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SIGDOC Newsletter
March 2008 :: Volume 9, Number 1
Features
- Agile Methods Survey
- What is Design of Communication? Part 3, From Steve Murphy
Agile Methods Survey
Gloria Reece
© 2008 Photography and digital story design
by Scott W. Ambler and Gloria A. Reece, All rights reserved.
LET’S GO TO A SURVEY!
Scott Ambler and Gloria Reece are teaming up to conduct the ACM SIGDOC 2008 Annual Agile Methods Survey: Accessibility and Usability. We invite you to participate! The goal of the survey is to learn how accessibility and usability are incorporated into current agile software methods processes. There is little information about how usability and accessible design are being integrated into an agile software methods process. We are filling this gap by conducting annual surveys of information technology professionals. Our surveys are primarily quantitative with a few qualitative items (most at the participant’s discretion). We anticipate using this information in professional publications for technical audiences. This brief (6–minute) survey is for those who work in agile software development environments. Your survey responses will be reported anonymously, and your individual participation will not be revealed to third parties.
The survey contains brief questions in these formats: dichotomous (yes/no), checklist, drop down list choice (select one item), and short answer (text response). Since we are hosting the survey in a secure environment, you will need to provide your first and last name and e–mail address. Your e–mail address will be used for receipt correspondence associated with submission of the form. Brief instructions are also given within the questions.
Some terms that you may find helpful while completing the survey include:
Actors:
- User or End User. A person who will actually work with the system/product being built.
- Stakeholder. Anyone who has stake in the creation or operation of the system. They include those who are direct and indirect users, manager of users, senior managers, developers, operations staff, support (help desk) staff, developers working on other systems that integrate or interact with the one under development, or maintenance professionals potentially affected by the development and/or deployment of a software project. Some agile methodologies, XP in particular, uses the term “customer.”
- Developer. A person who is a programmer that may have skills at one of these levels: master, journeyman, or apprentice.
- Master Developers. Are journeymen who can decompose a problem to solve a business need and prefer clear, concise code that adheres to standards.
- Journeymen Developers. Have a broad object–oriented (OO) vocabulary, understand OO principles, and apply them in their code. They use a rich set of design patterns, but may not be comfortable in exploiting their OO skills to solve a business problem.
- Apprentice Developers. Are programmers that are not yet Journeymen. They are competent in a programming language and associated tools (IDE, unit test tools, debuggers). They can write code.
Types of Testing:
- Acceptance Testing. A testing technique, the goal is to determine whether a system satisfies its acceptance criteria and to enable the stakeholder(s) to determine whether to accept the product.
- Accessibility Testing. A testing technique, where the goal is to determine whether a product satisfies the required criteria and to enable the stakeholder(s) to determine whether to accept the product as one that someone with diverse physical and sensory needs could use effectively. One example is an accessible website. Some familiar criteria include the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), World Wide Web Consortium (W3.org), Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and other government mandates such as Section 508.
- Usability Testing. A method by which users of a system are asked to perform certain tasks in an effort to measure the system’s ease–of–use, task time, and the user's perception of the experience. Usability testing can be formal, informal, use dedicated rooms and equipment, employ physical mock ups of the system, or conducted remotely.
- User testing. Testing activities, including both acceptance and final acceptance testing, where stakeholders are actively involved.
If you have any questions about the survey, please contact Gloria at drgreece@windstream.net for additional information. Please use this description for the subject line when writing:
SUBJECT: 2008 ACM AGILE METHODS SURVEY
If you are willing to take the survey, please click on the link below. The survey will be available from April 1, 2008 at 8:00 a.m. until April 30, 2008, at 12:00 a.m. (midnight) EST.
http://college.livetext.com/misk5/formz/public/22277/UBtsJGUQXB
Survey Acknowledgements:
We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Brad Mehlenbacher, ACM SIGDOC Chair, and Rob Pierce, ACM SIGDOC Newsletter Editor, for granting us this opportunity to publish this article in their newsletter. We ran pilot tests of the survey during March 2008, with expertise in the following areas: communication, information technology (includes agile), engineering, accessibility, and usability. We also sincerely appreciate the assistance from all of our volunteer participants. Without your help, this investigation would not be possible—thank you!
ABOUT THE INVESTIGATORS
SCOTT W. AMBLER
A 1994 honor graduate from The University of Toronto, a Canadian native, Scott Amber holds an M.S. degree in Information Science. He is an internationally–recognized expert in human–computer interaction (HCI), object–oriented design (OOD) concepts, modeling, testing, and user–interface (UI) design, computer science, and commerce. Scott is a certified instructor in Rational Unified Process (RUP) and has extensive experience with mapping objects into relational data bases. He works with organizations who need an introduction to software development processes. During his career, he has mentored developers in OOD concepts, modeling, testing, and UI design. Scott has written numerous magazine articles and columns on information technology topics. He has also trained hundreds of people in OOD modeling and development. He has co–authored and edited a collection of software development books. Scott is a Jolt judge for Dr. Dobbs Journal. Scott’s work also requires extensive travel; he has had an opportunity to see more than 280 interesting places! Scott is a Fellow of the International Association of Software Architects. Currently, Scott is Practice Leader Agile Development with IBM Rational, based in Canada but helping IBM customers worldwide to scale agile development approaches. He has worked in the information technology industry since the mid 1980s and with object technology since the early 1990s. He has written several books and white papers on OOD software development and process, Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD), Agile Database Techniques, the Agile UP, and the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) (TM). He is a frequent speaker at international technical conferences where he delivers keynote speeches. Scott writes columns and/or articles for several publications. He maintains, and is active on, several mailing lists and blog about how to scale agile software development.
GLORIA A. REECE, Ed.D.
Gloria Reece contributes to design of communication and education practices at Society levels with international reach. Her document design research at Florida Institute of Technology charted new territory for multimodal delivery. Gloria’s 2002 research, Text Legibility for Web Documents and Low Vision, covers 12 disciplines and extends and applies document design to those with vision problems. Winner of six research awards since 1973, Gloria has been recognized for the innovativeness of her scholarship. Since 2003, Gloria has been a Governor’s Teaching Fellow sponsored by the University of Georgia. She is a 2008 honorary recipient of the Associate Fellow award from the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Gloria is also ACM SIGDOC’s INTECOM delegate. For fifteen consecutive years, Gloria has served INTECOM Societies as a presenter at annual meetings. She is a charter member of the STC AccessAbility SIG. During 2002–2003, she conducted a national, collaborative campaign on hearing loss that resulted in one of the earliest uses of new media in accessible design. She is a 2005 recipient of an NSF grant for a web resource for accessible new media for college calculus. During 2006–2007, Gloria directed a multilingual online educational outreach for economically disadvantaged children, including those with vision loss. From 1998–2004, Gloria was involved in assisted living care for elderly with communication disorders associated with arterial dementia and alzheimer’s disease. Since 2000, Gloria has been a volunteer caregiver for elderly who have mobility restriction and are deaf–blind. These efforts have led medical professionals to new solutions for prescription magnification devices for Age-related Macular Degeneration patients, use of new digital technologies for the profoundly deaf, and use of new fabrics for gas permeable lenses for those with ophthoneurolgical vision problems with adverse refractive error. Currently, Gloria is writing Practical Writing and Design for eLearning (a John Wiley publication), which will have linkage to Exceptional Technology Solutions, which is her new website that focuses on scholarship of teaching, learning (SoTL), and consulting activities and includes an on–line resource for the book.
Index to Photos in Digital Story:
- Scott Ambler at Machu Picchu in Peru during January, 2004 (Scott was in the first group to get on the Andes trail that year.)
- Scott Ambler at Machu Picchu in Peru during January, 2004
- Scott Ambler in New Zealand just outside of Queenstown on the south island during Spring of 2003
- Scott Ambler at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC
- Scott Ambler at the Teotihuacan, the pyramid near Mexico City, Mexico.
- Gloria Reece during her digital storytelling class at Georgia College & State University in Fall, 2004.
- Scott Ambler with an iguana.
- Gloria Reece sporting her new 2003 hat design: “Peacock Feathers” at the 2003 Annual STC Conference in Dallas, TX.
- Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, NV, by Gloria Reece at the Paris Hotel while attending the 2006 Annual STC Conference.
- Logo for Scott Ambler’s consulting website (http://www.ambysoft.com).
- 2008 Graphic designed for photo collage.
- Logo for Gloria Reece’s SoTL and consulting website (http://www.exceptionaltechnologysolutions.com).
Gloria A. Reece, Ed.D./Dr. Glo
Educator, Researcher, and Consultant
New Media & Instructional Technology
Accessible/User-centered Design
Business, Technical & Professional Communication
93 Mariners Dr., NE
Milledgeville, GA 31061
(478) 453-8010 (EST)
drgreece@windstream.net
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What is Design of Communication? Part 3, From Steve Murphy
by Steve Murphy
srmurphy@ca.ibm.com
Steve joined the SIGDOC community in 2002 to get better insight of industry practices that I could apply to my position as a graphic designer at the IBM Toronto Software Laboratory. He started at IBM as a production graphic designer creating various images that were needed for software products, including: icons, diagrams, packaging components, and illustrations, and is now an Information Development (ID) specialist. His stated objective for this three part Newsletter contribution is to achieve a broader definition of a graphic designer's role in the design of communication paradigm.
To briefly recapitulate the two previous SIGDOC newsletter feature articles on the subject of "What is Design of Communication?", Part 1: Defining and improving graphic design services for information development (ID) deliverables described the assessment and the streamlining of the information graphics production process which provided efficiencies for the Toronto Lab Media Design Studio (MDS) ID and Packaging team. Part 2 detailed the benefits gained from the increase of productivity and the new alliances forged with the editors and writers to produce best practices that solved usability issues for screen captures, concept diagrams and syntax diagrams.
I left Part 2 off anticipating the newly formed IBM ID advisory counsel's workgroup named the non-text information (NTI). I may remind you that this was the opportunity to take best practices from local implementation to a corporate level. The goal of the workgroup was to bring best practices to graphics typically found in IBM technical documentation. Sounds reasonable and easy enough. A group of approximately 10 graphic designers from the software and systems groups gathered. A question on everyone's mind was: "Where do you start?" Fraternizing was the first order since most designers never collaborated with each other before. It was quickly followed by goals and scope of the effort. Without a clear idea of what kind of images each designer was creating, the team collected information and examples of their work. It soon became clear that everyone used different terms to mean the same thing when describing the different types of graphics. A taxonomy of terms was created providing a reference to commonly used visual assets and graphic types. The teams broke out into subgroups working on a specific type of graphic. They developed best practices, graphics repositories of reusable visual elements (also known as clip-art libraries), instructions for creating more usable graphics, and so on. The effort cumulated in best practices that are published on a corporate web site named Design Resources for Information Graphics (DRIG) featuring best practices for:
- Accent graphics depicting conceptual or abstract representation of user goal category within IBM Information Centers
- Concept diagrams represent a system, a structure, or process
(see example in previous article)
- Cueing graphics are static, literal and/or metaphorical graphic used to provide the user with a cue to content type (for example, tips, concepts, platform identifiers) that needs to be differentiated from the other content to avoid confusion
- Logic diagrams (also known as flow charts) illustrate a series of steps and choices or the hierarchical organization of code structures
- Screen captures are "pictures" of a computer's desktop or display
(see example in previous feature article)
- Syntax diagrams are graphical representations of syntactical properties of a programming language
- Technical illustrations depict a real-world physical entity (for example, a computer work station or a printer) in a highly representational manner.
- UML diagrams are model representation of real world ideas
(see example in previous feature article)
The structure was repeated for each information graphic type:
DRIG established a visual language for information graphics and all associated visual assets. Consider it as the equivalent to the Chicago style for writing. The importance of the web site is profound: graphic designers are using a common visual style when creating graphics, writers communicate request using the same language and use the web site for quick downloads of prefabricated images, and--to a certain extent--marketing and development teams use the reusable elements libraries for presentations.
Moving forward to the stage of innovation is so much easier once DRIG's foundation was formed. The majority of the effort for DRIG revolved around providing a comprehensive set of tools and best practices for static images. It was time to turn our attention to animation. There is an impressive amount of research which tests the validity of animation in technical documentation and instructional learning. All provided useful insight into specific concerns of human cognitive capabilities which were directly applied to the animation creation instructions. Many years before the release of DRIG, the Toronto Lab MDS was producing animated product tours, tutorials, and demonstrations. As each project passed, we concluded that animation is a costly venture especially when professional voice-overs are involved. In addition to the production costs, the people effort is high during the planning and production cycle. We also factored this information into the best practices as warnings.
The version 2 release of DRIG provided detailed instructions for creating screen capture animation using ViewletBuilder(TM)(producing viewlets based on the corporate information development Viewlet Information Center), and concept diagrams, logic diagrams, and technical illustrations animation for product tour and e-learning modules. Of course, the package would not be complete without the means of creating animation quickly. Templates for the embedded product tour (viewed within a documentation container) and for a stand-alone (download) version enabled users to modify text in the navigation and text content using XML in conjunction with Adobe(R) Flash(R). More templates are planned in the near future.
Continuing the theme of innovation, MDS explored using a rich illustrative style in the DB2(R) autonomic computing marketing documentation enticing and engaging a broad audience of users to read new complex technical concepts (see The Use of eBooks and Interactive Multimedia as Alternative Forms of Technical Documentation in the 2005 SIGDOC Conference Proceedings).
Throughout my 11 years experience working with the information graphics for IBM technical documentation, my learning curve has never diminish: There is always something new that comes along that aims to improve users experience. Just when a plateau of achievement is reached, the rules change. Incorporating Web 2.0 capabilities into the domain of information graphics is compelling. Many buzz words are floating around: better consumability, and increase retrievability provoke thoughts for improving documentation. Many success have already been realize in Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), data clouds, and mash-ups. How can a static images be more informative or be searchable when bitmaps files like GIF, PNG, and JPEG are so limiting?
The next stage of evolution of information graphics will provide users with more dynamic interaction between images and documentation, better visualization of complex visual concepts, and ability to modify the displaying information to tailor to user preferences. Our next investigation of Scalable Vector Graphics will explore the potential to revamp the information graphics workflow from the creation stage to integrating them in an XML authoring environment, and finally to the translation phase. This story will be told at another time.
In summary, a graphics designers role in the design of communication can be broad and as creative a process as printing an etching. I have described the many stages of development that I witness. At first, I was a leader which refined the business process of producing a large amount of graphics for information development. Writing best practices for information graphics while engaging stakeholders from different discipline preoccupied my work for many years. This insatiable thirst for continuous improvement persevered into more technical area such as graphic file formats, XML, and DITA. Often design of communication is what you make of it. It can take you down paths where you have not imagine possible. Keeping an open mind will certainly pave the way to new possibilities.
Cheers,
Steve
Steve Murphy
Illustrator/Media designer
Markham, Ontario
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