Steele Bit

Cord cut, now what?

2012-07-08T15:34:00.001-06:00

In August 2011 Jamie and I cut the cord. It has been almost a year since this "dramatic" move. Even after clarifying points from the original post, I still get plenty of quizzical looks and probing questions regarding our decision so I figured another post was in order.

Early on it became apparent that it would be nice to have basic television available.

Since June 12, 2009, full-power television stations nationwide have been broadcasting in a digital format. (DTV.gov)

Meaning that basic television from ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS, etc. is available in High Definition. To receive these stations we purchased a digital antenna. After some research including checking the DTV Reception Maps I determined the Terk HDTV Indoor Amplified HD Antenna to be sufficient for our needs.

In our home this antenna gets great reception. The antenna is primarily used to watch news broadcasts and the Today Show. It has also come in handy for the occasional sports broadcast. The quality is as clear if not clearer than the basic stations provided on cable and renders at 1080i.

Between Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, Amazon Instant Video, Redbox and Apple TV we have access to plenty of content. We pay subscription fees for Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora, but at $8.55, $7.99 and $3.00 the total cost of $19.54 is nominal. Amazon Instant Video, Redbox and Apple TV gives us access to current run television and movies we cannot access via our streaming services. How much each costs depends on how many movies or shows we rent/buy in a given month.

Service	How we use it
Netflix	Movies, documentaries and previous season TV shows
Hulu Plus	Current run TV shows
Pandora	Streaming a huge selection of music
Amazon	Purchase current run TV shows and rent the occasional movie
Redbox	Rent new release movies
Apple TV (iTunes)	Rent movies

Hulu Plus covers many of the current run shows which we like to watch. However, there are a few shows which are not available. Thankfully, both ABC and NBC offer iPad applications from which most of their current content is available. Unfortunately, neither FOX nor CBS offer similar applications. This is not a huge deal as we don't watch many current run CBS or FOX shows.

Many shows which are not available via a dedicated app are available from the web. Via Apple AirPlay we can easily stream content from our iPads to our Apple TV. Meaning that anything we can watch on our iPads we can watch on our televisions. With AirPlay being added to the latest Mac OS X revision we will be able to watch anything on the internet on our Apple TV.

There are a few shows that are only available to us via purchase. Right now we are buying content from Amazon Instant Video. We pay for How I Met Your Mother, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, In Plain Sight (for obvious reasons) and Mad Men. That said all of the past seasons for these shows were recently added to Netflix so we may reevaluate how imperative it is for us to watch the current season.

Aside from what we can purchase, Amazon Instant Video continues to increase in value. The service is quickly adding many free options for Amazon Prime subscribers. If you are not familiar, Amazon Prime is a subscription service which allows you to receive Amazon orders in two days, borrow one free Kindle book a month, and stream an ever increasing library of free media content. Since the question of price is already in your mind Amazon Prime only costs $6.67 a month, but you pay for it via an upfront fee of $79.99.

Without the ease of cable stations sports are still difficult to consume, but if I really cared I could purchase streaming passes for all of the professional sports leagues. College sports are still the most difficult to watch with via streaming. However, I still maintain an Xbox Live subscription (got a great deal for a year's subscription at Christmas time) and use it to watch some college basketball. In fact, a few non-conference Lobo basketball games were streamable via ESPN3 on the Xbox. Even better in two instances the games were shown in HD whereas the local Comcast feed was not. When we cannot stream a Lobo game we listen to it on the radio, go to a friends house, sports bar or skip it. Outside of Lobo basketball sports are not a huge deal to us so our inability to easily consume sports content is inconsequential.

Even with all of that said slowly but surely it seems that sports are becoming more convenient to stream: the 2012 Super Bowl was streamed live for the first time and we are watching the 2012 Tour De France via the NBC iPad app. The app provides all kinds of statistics and information about the riders. While not perfect at $14.99 it's still a pittance to pay when compared to a full blown cable subscription.

While reading this you may not have picked up on the number of devices that we use to consume streaming content: That number stands at seven devices:

Xbox
Apple TV
iPad / iPhone
Roku
Antenna
Computer
Blu-ray Player

The way we consume content varies between devices and is not always the same even on the same device. To Microsoft's credit they continue to add apps and services to the Xbox which make it our go to device for streaming. The variety of ways to watch TV is not a huge deal but does require consideration each time you want to watch a program. With cutting the cord there is no "turn on, tune in, drop out." Even with the minor inconveniences we are still incredibly satisfied with our decision.

tl;dr

We use a variety of devices and mechanisms to watch television. It can be inconvenient and is rarely consistent. Cutting the cord has definitely worked for us, but is not for everyone.

Cord Cutting Rejoinder

2011-09-04T16:30:00.003-06:00

My post on Cutting the Cord was intended to clarify just what exactly my wife and I are doing for media entertainment since we are no longer paying for cable TV service. The post netted some great responses!

Brandon pointed out that you can purchase a Tour de France subscription for $19. In Brandon's opinion:

The [Tour de France] streaming is better than the TV coverage. Has lots more data (Speed, Heart Rate, Power Output, GPS tracker etc...)

Hooking a computer up to a TV to watch the race will not be a problem. In fact I'm thinking of building a home theater PC (HTPC) to run Boxee software and stream web only content to my television. Which will largely depending on how well using a Roku only works out once fall shows return.

Adam was curious if the cost for internet access had increased as a result of cord cutting. The short answer is no. The long answer-- I have long paid Comcast for additional internet bandwidth. My internet cost was around $67.95 regardless of my television subscription. The discount for "bundling" TV and internet is a few dollars. Interestingly when I canceled my TV service the Comcast customer service representative was kind enough to give me a yearlong internet price discount at $49.95 including my speed boost. So to clarify I did not include my internet cost because the price was barely affected by canceling TV service. Sure it'll be cheaper for a year, but will reset to where it had been before whether I have cable TV or not.

Several friends have pointed out the Comcast data threshold of 250 gigabytes. The 250 gigabyte bandwidth cap is an arbitrary restriction that Comcast established in October of 2008. According to Comcast most users only utilize 5 to 6 gigabytes a month. In 2008 Comcast provided the following statistics on consumption activities:

Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

The August 2011 edition of Wired included the article What Bandwidth Caps Would Mean for Internet Gluttons using an infographic to explain bandwidth consumption:

For perspective the Full Lord of the Rings Trilogy is 11 hours and 23 minutes. More importantly in most cases Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon only stream in 720p, which is still HD just not 1080p. So streaming a 22-minute HD television show eats 0.42 gigabytes and a 44-minute show 0.84 gigabytes. Watching the typical feature film in HD would require roughly 2.5 gigabytes. Further, not all of the content we stream is in HD (MacGyver anyone) so these numbers are even lower.

Since cutting the cord we are averaging 4 - 5 gigabytes a day. At that rate I will consume roughly 135 gigabytes a month. At this point the 250 gigabyte cap is not overly limiting, but I will keep an eye on my consumption because if we exceed the limit for two months in a six month period Comcast will cut our cord. Given our current consumption patterns I am not worried about that happening.

Please keep the questions and comments coming. It has been interesting learning what others are doing to the cord, as well as having people question my setup. We continue to be pleased with our decision.

Cutting the Cord

2011-09-01T07:55:00.000-06:00

As of Monday, August 22nd, 2011 my wife and I are no longer cable television subscribers. For both of us this is the first time in our lifetimes that we have not had cable television in our home. While this sounds like a dramatic change in reality it will not be that much different from when we had cable.

For the last six months I have been talking about canceling cable with anyone who will listen. I spent the six months before that pondering how I would do so. Like a true geek I inundated myself with information on the topic, devising various configuration options. Not wanting to fall into analysis paralysis I pulled the trigger in April and purchased a Roku XD for $79.99.

For those unfamiliar with Roku let me provide a bit of background. Roku is a consumer electronics company which Netflix selected in 2007 to build an exclusive device for their streaming video service. Netflix then decided it would be better served to release a plethora of Netflix Ready Devices instead of offering only a single device. Undeterred Roku released their initial device as a platform making it easy for other providers to deliver content to the device. This shift was the right move for both companies as Netflix streaming is ubiquitous and Roku offers over 300 "channels." There have been several hardware iterations since the initial release, the most recent being the new Roku 2 models unveiled at the end of July.

With shiny new hardware in hand we began to stream Netflix instant videos and Pandora to our television via the Roku. This was not a huge change as previously we had both of these services available to us on our Samsung Blu-ray player. The Roku offered a better user experience so it replaced that function of the Blu-ray player, but was not yet a cable TV replacement.

In May Hulu offered a free month of Hulu Plus to anyone with a dot edu email address. A Carnegie Mellon graduate student at the time I took them up on their offer. Hulu Plus offers not just a handful of episodes but full current seasons which can be streamed to a variety of devices, my Roku included. While Hulu Plus does not feature every show we watch in prime time it covers the majority of them.

The combination of content offered from Netflix and Hulu Plus made me begin to believe it would be possible to cut the cord. But we were still missing shows which were not available on either service. Lacking services to provide access to content I began to examine what it would cost to purchase shows à la carte from Amazon Instant Video. Amazingly Amazon provided options for purchasing most of the shows missing from Hulu Plus. The cost for individual shows feels a bit overpriced but is not egregious. Amazon does offer season passes to most shows which provides a discount over the individual price.

My wife and I have different tastes in TV shows, but here's what we are watching and where are we watching it:

Hulu Plus
- Castle
- Biggest Loser
- Cougar Town
- Modern Family
- 30 Rock
- Parks and Recreation
- Office
- Glee
- Secret Life of the American Teenager
- Saturday Night Live
- Body of Proof
Amazon
- Breaking Bad
- How I Met Your Mother
- Mad Men
- Psych
- Dexter
- The Killing
- The Walking Dead
Hulu Web
- Covert Affairs
- White Collar
- Burn Notice
- Community
Web
- Gossip Girl
- Project Runway

Of the shows we "care" about only The Middle and The Big Bang Theory are not available. Which is ironic because The Middle is about a family who would never think of streaming their television content and The Big Bang Theory is about geeks who most certainly would.

With entertainment television mostly covered sports are the only piece missing. I do not watch a lot of sports, but do closely follow Lobo Men's Basketball. Sadly The Mountain does not provide a streaming option so cutting the cord will cost me my ability to watch Lobo games at home. I have already had several invites to watch games at friends houses, can turn on the radio and there are always sports bars. Next summer I will have to determine if there is a way to easily stream the Tour de France. Beyond cycling and Lobo basketball-- ESPN3 HD content can be streamed via my Xbox Live subscription. If I cared to pay for MLB, UFC or the NHL I could stream them to the Roku. If I owned a PlayStation 3 I could subscribe and then stream the NFL Ticket. Point is if sports are your thing there are options though I am finding for college sports they might be a bit more limited.

So what's the bottom line? How much is this shift saving me? Let me break things down:

Service	Monthly Cost
Hulu Plus	$7.99
Pandora One	$3.00
Netflix Streaming	$8.55
Amazon Instant Video	$30.00 est.
Xbox Live	$9.99

I am not convinced we will be purchasing all of the shows I've listed from Amazon Instant Video so the $30.00 estimate should go way down. Jamie and I just had twin girls so we do not have the time for television that we used to. My guess is that because of our limited time available, back seasons of shows we have not seen will suffice to keep us entertained. Unless we really need to see a show near when it aired, I can see us waiting for the price to go down or become available on Hulu or Netflix. Additionally, I am not convinced I need ESPN3 or that I will have time to enjoy Xbox Live so we might be eliminating that cost as well.

Bottom line we were paying a little over $100 a month for cable television. With a full package of Amazon Streaming and Xbox Live our monthly cost would be $59.53. Cut Xbox Live or a percentage of the shows we are willing to pay Amazon for and that number drops perceptibly. My guess is our actual monthly total for television entertainment will be closer to $30 or $40.

The simple fact that I am in control of what shows I want to pay for, rather than having them prescribed to me as a bundle from my cable provider is what I am most excited about. If a show becomes uninteresting I stop paying for it immediately saving not only money but time.

Carnegie Mellon Practicum Project

2011-01-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley approaches teaching through learn by doing. This approach emphasizes group work in simulated real world situations in all courses. As a capstone course students partake in a practicum which “offers an educational opportunity for students to work for corporate clients doing real-time work, under the guidance of faculty.”

For my capstone course at I am working on the GeoCam Project. From the GeoCam blog:

The GeoCam Project aims to build a network of citizen disaster responders out of people helping people every day.

Google funds the project and the team works at the NASA Ames Research Center. The project will put me out of my comfort zone as it relies upon languages, frameworks, and platforms I do not have much experience with. I am excited to begin work on the project and will be documenting some of my experiences here.

Ask and You Shall Receive

2010-10-12T14:33:00.001-06:00

I am in the process of preparing a presentation on Stack Overflow for the Sandia .NET User Group. In simple terms Stack Overflow is a programming question and answer site that's free. If you have not heard of it you are either not a programmer or have not been standing near me when I am singing the site's praises.

I will link to the presentation when I have it prepared, but for now I wanted to thank Jeff Atwood and Emily Yacus at Stack Overflow for being so cool as to provide me with t-shirts and stickers to handout after my presentation.

Thanks again guys and keep up the great work!

Setting Up Android Development Environment

2010-07-06T09:59:00.002-06:00

Setting up an Android development environment is not a terribly hard task, but there are several steps involved. Before I document those steps a note about the hardware I used for my forays into Android development.
Development Machine Specs

Windows 7 64 bit
Processor: Intel Core Duo T9800 @ 2.93GHz 2.94GHz
RAM: 4.00 GB

Android Platforms

Motorola Droid
HTC Incredible

The following steps are merely the ones that I used to develop Proximity Alerter and are definitely not the only options for setting up an Android development environment. Accounting for download and installation time the following steps should take less than 2 hours.

Step 1 - Android SDK & Components
- Download and install the Android SDK
- Once the SDK has been installed, you'll need to manually add the 2.1 platform and Google APIs, see Adding Android SDK Components
Step 2 - Phone Drivers
- Download and install the Motorola Mobile Phone USB Driver
- At the time of this writing I could not find an easily downloadable HTC driver but the Installing HTC Incredible Android SDK Drivers instructions provided by Andrew Westberg work.
Step 3 - Setup Android Devices for Debugging
- On the device, go to the home screen, press MENU, select Applications > Development, then check all three options
Step 4 - Setup MOTODEV Studio (a fully contained Eclipse plug-in) for Android
- Download and install MOTODEV Studio for Android (might require account creation)
- Start MOTODEV Studio for Android, create a new workspace
- Select: "Use an existing SDK from the file system" and point MOTODEV Studio to the location where you installed the Android SDK

At this point your Android development environment is setup and ready for the obligatory Hello, World.

Android Application Ideas

2010-06-25T08:38:00.003-06:00

I have spent the month of June recovering from a lot of travel and catching up on work. Thus far it has been an outstanding summer filled with a lot of learning. We started a new project at work which is stretching my capabilities and providing excellent learning opportunities.

In addition to work I've spent the last six weeks in a Smartphone Application Development course. The course focused on developing applications for the Android Platform. The course was taught by Ted Selker who pushed us to come up with innovative project ideas. I had some of my own but polled my social graph for additional ideas.

The best ideas are below

Service Disabler: An application that is location aware turning off features depending on location. This would have practical use for the government as even government owned portable electronic devices have restrictions inside of limited areas. This idea could be extended to the consumer market to turn off specified features/notifications when at particular locations i.e. I am at/near my desk I don't need to be notified of Twitter mentions.
Bicycle cadence measurements: Bicycle cadence measurements. This measurement could be obtained by listening for the "swoosh" of a bicycle pedal using a Bluetooth headset or by calculating a virtual cadence using the accelerometer. In either case as a cyclist I am interested in this application because I presently have no option like it.
Photo Geo-tagging: A photo geotagging application. The application would communicate with your service of choice (Flickr, Picasa, etc.) and update previously uploaded photographs with a prior recorded geotagged location. The application would be smart enough to ignore photographs where it was not on at the time of the picture being taken. This would be useful for photographers who already carry additional devices to provide similar utility.
Grocery Food Item Locations: An application that provides the location of food items based on a specified grocery list. I.e. cereal can be found on aisle 3 and produce in this section of the store. This application would provide the details of where to go in the store to get all of the items on a list and provide suggestions for available coupons. To make this truly work would require the eventual buy in from multiple grocers as keeping store layout information up to date would be difficult.
Exposure Calculator: An exposure calculator for pinhole photography. Capturing light values and displaying flash calculations to photographers. This would be of value as photographers already carry additional devices to provide such calculations.
Advanced Phone Locker: Provide the ability to lock the phone with more than a simple pin or connect the dots unlock mechanism. This application would use multiple sensors to unlock the phone. It’d be interesting to allow for audible, location, gesture, and accelerometer based unlocking. A user could create a profile combining up to two unlocking mechanisms.

Some of these are more cute than useful. I ultimately chose to write the Service Disabler application though it morphed into Proximity Alerter.

About Me

2010-06-10T11:30:00.003-06:00

My post What's in a Name should provide a general sense of who I am but if you are really interested read on.

My name is Andrew Steele. I am married, have two dogs and work for Sandia National Laboratories as a Programmer Analyst. Which is an overly complicated way of saying computer programmer or software engineer.

The internet is fully integrated into my daily activities. I am the epitome of a digital native. As a curious professional looking to improve I spend a lot of time participating and lurking on Stack Overflow. I get more out of my Twitter account than my Facebook account. I spend a lot of time reading about computers and technology.

I am an avid road cyclist, snowboarder, hiker, and UNM Basketball fan. Thankfully, living in the City of Albuquerque in the Land of ~~Entrapment~~ Enchantment (New Mexico) allows for plenty of opportunities to pursue these passions. During the summer I tend to spend enough time outdoors to cultivate a serious ~~farmer's~~ biker's tan.

I have been enamored with computers since I was a toddler. I became interested in programming when I figured out how to tweak the variables in the turn based artillery game Gorillas. A few years later with a friend I built my first web site which received a cool rating from Yahoo!. This happened because at the time our site was one of only a few that featured Doom 2 WADs. This was pretty awesome until my parents received a bill for the bandwidth (hard for a kid to explain in 1995). During high school and the early part of college I worked for America Online. When AOL lost its identity during the Time Warner merger and subsequent fallout from the dot-com bubble I took an internship with Sandia and have been there ever since.

After a four year hiatus I decided to return to school to earn another master's degree. With the support of my employer in the fall of 2009 I started the Master of Science in Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. The experience has been rewarding and I've enjoyed being a student again.

Spring 2010 Travel

2010-06-01T12:05:00.001-06:00

Since the weekend of May 14th I have been traveling relentlessly. At one point I was only in Albuquerque for 16 hours before leaving again and while I enjoying traveling being gone this much has been both hectic and tiring. My travel has been for school, pleasure, work, bicycling and a wedding.

My first stop was a student gathering at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley.
I spent the Friday before the gathering in San Francisco and was lucky enough to get a great rental deal on a brand new 2011 Ford Mustang. The car only had 62 miles on it when I picked it up and added a lot of fun to the weekend. The gathering’s theme was "Innovation and Creativity" and featured a panel on creativity, a Comedy Sportz performance, a presentation on Improvisation and Creativity from Patricia Madson and various other workshops. The sessions were a lot of fun, but the highlight of the gathering was the opportunity to interact with my fellow students in the flesh. We all met last August at orientation but meeting again was nice as virtually attending class and holding group meetings only takes you so far.

While at the gathering I received a Motorola Droid to use over the summer for a smartphone development course. I was happy to have the phone as I intended to use its features to assist with my next trip.

After returning from San Francisco I was in Albuquerque for three days before leaving for a conference in Long Island, New York. Having never visited New York City I decided to play tourist and leave a bit early for the conference. A friend of mine who lives in Bronxville allowed me to stay at his place. He gave me three pieces of advice before leaving me alone on a train into midtown Manhattan:

Never screw up the city’s flow and never hesitate.
If you don’t know just ask. People in New York are generally pretty nice.
Don’t think about what you look like as no one is paying attention to you anyways

Armed with this advice I spent a few days taking in as much of the New York experience as I could as quickly as I could. By utilizing my Droid and BlackBerry to navigate the city I was able to get around pretty easily. In fact other than getting on the wrong subway train once I always knew where I was going. In addition to navigation I used Yelp with great success to get recommendations on good touristy and un-touristy restaurants.

The Droid also led to my coolest social networking experience to date. I took a picture of the arch in Washington Square Park and immediately published it to a Facebook album. Within moments the photo had received a comment from a friend who lived near Washington Square. We commented back and forth and were able to meet for lunch. None of this would have happened without the ability to instantly tap my social graph. By the time my co-workers arrived for the conference I was able to play tour guide taking them on a whirlwind tour of the city. I certainly did not see everything and would have liked to spend more time at particular sites but do feel like I got a taste of the Big Apple. In fact in the short time that I was there I was able to take in a Broadway show (American Idiot) and was even so lucky as to have my name drawn to attend a taping of The Late Show with David Letterman.

The vacation portion of my trip east was awesome and so was the conference. The National Laboratory Information Technology Summit (NLIT) is always great; the content is stellar and everyone there is focused on similar work which saves the usual conference pain pleasantries of trying to convey exactly what it is that my company does. At NLIT I gave two presentations Progressive Enhancement to the Rescue and Goal Directed Design Prevents Dancing Bearware. The session on Progressive Enhancement was lightly attended but I had a great turnout for Goal Driven Design. Both presentations netted some outstanding hallway conversations. I gained a lot from the presentations that I attended and look forward to next year’s conference in Colorado.

After returning from New York I spent only 16 hours in Albuquerque before heading to Durango, Colorado for the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic. Iron Horse is a race from Durango to Silverton over two mountain passes. It attracts 2,500 riders who attempt the trip on road bikes, beach cruisers and unicycles. The ride is hard, but a ton of fun. I did well in the ride but not as well as I would have liked. I think all of the traveling had started to catch up with me (that’s my excuse anyways).

At any rate, I have been back in Albuquerque since Sunday afternoon but am headed back to Durango Wednesday evening for a wedding Friday. I had considered attending Tech-Ed North America in New Orleans but am glad that after this weekend I am done traveling for a while.

Personas and User Stories in Action

2010-05-20T01:56:00.001-06:00

My team is in the process of transitioning our development methodology. We have never had a formally documented development process. At best our practices have been most akin to waterfall and at worst haphazard. We have succeeded in developing this way because we have been in a perpetual maintenance mode, tested relentlessly, and new development has largely been completed by small groups of developers. Over the course of the last year we have been slowly transitioning to agile practices while incorporating the interaction design philosophies espoused by Alan Cooper. As we are beginning a major redevelopment effort we felt we were finally ready to take the next evolutionary step, adopting an agile methodology, Extreme Programming (XP) and more fully utilizing Cooper’s personas.

In Extreme Programming and Inmates I argue that the use of personas can assist XP teams in generating user stories. What I do not explain is that on the morning I set that post to publish my team was gathering to do exactly that. We spent all of last Thursday in a conference room. Our meeting began at 8:30 AM with a roughly outlined agenda.

In the weeks prior to the meeting we had worked to create a cast of characters representing our identified user personas. These personas were based on the demographics and unique goals of our intended user base. At the meetings outset our intent was to identify those personas which were positive and negative. After some deliberation we identified three positive personas and nine negative personas. Of the three positive personas one was clearly primary.

Having culled our cast of characters we began a traditional brainstorming session. This brainstorming session was not like others that we have had as our discussion and ideas were focused. Knowing who we were talking about allowed us to quickly generate a valuable mind map. After a morning in a conference room we decided to take a break for lunch.

Even after the successful morning I was nervous to return from lunch. While my team had responded well to the use of personas for brainstorming I feared their unfamiliarity with user stories and some lingering tentativeness toward personas would hamper our productivity. I had visions of us sitting around a table just staring at each other.

To my great pleasure I discovered that my fears were unfounded. The team adapted to creating user stories quite readily. We had the same experience that we had had in the morning in that the personas focused our discussion and allowed us to zero in on who a particular story was for. We turned on music and laughed our way through the remainder of the afternoon.

At our meetings conclusion we found that we had generated over a hundred user stories. Many more than we can complete in several iterations. I am happy to report that using personas in conjunction with story cards has thus far been a resounding success.

Differences between Story Cards and Use Cases

2010-05-18T17:27:00.001-06:00

Story cards and use cases are both mechanisms for documenting user goals. Story cards are part of the agile software methodology Extreme Programming (XP). Use cases are part of the more formal Unified Process (UP) methodology. The two approaches share similarities but differ in their application. It is these differences that make one method more appropriate than the other depending on the type of project.

Story cards are user goals written in the form of two to three sentence stories on index cards. A story card contains enough information for the customer and developer to understand the story’s intent and estimate its implementation difficulty. In contrast, there are three use case “dressing” levels. A “briefly dressed” use case does not differ greatly from a story card in the amount of information documented. A “casually dressed” use case captures additional information but is not as detailed as a “fully dressed” use case-- a highly detailed document including pre/post conditions, alternative paths, and exception handling.

While story cards and briefly dressed use cases resemble each other in the amount of information documented, their function differs. Briefly dressed use cases are essentially placeholders for future fully dressed use cases. Fully dressed use cases are the final result of many customer and developer implementation conversations. While not every use case must be fully dressed before development begins, generally no development work towards implementing a particular use case begins until that use case is fully dressed. Conversely, story cards act as a conversation starter allowing programmers to begin development while still engaging the customer for implementation details. Establishment of user acceptance criteria for the story cards occurs during these conversations. From these criteria developers are able to create automated user acceptance tests. Automated user acceptance tests are a code form of the formal written documentation in a fully dressed use case.

XP story cards enable concurrent conversations during development, while UP use cases enable preemptive conversations prior to development. The difference between preemptive or concurrent conversations goes to the heart of the differences between agile and formal development methodologies. Agile methodologies and XP in particular attempt to engage the customer throughout a project’s development lifecycle. Story cards are a means to continuously engage the customer while developing a product. Formal methodologies like UP primarily focus on detailed documentation before implementation work begins. A fully dressed use case attempts to detail all possible usage outcomes creating a blueprint for a developer to work from.

Whether story cards or use cases are more appropriate for a particular project depends on whether an agile or formal methodology is most appropriate for the project. Projects that are life critical, require a very high degree of precision, or the development team is highly distributed will benefit from the use of fully dressed use cases and a formal methodology. Projects that allow for repetitive iterations, have a low fault tolerance, and lend themselves to close developer/stakeholder collaboration will benefit from the use of story cards and an agile methodology.

Much like agile and formal methodologies, story cards and use cases have advantages based on the type of project under development. Developers should be aware that while they may prefer one methodology over another, project requirements may determine which methodology is more appropriate.

Extreme Programming and Inmates

2010-05-13T01:30:00.001-06:00

In The Inmates are Running the Asylum Alan Cooper makes a compelling argument for interaction design which Cooper contends requires thorough exploration and documentation before any programming begins. Kent Beck in Extreme Programming Explained describes that the methodology uses a pull development model which specifies stories in detail immediately before implementation. When juxtaposed these two assertions seem contrary but upon reflection can be made complementary.

At their core agile methodologies like Extreme Programming (XP) emphasize creating good products, not just good programs. This distinction while subtle is important. By embracing the external input of customers, users, managers, and stakeholders XP practitioners acknowledge that a product is more than just a program comprised of features. Cooper similarly believes that a successful product is not just a feature compilation arguing that achieved goals, not features, compel users. Cooper’s advocacy for goal driven design leads to his suggestion of utilizing personas-- hypothetical archetypes of actual users. In XP projects developers can use personas as stand-ins for onsite customers. Personas allow XP teams to vet features through the lens of accomplishing a persona’s goals.

XP developers document external input in the form of user stories. An XP user story is a mechanism which estimates and describes units of customer-visible functionality. In his Agile 2008 Conference keynote, Cooper contends that creating user stories is arguably an agile programmers’ weakest skill and is an interaction designers’ strongest one. Cooper goes on to conclude that while agile methodologies like XP bring outsiders into the software construction process it is interaction design that makes the contributions of outsiders effective and useful. Simply stated, XP puts developers and stakeholders in direct collaboration while Cooper advocates placing an interaction designer in-between stakeholders and developers. Utilizing an interaction designer in conjunction with an XP team seems reasonable; allowing developers to focus on technical problems and interaction designers to focus on human factors. XP programmers can take Cooper’s advice by investing time to fully frame user stories, which ultimately speeds up programming and reduces costs.

Both Beck and Cooper are advocates of an iterative process. In Chapter 3: Wasting Money Cooper warns against using iterative product delivery as a means of product refinement. Later he declares that “getting to the right product is always a matter of iterating” (Cooper p240). What Cooper does not stress in Inmates but does so in his keynote at the Agile 2008 Conference is where the iterative process should take place. Cooper believes it is folly to iterate where customers are subject to abuse by those iterations and instead urges iteration during the design and engineering phases. While Beck urges that in an XP project the product should be in a releasable state at an iteration’s conclusion, he does not suggest that it must be released.

Incorporating Cooper's goal driven design with Beck's XP practices improves software product development. Beck acknowledges that there is no litmus test for certifying a development team extreme and Cooper is ultimately a proponent for the tenets of agile methodologies. While at first glance Beck and Cooper may seem to be in conflict regarding iterative software development, in reality they both offer valuable suggestions which should be leveraged. It is therefore up to an agile development team to incorporate the suggestions of each practice in a sustainable and effective way.

What’s in a Name?

2010-05-10T16:30:00.002-06:00

I have been kicking around the idea of starting a blog for a couple of years, but with this post am jumping in feet first. One of the reasons it has taken me so long to begin blogging is I could never commit to a name. Generally, the names I came up with were too restrictive and locked me into too specific a topic. I did not realize the problem with one name until after I had registered the domain and realized it was a dirty word in Dutch. To have reaped the benefits of blogging earlier I should have damned the naming torpedoes and proceeded at full speed ahead, but am glad I did not because I am exceedingly pleased with the name I finally selected: Steele Bit.

Steele Bit covers everything I want my blog to be about. I imagine that some posts are going to be personal in nature, including my last name covers that. That said bit is the more interesting part of the name.

The word bit is fun because it has a long list of definitions. I use it here primarily because the relation bits have to technology. I intend to focus my writing on programming and related topics. Further, as a card carrying geek I will not be able to keep myself from posting on new technology. Finally, the word bit invokes the sense of something small which is to say I do not intend to be unnecessarily verbose in my posts.

In summary Steele Bit will primarily be a blog about programming, a smattering of technology, and with a bit (see what I did there) of personal anecdotes thrown in for good measure.