
Your team does not want to do unit tests and you don't want either		Allocate budget and tell them to read this series of articles.
You don't even know what unit testing is		Wow, after all those 12 articles ? Go back read them and ask questions if you are not convinced. You MUST know what are the best practices in software development
Your team does not want to unit test but you want		Tell them to read this series of articles.
Your team wants and you want		Great ! You'r on the road to quality. But there are so many other stuff to do like code review, peer programming, continuous integration, ...

Cheap people only calculate cost with money.  But if you want well-tested software you’ve got to see the bigger picture.

Here is how I see it. But since it’s quite a new matter for me, I’d appreciate to debate about it and have your experience in comment.

1. Your company’s goal is to make money 
2. To make money you must produce good useful software (to sell or to use internally)
3. To produce stable tested and useful software you need a good team (who cares about tests and quality more than having a 1000 features)
4. And to have a good team you need more than money

A Comparison

Let’s compare 3 kind of tests I hope you already practice in your company : unit tests, manual integration tests and manual regression tests.

Alright, that’s my vision, and you can guess in favor of what I preach. But when talking to fellow devs and seeing different projects, I can tell this table is pretty accurate.

An Example

This week I spent 2 days automating every test I could think of in the service I’m developing.

I though my application was simple and ok before putting unit tests everywhere, even on the most trivial classes.

But I discovered bugs. Sometimes simple copy/paste bugs. Sometimes bigger ones.

So I started to automatize those 208 manual tests. It became clear that I saved more than 2 days.

Also I saved money by increasing my understanding of the product and my competences in mocking and JUnit.

The project leader was ok to spend 2 days improving code by refactoring and unit testing after I asked him. And I’m sure he took the right decision. Of course we’ll never know exactly but I think we saved debugging days.

The Cost Of Debugging

Sometimes debugging could seem faster than implementing unit tests. And in absolute time it could be true. But be honest : if you have many procedures and many people in the bug hunting sessions, your costs are going to crash the ceiling.

Necessary but costly heavy testing sessions go like this :

1. Prepare an environment for the testers to tests
2. Ensure that testers test against the right version of specifications
3. When a tester find a bug (sometimes that could be avoided simply by 3 lines of JUnit) he fills a report
4. The project manager gets the bug report, test again and attribute it to a developer if needed
5. The developer stops everything he is doing to try to reproduce, correct and test again
6. If the developer is a good one he implements immediately a unit test to avoid finding this bug manually ever again
7. Back to the project manager for validation
8. Back to the tester for validation

TODO

• Go on, hit some numbers in Excel and try to find out the cost of letting your people think instead of just passing some manual tests.
• Come back here and tell us where you’ll invest more in your project. We’d be delighted to debate about it here.
• Ask yourself honestly : What’s the cost of NOT doing unit tests ?

For the developers out there

What’s your opinion/experience on this ? Do you feel managers don’t allocate enough budget on unit tests ? Are they taking to many risks by only paying for manual tests ?

Having The End In Mind

First : you must know why your team is doing unit tests. 

In fact you must follow a business logic more than a method or a trend.

Don’t encourage unit testing just because “others do it” or “it’s like that”.

Think about it. What does it mean ? Why are you unit testing ? Why do you take some of the money you have to put it in a code that won’t be in the final product ? Is it worth it ?

Take some time to stop and think about what you have done and what you want.

Software quality ? Ok, it’s a good reason. And why doing good-tested software ? To make your users life easier ? To gain market share ? To avoid costly support ?

They Don’t Really Care About Us

Your users don’t care about your software actually.

They don’t care about unit tests, integration tests…

They wan’t to do stuff that works. And they maybe need your product.

This is why you do unit tests : to make good software, to have people use it, so you’r company can sell it.

Just like the automated inspections in an assembly line : you must be sure you don’t sell rotten products to your clients. That’s the reason. It’s even better than adding features.

People want features that work.

Are We There Yet ?

Second : your must know when you have reached a good quality.

Sometimes while doing unit tests, you feel like you have it all. You have done all you can do automatically. You can’t go farther.

That’s when to stop.

Easier said than done.

This is why as a manager you must take the pressure off your team when they are doing unit tests. You must let them think.

Are they done with it ? No ? Let them finish so you can be sure this part is stable and clean before moving on. Besides developers love doing good job, not jumping from an unfinished feature to the next.

Take time to stop and think.

And stop writing tests when you’r done.  But never before. And not because of budget. If you are short on budget, prefer to limit the number of features, not the quality of the existing one.

TODO