80:20 rules! – Building software smarter
Google Tech Talks October 8, 2008 ABSTRACT Ever notice that you seem to spend 80% of your time on 20% of your tasks? Or that 80% of the decisions in a meeting seem to occur in 20% of the meeting time? Welcome to the world of the 80:20 rule. When we design, build and test software, we have to determine where to start and what we should do next. The 80:20 rule helps provide an answer to these questions, while helping to increase our productivity and effectiveness. As well as being an agile principle, it’s a common thread in other disciplines, and there’s a special variation that applies to software defects. We’ll explore the different ways testers and developers are using the 80:20 rule. This rule could be a secret ingredient to help you build software smarter! Speaker: Erik Petersen Erik Petersen has been involved in custom software development since the 1980s, now focusing on testing and quality. He has presented at more than twenty Australian and international conferences, winning several awards. He mixes industry experience with powerful ideas and a passion for quality, and has influenced the work habits of hundreds of testers and developers across the world. Erik’s been heavily involved in the Exploratory Testing community since before he even knew what it was called, proposing the idea of paired ET independently of Kaner and Bach in 2001. He is pushing forward with research on ET and other agile methods. He has reviewed many agile and testing books, and accidentally …
80% of this presentation could have been delivered in 20% of the time ^_^;
Nice Informative Video. Keep it up
Nice reworking of an old rule. Regards debugging, I like the test 4 times advice. i.e. review the requirements and remove 60% of the bugs. Repeat with the design, code and testing, removing about 60% of the bugs at each stage. This way you get less than 1% bugs remaining. Even very skilled people rarely remove more than 80% with any 1 stage of testing, but with the test 4 times approach most developers remove more than 99%.
Wow! Fourteen thousand views in seven months! I thought I would be lucky to get three thousand in a year. Hopefully people are using the ideas in this talk to really build software smarter!
Erik
did you ever see a security presentation ? defcon, blackhat, shmoocon, phreaknic ?
0Oooo0oO0ooOoo0,
Base down life like that: No one is perfect, so are everything else!
From my point of view, your comments (the types ) are completely irrelevant in this context.
Perhaps, you should read this quote :
“Compliments in public, make suggestions for improvement in private”
Perhaps too, you did not listen the presentation in HD ! The slides are pretty clear.
Sincerely,
Have a nice day!
The poster is requestubg this comment is being removed. It is based on a unique difference of opinion since an early version of this talk won best presentation at 2 international conferences!
To be very brief and blunt: you have excellent command of the topic, but your presentation’s quality will be improved by several orders of magnitude if you work on your delivery skills!
Boring & poorly delivered? If you pay close attention, some slides have quotes on them so they need to be read. I couldn’t see the monitor most of the time so it was impossible to read the slides!
I’m confused how a 3d color graduated slide master can be a 2D flat color Windows 3.1 master.
There was actually another speaker in that theater still speaking when I was meant to start, so I had 30 seconds prep time before the talk started so I don’t think it went too badly. Glad you stayed awake!
An emailed comment on this video:
I viewed your presentation today. It presents ideas that can make
many people more productive and hopefully happier in their work. I
have forwarded to several others who will hopefully view it. Thanks for sharing this
with us. I certainly found it timely.
The presenter obviously knows what he’s talking about, and his topic is very important to take to mind, but he has a lot to improve in terms of his delivery skills. A few things come to mind:
* That garish slide layout is over-designed and visually distracting – Windows 3.1 called, they want their colors back
* Why do you read back the slides? Either you know the slides are boring, or you consider yourself boring, or both
Still, after forcing myself awake I learned a few valuable lessons…
summary at 48:50 and 50:25