Warning: I spent a good chunk of last night sitting in a hot tub
reading Joel on Software. This is probably a direct result.
Ok. We have this GUI layer. It doesn't do anything, because all that
stuff is down in the model. At this point, this is so essential as to
almost be XP dogma by now. The GUI is hard to Unit Test. It's hard to
Acceptance Test. We want it thin, so thin as to not matter.
Unfortunately, I kinda lied in the last patagraph. I said it doesn't
do anything. That's not really true. If it's a desktop app, it's
highlighting, cutting, pasting, moving stuff, and either it's
complicated enough to drive your end user crazy or you've hired some
really bright UI guys and could we please have their names and home
phone numbers so we can hire them away from you. If it's a web app,
it's trying to handle cross platform compatibility with HTML, CSS,
and Javascript, and you still need the really bright UI guys.
Now I firmly believe that agile is the right way to do GUIs. But I
also belive one thing: It's A Different Kind Of Agile*
Now I can do some web GUI stuff. I used to do some web design work. I
was never good, but I used to do some. And this is where things stand
out. Because I know I was never good, it becomes obvious to me that
our product, like many products, looks more like Geocities than it
does Microsoft excel. This isn't to say it looks bad. It looks like
Yahoo, and Yahoo is functional but definately not elegant. In fact
what the ads sometimes do to the post display on Yahoo is downright
fugly.
So I'm thinking about what a agile team that focused on GUI screens
would look like. I think it would hire very different people first of
all. And that makes me think that someone else should be definately
be doing the GUI. And I think they would be testing different.
Wouldn't it be interesting if they mocked up the entire model and
built some form of test suite that really beat against all the things
we forget GUIs do?
Different people with a different problem and different practices
focused on the reality of their situation. What would it look like?
It's something to think about anyway.
*If anyone has a better way of emphasizing that on this forum, please
e-mail me. I think it looks ugly but I can't use all Caps. :(
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