Previous research topic-titles

Previous research topic-titles listed below:

• Mobile banking: the study of AIB mobile bank application.
• Brain-computer interface for medical: evaluating the usability of brain chip for disabled person.
• Gillette's marketing campaign: a sentiment analysis on Twitter.
• Assessing the usability of taxi application Free Now.
• How does ClubMed resorts design daily events.
• A study into the growing influence of the internet of things in the modern household.
• Assessing the usability of 12306 ticket purchase system.
• Google Lens: evaluating the usability of AI & AR powered mobile application in today's world.
• Digital-only banking: evaluation of Alat Nigeria's first fully digital bank.
• Digital learning/e-learning: evaluating the usability of an e-learning model (Byju's)
• Google Fit: encouraging you to exercise more.
• Replacing B2B sales contacts with a website: an exploration of human-centered design methods for a loyalty solutions startup in HORECA industry.
• Social Listening for Innocent Ireland.
• A Study and Initial Report on a Requirements Elicitation Process for an Encrypted National Telehealth Conferencing Platform
• Ripple for cross-border payments: evaluating Ripplenet as a payment solution for banks and financial institutions.
• Too good to go - a technology-based approach to food waste management.
• Research on the usability of mobile short video TikTock.
• Utility of interviews, surveys and prototyping within the context of improving user experience of smart travel card mobile applications.
• HDFC EVA: can a chatbot replace customer service agents?
• Gamification of eco-apps: assessing the implementation of gamified elements to improve user engagement of the application Litterati.
• Evaluation of Historical Analysis in context of Atlassian’s product strategy and Survey to analyse users’ attitude on Jira.
• Paytm an e-wallet: assessing the usability of mobile based e-wallet application.
• Usability in context: a case for the Joulebug app in motivating local environmental stewardship
• Usability analysis: Paytm digital wallet - one step closer to a cashless economy.
• Adaptability of Google Pay in India and Ireland.
• Innocent Smoothies Ireland case study: Twitter campaign impact * strategies comparison
• Revolut for banking: assessing the usability of the app as a new electronic money institution.
• Brightspace: an investigation into improving participation and engagement with the learning management system discussion board.
• Analysis of Uber's disruption to the traditional taxi-service industry
• Evaluation of Textual and Sentimental analysis methods in the context of social medial campaign Gillette 2019 ‘Men Can Be Better’ on YouTube.
• Re-designing a more social spotify UX in mobile.
• Usability Assessment of Oneview Patient Engagement Application Based on Empirical Evidences
• Growth of the online food industry: comparative analysis of the two online food industries Swiggy and Zomata in India.
• How do Results of Unmoderated and Moderated Think-Aloud Protocols Differ in Usability Evaluations?
• Swipe Left on Ghosting: A Usability Analysis of Tinder’s Chat Function
• Conversational AI and Smart Speakers: Usability & Requirements Study
• A Diary Study in the Context of Smart Furniture for Remote Workers
• Innovation Reading in the Digital Age: Usability, Requirement Analysis, and Feasibility Study of Blinkist
• Redesigning Notification Badges on iOS 12 and its impact on user’s task engagement
• Evaluating the Usability of the Collaborative features on LMS Blackboard Learn
• Improving User Experience of IRCTC Rail Connect App by Incorporating Human Computer Interaction Guidelines
• Contactless Payment in Germany
• User Privacy on Apple iCloud Photo Library
• Usability Analysis of the GoCar iOS Application
• Empathy Tools Critique
• Empirical Study on the Build-In Anti-Theft Measures of High-end Android Smartphones
• What are Technological Tools That Facilitate Mentorship and Employment of Persons with Disabilities? A Case Study on Nextbillion
• Understanding, applying and evaluating the use of eye gaze tracking software: lessons learned evaluating company career websites
• Improving Ctrip Mobile App as a user-friendly one-stop-shop
• The Prevention of Falsified Medicines in Ireland – An Analysis of The Irish Medicine Verification System (IMVS)
• VR for Learning: Assessing the Usability of Mobile Based VR Headsets in Classrooms
• An Enquiry Into Motortrans.ie
• How effective are the gamification features in the Apple Watch in promoting physical exercise? A diary study.
• What Type of Data is more Suitable for Assessing and Improving the Usability of a Chat-Bot?
• SDL Trados and OmegaT – A Comparative Analysis of Usability of the Main Features
• Comparing the Technology Behind Nest Learning Thermostat to That of a Conventional Thermostat Along With Their Energy and Cost Efficiency
• How Can Netflix’s Search Feature be Improved for Users?
• Managing Organizational and Process Innovation – Lessons Learned From a German Non-tech SME
• Usability Analysis of Flightradar24 Mobile Flight Tracking App
• Shop Code: Usability Testing and Redesign Proposal
• How Drones Can Leave The Hazardous Zone
• Usability Study and Redesign Proposal for the Google Play Store app
• Using the Trinity ID as a starting point, how can iDly update that system in order to enhance the features of their digital ID cards?
• How to improve the Dash students’ experience?
• Housemydog.com: how to enhance the design and development features of a dog minding platform through a usability and feasibility study
• BRS Golf Booking System
• Plynk - the money messenger
• Can sleep apps improve your sleep troubles?
• Improving Hailo
• Aer Lingus iOS app usability study
• Usability analysis on IPF app for Patient M Power
• How can the “dublinbikes” mobile application better reflect and channel the innovative nature of bike sharing 
• The Dublin Bus Mobile Application: usability analysis
• GiapSchool usability study and improvement
• UCD Mobile: Usability & Requirements Study and Development proposal
• Roomys Evaluation and Improvement Project
• Effy solutions usability study and design proposal
• Metrifit usability, requirements analysis and feasibility study to update extant system.
• External Brain: Experiencing Evernote
• Design and development proposal for ChildDiary v2.0
• Buymie v1.2.0 – Usability Study
• “Pay and Display” Is displaying necessary?
• Cocoon: Lessons Learned From Evaluating a Software Startup.
• A proposal for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system upgrade
• (Kammavari Sangha Institute of Technology) KSIT website debunked
• Redesign and Recreate a System for an Agency of Home Appliances Maintenance and Repair Services
• Improving Trancehub
• Selling, Point of Sale and Shop Systems for JD Sports
• Smart Baggage Claim for RFID Enabled Airports
• Coapp - collaboration tool for web designers
• A Website Redesign of Ard Scoil Ris
• Upgrading of Irish Light Rail ‘Luas Tram’ Ticketing and Fare Collection Machine
• ‘Echo - The Premier Communication Application’
• In-Car Voice Interaction System Redesign Proposal
• Product for Bass Guitar to Midi Converter
• Website Redesign Proposal for U.C.D Applied Language Centre
• Redesigning Dublin’s Traffic Control System
• Redesign of an Existing System Cineworld Ticket ATMs
• Daft.ie Using Technology to Restructure Services
• Tesco Mobile App: Connecting Recipes and Shopping function
• UX/ID for Irish Multiplex Cinemas
• To Improve the User Interface of the Blackboard Learn System
• A Redesign Proposal for the Coillteoutdoors.ie Website
• UPC Horizon UX Issues
• CRM for an Online Insurance Broker - A Case Study
• Stamp App - The Future of Postage Stamps
• Redesign Proposal of PAYE Anytime
• Android application for shopping and payment purposes with the use of NFC technology
• HR System Functionality and Leave Management
• Online Banking: A study of two Irish Bank’s and Possible Improvements
• Leap Card New payment system proposal
• Improving RTE Player
• An Analysis and re-design of the current E-xamit website
• Tool Repair System
• UCARD System Development
• Self-Service Library Machine: 3M ‘R-Series Model ‘8600’
• Improving Tesco Self-Service Checkout
• Bank of Beijing Personal Internet Banking System
• SiSWeb – Redesign Proposal
• Enhancing the Reporting Capabilities of a Banking Organisation
• I-Concentrate - Control access to Apps, Networks, and Websites
• A Redesign of the Current ATM System in Ireland
• Improving user Experience on CopiPrint Machines
• Introducing Mobile Payment to Irish Transportation
• Bus Éireann Website and Tech Services
• An Analysis and Redesign of Ticketmaster Event Ticketing Service Provider
• Proposed Redesign of the Mantis Issue Tracking System
• A Redesign of the Twitter Newsfeed
• Analysis of current Intranet Facilities and Proposed Redesign
• Re-design of the Ulysses self-service Help Desk module used by St. John of God Hospitaller Ministries
• Redesign of Ryanair Website
• Ad Server
• LEAP Integrated Ticketing System
• Ryanair.com- How can we do better?
• Report on Sony Entertainment Network’s Online Store And Proposed Recommendations
• Application Virtualization: An Aid for OS Migration (Windows)
• Gamification of McDonalds App
• Dublin.ie Redesign Proposal
• Trolly Folly: An Analysis of the Ryanair Online Shopping Experience
• The Introduction of a paid car parking solution to the UCD Campus locations of Belfield and Blackrock
• Improving the M50 Eflow toll system
• Payzone Parking Tag
• Protecting ATM Users from Fraud

The talking about design - book club

- Talking about design, development, creativity -

Welcome to the Design Development Creativity Book Club. 

In this series we will be reading and reviewing Tracy Kidder’s award winning non-fiction account of a high-tech project. The Soul of a New Machine won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, in 1982.

We will be looking at the book from a number of viewpoints: General aspects of high-tech production; Innovation, management and leadership; Engineering culture and work practices; Teams and interaction.

The book offers a rare inside account of high-tech projects and provides a mirror in which we can contrast our own projects. What does TSOANM tell us about working in high-tech today? What has changed over the intervening years? What seems to have stayed the same?

Jobs to be done - theory and perspectives from industry

The link below provides notes and a recap of a live streamed conversation between Jim Kalbach, author of the recently published The Jobs to Be Done Playbook, and a pioneer of a theory of "jobs to be done", Tony Ulwick.

The Jobs to be done approach requires designers to direct their full attention to the job a customer is trying to get done, and employs this knowledge for redesign, tweaking, injecting innovative products and services into the customer's chain of activity, the chain of "in order to", that they perform to satisfy a goal.

 https://www.mural.co/blog/jobs-to-be-done-livestream-recap

Research search and discovery - UCD Library

 A little detective work is sometimes involved in gaining access to research articles but it is well worth establishing the skills and ability to track down research publications and the like.

The first port of call should always be the UCD Library. We should highlight that the results returned by our library systems may differ depending on whether you have logged in to your UCD Connect account or not. This is because the library disseminates licensed content protected by copyright and thus cannot act as a back-door source to free access to 'for fee' publications. A web search via a search engine often links directly to the publisher however access may still be provided by the UCD Library negotiated access licenses with publishers. Publications may also be accessible via the University or state research organisations with accounts on third party aggregator publishers (like ScienceDirect) and other licensors of content. The UCD Library curates and manages access to all of these services on behalf of UCD's students, researchers and staff.

Exercise: 

 

1. Select the "One Search" widget and enter the title you are looking for.

https://www.ucd.ie/library/ 

An approach to effective use of One Search is to first search for the title of an article, then perhaps narrow the search criteria by gradually adding the author's surname, forname, year, etc.

2. Use a web search engine. The Google Scholar service can sometimes be particularly effective.

Examples for this week's readings...

https://www.ucd.ie/library/  

A search for "Expressing Experiences in Design" on One Search yields

https://bit.ly/3mFz3RH

https://scholar.google.com/ 

A search for "Expressing Experiences in Design" on Google Scholar yields

https://bit.ly/32SexWn

Similar results provided using the same approach for "Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful Some of the Time"

The UCD Library supports a wide range of tools for research discovery.

https://www.ucd.ie/library/onlinetools/

Designing surveys and questionnaires is hard but we have good tools...

Designing surveys and questionnaires is hard but we have good tools... The UCD College of Business has a site licence for the online research survey package, Qualtrics. The licence is for both staff and students (use your @ucdconnect.ie email address as username to register).  Qualtrics is a leading online resource which enables users to engage in many kinds of online data collection and analysis.
Why do we recommend Qualtrics over other tools? Because it offers fantastic in-app advice and tips on good questionnaire construction.

• We have unlimited users access for ALL staff and students across the College of Business for own projects and assignments.

More information at

https://iltg.ucd.ie/kb/qualtrics-surveys/

What is design thinking?

This post by Kristen Seversky is a short but thoughtful read.
Design thinking and my journey from software developer to product owner
Kirsten describes herself as a "product-owning, design-thinking, code-writing, people person striving to make tech more meaningful and inclusive."

``Design thinking isn’t a set of laws; it’s a shift in focus that re-centers humans at the core of our work. We’re a bunch of humans building solutions that humans will use. Maintaining exposure to their realities is our only means of actually solving problems instead of indirectly creating new ones. It’s an ethical agenda.''

(51) IDEO Method Cards

A product design research methods compendium

These methods are organised into four families representing the emphasis in how each method may be applied. However, there is no reason why you shouldn't consider a method applicable to one of the other categories. These methods simply represent ways to inspire us to consider different ``ways to empathize with people'' to seek insights, understand behaviour, perceptions, needs, goals [IDEO, 2003]. All these methods and categories emphasise the empirical world as the source of ideas and inspirations. The empirical world encompassing social and material structure, attending empirical moments and events as nexuses of action, historical and scientific context, the happening of things of both great and small significance (global and local).

The idea underlying `Learn' is that hard data, measurements, statements of the facts as they may be known. Observations and data gathered from empirical settings, treating the world as a kind of living lab. This sort of data tends to be treated as more objective, scientific, and provides the material for more statistical and quantitative analyses. It offers the potential for revealing unexpected patterns and insights that demand the use of other methods to understand further. `Learn' methods help us build the data and evidence addressing focused research questions, to follow up hunches and ideas that may be tested or evidenced by measurement data (rather than data mining as such).

The `Look' category implies that people going about their lives and happenings in the world are our best teachers. These are methods for gathering insights from interpretive observations, shadowing and participating in `the wild' [Buxton, 2007]. These methods emphasise the value of the empirical world in the language and terms of its use by its participants. The data gathered depict social realities, actual happenings and incidents; evidence of real people with biographies coping in actual settings, surrounded and constituted in the (seemingly) ephemeral and trivial real-world of people. `Look methods' enable generalised undirected problem identification, the broad assessment of an area before narrowing down on a specific concern.

`Ask' methods seek people's direct participation in constructing research data. People aren't `social dopes', they understand their own conditions. People have points of view and knowledge that they will readily share if you enable them. While this kind of knowledge may be idiosyncratic and bounded the more of it you can gather the more universal may be our understanding overall. `Ask' methods are useful when you have identified a research goal, an application, and a context. They are ways of revealing insider knowledge and practical contingencies that your project will encounter and leverage.

`Try' methods are all kinds of action research, some in-vitro (experimental setting) and some in-vivo (in the wild). These are methods that test how your project may work, how it may change behaviour and understanding, how useful and applicable it is. `Try' methods are active designed interventions and thus quite experimental in character. They encompass controlled simulations, experimental scenarios, to living labs in `the wild'. The focus of these methods is testing. They test feasibility, practicality, understandability. They seek people's active involvement and feedback on the design and application of the project.

---

• Learn: Analyze the information you've collected to identify patterns and insights.
• Activity Analysis
• Affinity Diagrams
• Anthropometric Analysis
• Character Profiles
• Cognitive Task Analysis
• Competitive Product Survey
• Cross-Cultural Comparisons
• Error Analysis
• Flow Analysis
• Historical Analysis
• Long-Range Forecasts
• Secondary Research
• Look: Observe people to discover what they do rather than what they say they do.
• A Day in the Life
• Behavioral Archaeology
• Behavioral Mapping
• Fly on the Wall
• Guided Tours
• Personal Inventory
• Rapid Ethnography
• Shadowing
• Social Network Mapping
• Still-Photo Survey
• Time-Lapse Video
• Ask: Enlist people's participation to elicit information relevant to your project.
• Camera Journal
• Card Sort
• Cognitive Maps
• Collage
• Conceptual Landscape
• Cultural Probes
• Draw the Experience
• Extreme User Interviews
• Five Whys?
• Foreign Correspondents
• Narration
• Surveys & Questionnaires
• Unfocus Group
• Word-Concept Association
• Try: Create simulations to help empathize with people and to evaluate proposed designs.
• Behaviour Sampling
• Be Your Customer
• Bodystorming
• Empathy Tools
• Experience Prototype
• Informance
• Paper Prototyping
• Predict Next Year's Headlines
• Quick-and-Dirty Prototyping
• Role-Playing
• Scale Modeling
• Scenarios
• Scenario Testing
• Try it Yourself

---

(source: the IDEO Method Cards booklet [IDEO, pp. 2-3, 2003])

References

Buxton, B. (2007). Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.
IDEO (2003). IDEO Method Cards: 51 Ways to Inspire Design. William Stout, Palo Alto, CA.

Mockaroo - Useful data for rapid mocking

"As a developer..."
You know the problem, you have developed a solution, now you need to test it with lots of realistic data? Then Mockaroo is for you...

Do you know Connie Deverille in R&D?

A random data generator and API mocking tool (as a service). Generates realistic(ish) randomised data sets in JSON, SQL, CSV, Excel.

Mark Brocato the founder/developer behind Mockaroo - https://mockaroo.com/

Consider #IdeaFlow

IdeaFlow, or "How to Measure the PAIN in Software Development". A book by Janelle Arty Starr. An approach for systematically measuring where and when problems arise in software projects (software pain) and how to go about resolving them. Janelle proposes a data-driven feedback loop to locate the causes of friction and pain in `developer experience'. But she concludes that the challenge is not that we can't find solutions to these problems, it is in finding and correctly identifying the underlying problems in the first place.

Janelle explaining her insights on addressing the challenges of big software projects https://leanpub.com/ideaflow

Adding a post to Brightspace ePortfolio and Collection

Navigate to 'Module Tools > ePortfolio' to view my contributions, notes, reflections etc. 

Create a new post by clicking on 'Add to ePortfolio'

Yay, your post has been added

Now click on the drop arrow and select 'Add to Collection'

Brightspace displays a list of Collections you created earlier

Select the collection you want to associate it with... and click 'Save'

Confirm the particular Collection's 'Share' status...

The collection can be shared with the whole class group, 'Always Visible'. All good! But if not...

You may need to activate sharing for named individuals instead: "firstname secondname" on the original post itself, in addition to the Collection...

The design/construction challenge class nov 2019

Photo's from the class

all charged up and ready to go. take me to your teacher...

(talk and hands-on workshop) Prototyping with Power Apps

On Nov 19: 9.30 - 12.30 D101 we held a really productive hands-on workshop with Stephen Howell (Microsoft Academic Lead & Accessibility Evangelist). He gave a quick tour of the cloud pyramid and illustrating where MS fits with the various offerings from AI, processes, storage, mobile, through to accessibility and the amazing real-time language translation/transcription services.

Allen and Stephen @Howell_MSFT with the MScDI class of 2019-2020

The workshop itself was a practical introduction to prototyping with Power Apps etc. It was a seamless and compelling entry point to coding via the UI.

setup for the Lego session...

Class in Belfield Campus Nov 12. Plan to arrive early!

Help with the setup for the Lego session...

This week's class will be held at UCD's Belfield campus. Please arrive early to avoid problems with parking, traffic, public transport etc.

Tuesday Nov 12 from 9:30am in room Q279 entrance via the Quinn Building in the new Moore Centre for Business.

Map coordinates - https://goo.gl/maps/uAXzMBnCwi8QccVP6

Exercise: Analysing a design

Goal
Establish and understanding of the interplay between implicit and explicit aspects of high tech designs. To reveal hidden assumptions, expectations and prior knowledge that are necessary conditions of successful technology use. This exercise is adapted from Sharp et al. (2007).


Instructions
Analyse a TV remote control (5 minutes).
Ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I recognise when I inspect the device initially?
• Do I perceive feedback when I use the device (sound, clicks, weight, surface texture etc)?
• What is the device's context for use?
• Is anything missing?
• What goals does the device addresses?
• I have a goal; does the device facilitate or get in the way?
• Consider other modalities for achieving the same goal (e.g. talking, old phone, mobile phone, Skype). 
• What is explicit and what is implicit?
• What is usable (or conversely unusable)?
• Do I need further explanation to understand some aspect?
• How can I learn about what something does?
• How do I know where I am (in the system)?
• Where am I in the process?
• What do I feel about using this device?
• What are my impressions about this device?
• Who can work with this device? Easily?
• Is it easy to make a mistake?
• What are the consequences of making a mistake?
• Can I recover from the mistake easily?
• Do I feel comfortable experimenting with the device?
• What happens if it breaks?

For example refer to 'Adopting Technology' (Chapter 4 - Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge) (Moggridge, 2006).

Discussion

Open the floor to discussion of the group's analysis of the devices (15 minutes).

From the discussion make sketches of user experience(s) on the white board.

Is user experience a goal in itself?

What are the dimensions of user experience?

• Features
• Aesthetics
• Feelings
• Affection
• Desire
• Love
• Frustration
• Functionality
• Speed
• Risk
• Feedback
• Certainty
• Invisibility
• ...
• ...

Notes
Consider water taps:

• Explicit and implicit knowledge
• Learnt conventions
• High risk versus low risk
• Safe versus playful

What is a learnt property of the object and what is a learnt convention or social? e.g. red versus blue, left versus right hand side.

References
Moggridge, B. (2006) Designing Interactions, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.
Sharp, H., Rogers, Y. & Preece, J. (2007) Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, Wiley.

(PART 2) IONA Technologies - Adolescence

Preamble:

In 1991, Dr Chris Horn, Dr Sean Baker and Annrai O’Toole each chipped in £1,000 Irish Punts to bootstrap a business called Iona Technologies. There was no bank loan, no cash flow, and no Enterprise Ireland. I doubt anyone would have put up the money if they had even asked at the time.
They took an educated punt, building on the back of years of academic/industry R&D into distributed systems and programming, supported in part by EU Espirit research programmes.
One of the running jokes in Iona’s newsletter iContact was the management teams’ 3-year search in the wilderness for a business model, but the truth was, that they always had their eyes on the prize and were constantly tweaking the business model to the situation and demands of the market of the day. The way Iona ‘organised’ was the key. It was a young Irish company with a distinctly Irish culture. Small nimble close knit teams, everyone knew everyone and no one let formality get in the way of celebrating success or getting to the heart of a problem. As a place to work it was hectic, razor sharp, direct and fun.

figure 1. Leasing Pembroke Street from Crampton's (credit McCarthy 1995)

Iona’s product Orbix brought Iona success but Orbix was also successful because of the way the company was organised and the way it (the software) `organised' or structured its customers. Professional services (PS), delivering C++ and object oriented programming training to large multinationals like ICL brought in revenue. The profits from services went straight back into product development but more importantly, the learning that Iona acquired on customer sites was transformed into features in Orbix. The the need for training in Orbix itself in turn drove demand for more services and contracts to integrate Orbix with client systems. Iona excelled in understanding the process of designing and deploy mission critical cross-platform distributed systems. This knowledge in turn was transformed into even better features and functionality for Orbix and a growing list of adapters, services, language mappings and platforms.

Iona had an instinct for the business and economics of digital networks a decade before anyone else. They tuned the business model to the market. In a way the business model was built into the architecture of the product, linking software, linking firms, linking markets and people. The business model was evident in how they bootstrapped the market for their product. But the business model wasn’t Iona; Iona was the people. The social banter at coffee stations, Wine and Cheese events, gatherings under marquee in Fitzwilliam Square, the Christmas party at Howth Castle, catching up after work in McHaffey’s, Kehoe’s, Slattery’s or Tonor’s. Welcoming someone back from a sales or service job in Seattle, politicking Standards at the OMG, attending JavaOne or Iona World. Networking is an intrinsically human thing and something the Irish excel at.

figure 2. Toners on Baggot St - the snug (2015)

The period 1999 - 2001 

The resources available for R&D are competing with customer demands on current products. A decision is needed to address the problem but no one agrees on the solution.

Product Development Culture 

Growth is good and profits are better but they come at a cost. The cost for Iona’s Dublin headquarters was having to move office each year. From Westland Row to Pierce Street, to Percy Place, to Pembroke Street Lower (figure 1), then the big split from Pembroke Street to St Stephen's Green. Stephen's Green would have been nice except that Product Development and Customer Engineering were housed in an old office block tucked behind a Georgian town house while the corporate functions had modern air-conditioned comfort half a mile away on Pembroke Street. But this was only temporary, a year-long hiatus. Iona would be the anchor tenant in a brand new tower block on Shelbourne Road. The "Iona Technologies Building." This last big move started in 1999 but the things were changing in other ways. The atmosphere of the company was evolving with each office move and each new employee.

The company had been famous for its 'everyone knows everyone else' feel and exciting work culture. However a sense of 'community lost' was increasingly apparent in conversation. The demise of the traditional wine-and-cheese on the last day of the month was a sign of this gradual change.

“What’s happening to the monthly ‘wine n cheese’? First it’s reduced to quarterly, and then half yearly... we need it for morale!” [engineer]

“The Iona wine and cheese was important, we need these opportunities to mix, to build spirit. Stop cancelling them!” [anon]

Structure and Organisation

The company is organised around three main development centres; head office in Dublin, the US headquarters in Waltham Massachusetts (aka Boston), and the Asia/Pac office in Perth, Australia. Internally the company has a hierarchical structure with product development (PD) teams organised into 24 product lines delivering to 3 main operating environments (Solaris, HPUX and Windows) and over 20 version variations on other platforms (Digital VMS, AS/400, MVS, SCO/Unix, QNX and others).

The product managers develop concepts and business cases for new products that are then assigned to an engineering team for development. The Iona PD Process has four main stages: Planning, developing, testing & QA, and Launching. The project life cycle provides procedures for the development of products, covering the whole development process from beginning to end.

"Product Development is team-oriented. Teams have strong software engineering capabilities but also have product management, project management, customer service, business and other skills represented. Each team has significant autonomy and discretion on what products it develops, and has responsibility to describe why, when how and by whom the products will be built, licensed etc. Teams are ultimately responsible for product success, measured in market share and revenues." [The dev team guide]

Customer Engineering (CE) is the support organisation and is also organised by product line. This allows dedicated customer support engineers to develop deep technical product knowledge. All support engineers are expected to also be able to support core Orbix. This is useful to balance support capacity if customer demands peak on different product lines. Support engineers are also seconded to engineering teams to facilitate the mutual transfer of product knowledge and customer context between CE and PD.

Orbix and ART

The company has experienced continuous growth in market share, revenues and profit in recent years. However, rapid success has led to rapid growth in headcount. They have been hiring `as many people as they can get' to develop, support and maintain the products.

Orbix is the company’s 'cash cow', revenue-rich, mature products that 'only' require maintenance. Cash cows provide a steady income from license fees generated both by new customers, and renewed annual service or support fees from existing customers. In Iona’s case, sales of large site licenses with annual support contracts are a lucrative revenue stream.

Orbix is the worlds most deployed distributed object request broker; a fully featured product architecture used to connect object databases, messaging and transaction systems, media streaming, and real-time operating systems to the internet. The Orbix product architecture has grown around orbixd (as in a Unix system daemon process). The orbixd is simply an ORB (object request broker) for connecting code written for a variety of programming language/compiler combinations. Language mappings for ADA and PL/I were even developed for the US defence sector and the IBM mainframe environment respectively. The Orbix daemon and libraries run on Unix, Windows and other more niche operating system environments such as VMS, Vxworks, even MacOS. There is also talk of Orbix Nano for embedded chips.

As the Orbix family of products has grown so too have the numbers of people developing, supporting and maintaining them. This has led to problems for management and interdivisional communication. In just over three years the company had grown from 10 to nearly 300; and over the following three years to over 1,000. The Orbix dev team alone grew from 3 to 50 programmers plus 30 or 40 more in support and services.

Orbix is the focus of everyone in professional services and product management. Yet the cost of supporting legacy Orbix is eating into the company’s profit margins. Industry too is seeking to move beyond the limitations of the object request brokers and is pivoting towards new technologies, paradigms like XML based application servers, web services, service oriented architectures and enterprise Java.

A skunkworks project codenamed ART (Adaptive Runtime Technology) was started in 1996. ART development was based in Boston. ART took a couple years to reach alpha and to commence controlled trials in the wild with a handful of (friendly) early adopters. The feature-complete beta version was expected a year later with a planned-for public launch in 2000 or 2001. ART promised a paradigm shift in distributed computing in terms of security, scalability, language coverage, functionality and performance. A flexible and high-performance distributed computing engine; the perfect ORB to replace Orbix and overtake competition from BEA, Oracle, HP, Microsoft and others.

Engineered Stress:

It is increasingly evident that the challenge of managing the large numbers of people involved in Orbix's development and maintenance has reached a breaking point. The old strategy of hiring and throwing resources at the problem is not working so well. The company is straining under the classic problem of hierarchical organisations: the need to maintain clear communication and coordination within layers of management, large numbers of people, and offices around the globe. They also have to balance a diverse portfolio of historical and new product development projects by coordinating teams (and teams of teams) in an intricate choreography with idiosyncratic interdependencies between different versions of Orbix.

Over the last year or so Iona's C-suite (CEO, COO, CTO, CFO) have appointed a number of executives from the Telecoms, Banking, and Aerospace industries. These executives are very familiar with standard management framework approaches for technology production such as the RUP (Rational Unified Process), ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), the CMM (Capability Maturity Model), and ISO9001.

Steve Vinoski, Iona's chief architect, leads the ART team in Boston but travels to Dublin frequently. Steve, a former systems architect from HP, has long been involved in developing open computing standards. He was an early advocate for object oriented programming and design patterns and although having a big-company background is skeptical about standard management framework approaches. Steve has been spending a lot of time recently talking with Kent Beck about this new practice-based approach called Extreme Programming.

Steve has asked the dev leads and engineers to review the current situation and propose options to improve the situation. He says ``There must be a better way to organise!' Many of the engineers agree. Orbix PD and CE teams are increasingly dissatisfied. 

Heavy mental "Back to our roots" (image credit: Joe McCarthy, 2000)

The Orbix dev leads (Mary, Aileen, Tim, Jan Willem, and Charlie) call themselves the junior management team – all of the pain, none of the power. Between them are responsible for all Orbix engineering or support. In addition to maintaining all legacy products they have been asked to design forwards compatibility with ART so that customers can easily migrate their systems when ART is finally released.

Comments gathered from a recent internal survey carried out by HR give a sense of the mood.

'More inter-departmental cooperation please, people feel guilty asking questions.' [Anon]

'Get CE and Engineering teams working closer and get rid of the quick fix mentality.' [PD engineer]

'Outrageous workloads are destroying me, there must be an end in sight?!' [CE engineer]

“Product milestone dates come down from ‘on high’, the teams should estimate them, not some diktat.” [PD engineer]

'The company is a fun and challenging place to work, it’s "challenging" when we over-commit…' [CE engineer]

'We need workable processes to get us moving between teams and products.' [CE engineer]

Workload and stress is increasing. There is a lot of `needed' yet unrewarded overtime and some people seem to practically live in the office. There is talk of setting up an on-call rota to provide out-of-hours software support and a rumour that the Orbix team is going to be cut rather than boosted is doing the rounds. More demands with fewer people! They are already putting in huge hours and effort to come up with fixes, release patches, and keep customers happy. It feels like something is going to break. To make things more complicated, many feel that working on Orbix (with its old but familiar complexity) is a dead-end. They want to learn to use ART (the shiny new thing).

Fred Brooks adage: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"

Fred Brooks' adage about software projects (known as Brooks' law) states, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". He explains the problem in terms of the communication overhead in a group. For example as the number of people involved in a project grows, the communication overhead grows faster. The overhead grows so fast that projects quickly become unmanageable.

Can you identify the errors in the diagram?

For a group of 'n' people, which of the following might be suitable functions to use to model this behaviour. What assumptions would you need to make to justify your choice?

f(n): n

f(n): n-1

f(n): n+1

f(n): n-m

f(n): n^2

f(n): n^2/2

f(n): n(n-1)

f(n): n(n+1)

f(n): n(n^2)

f(n): n(n+1)/2

f(n): n(n-1)/2

(PART 1) IONA Technologies - genesis

Iona’s Genesis
"New York, 26th February 1997, 9.29am. The coming of age after six years of infancy. A Croke Park-pitch size of a room with hundreds of computer screens replacing the light lost by blind-dimmed windows, replete with silently intense players grizzled beyond their age. The second-hand tranquilly rotates to mark the opening of the market at 9.30am, and the Lehman Brothers trading room explodes, keyboards pounding, phones shrilling answered with bronx cacophony. Our own stock opens its very first day up, our trading volume is good, and our initial public offering (IPO) on the US Nasdaq stock exchange is completed after a full year of preparation with our bankers, underwriters, analysts, and lawyers." (Chris Horn, 2012)

After NASDAQ Iona lists on the Dublin Stock Exchange (1997)

The narrative of Iona’s trajectory to success can be summed up in a sentence. IONA progressed from campus company in 1991, releasing Orbix in ’92, IPO on NASDAQ in ’97, and over the next 15 years spawning over 20 other spin-off companies before being acquired by Progress Software in 2008. The detail of IONA's history however is more complex and interesting (Baker, 2000).

Trinity College's Distributed Systems Group (DSG) was a small team of academics and engineers conducting research and development into the problem of inter-network computing architectures. The DSG had become a centre for excellence in distributed systems technology and more importantly in distributed object technology. Over the previous 14 years many of them had become international experts and built up a wealth of experience in designing and building distributed systems support platforms. Their research was supported initially by the college and then by the the EU through the (then) EEC Espirt research programmes. The leap from the academic to the commercial world was tempting as industries like banking and telecommunications embraced networks and internets.

Figure: Iona's Engineering division mission statement (see the video on Vimeo)

A Trinity College Dublin campus company, IONA occupied space in Trinity's rambling offices along Westland Row before spilling into office space on Pierce Street. At its height IONA would eventually employ over 1,000 people around the globe, providing work for many of the academics, researchers and post-grads from the DSG but at the end of that first week as an independent firm only seven new employees marked the occasion quietly with a toast at Mahaffey’s pub.

IONA's founder talent all came from this environment of academically led technological innovation and they were active contributors to the process of defining standards-based distributed object technology.

“[T]he start-up had three staff – Chris Horn, Sean Baker and Annraí O’Toole. But it had no bank balance, no marketing budget and no physical assets... On the other hand, the founders of Iona did not need to make a complete break from academic life or their incomes as lecturers. They could reduce their teaching time over three years, while they built up the company.” (Sterne, 2004)

Iona’s Justin Mason set up one of the first 100 servers on the new worldwide Internet. www.iona.com became the first non-academic Irish website (Mason, 2009) and Iona’s software could be downloaded on-line via FTP access – a radical departure from the conventional thinking that software came in a box or on disks.

During the early years the organisation funded itself through C++ training and consultancy services. Professional services work (aka consulting), brought in needed revenue from the Irish divisions of multinational technology firms like ICL and DEC. While the consulting wasn't as profitable as software sales it did produce unanticipated benefits. Delivering training and services contracts acted to expand the spread of object oriented skills and knowledge in wider industry. It produced new customers for Iona’s products and a cadre of skilled engineers many whom would subsequently work for Iona. They also leveraged their relationships in the local offices of multinationals to reach out internationally.

Inter-networked software was the heart of Iona's value proposition and its employees took advantage of the growing possibilities of the net.  IONA attracted talented people across all the disciplines: technology, programming, product management, legal, marketing and sales and more. In time many went on to start their own companies, innovating and playing influential roles in the open source movement, in standards development and other areas.

At the official launch at Object World in San Francisco in 1993 Orbix 1.0 defined and led the international trend to internet enabled computing. IONA was the first to market with its release of a commercial implementation of the CORBA standard. Orbix ran on Windows, Solaris, HPUX, and a long list of other operating systems (Durham, 2001).

Distributed systems arise organically in (and between) organisations because they allow specialised divisional applications to interoperate via standard interfaces with other applications running anywhere on the net. Iona’s Orbix technology enabled all these different programs to work together independent of their operating system or hardware platforms.

Iona was surfing the wave of the most recent paradigm shift in software architecture; object oriented design. The beauty of Iona’s approach to ‘object oriented’ was that Orbix could ‘wrap’ legacy software in a future proof IDL interface. IDL made programs look like ‘objects’ even if they weren't object oriented designs as such. It enabled firms to retain and maintain their huge investments in legacy and mainframe systems. It also provided the bits and pieces for the new distributed computing paradigm.

Orbix, Iona’s implementation of the CORBA specification, consisted of a software development kit (SDK), a daemon (computer service) and set of run-time libraries (libs). Orbix was also the technology used at the core of Iona’s growing family of internet centric products and services.

The CORBA standard enabled applications to deliver network interactivity ‘by design,’ at the same time as it future proofed legacy applications by wrapping them in an Object Oriented front-end. Object orientation could be layered over any system regardless of whether their underlying design was procedural, functional, or just plain ancient. Iona’s Orbix SDK (Software Development Kit) and the Orbix orb (an Object Request Broker daemon and libraries) enabled programmers to easily design distributed programs using IDL (Interface Definition Language), which enabled software object interfaces on one system to call and interoperate with objects on distant systems. Iona also provided language mappings to C++, SmallTalk, Java, Ada, and OLE (enabling access to Visual Basic, Delphi and Power Builder environments).

CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is an open independent specification for distributed software architectures based on the object oriented interface paradigm. The Object Management Group (OMG) manages the CORBA standard.

Iona's products were being used in some of the most exciting software engineering jobs in the world; Boeing’s distributed aircraft configuration system DCAC/MRM (Newcomer, 2006) and Motorola’s IRIDIUM global satellite telephony service (Computergram, 1994) in Seattle, Washington State, and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively to name two. These were cutting edge international computer engineering crucibles and their trajectories were shaping the Orbix feature list, releases and fixes.

DCAC/MRM is Boeing’s Define and Control Airplane Configuration/Manufacturing Resource Management systems.

IRIDIUM now an independent company, was developed by Motorola to deliver a constellation of over 66 satellites providing seamless mobile telephone communications across the globe.

Friday Night at Toner’s
Friday night in Toner's pub on Baggot Street was a good spot to catch up and enjoy some after-work banter. Tonight the talk was all about the recent jump in the share price and where the NASDAQ was headed. The share price had become an 'icebreaker' ever since the IPO (initial public offering) in February the previous year. Anyone with stock options had, unsurprisingly, developed a keen interest in the stock market.

People returning from `international duty' on customer consultancy ‘gigs’ in the Professional Services division (PS) could hold court in the snug, share war stories or catch up on the local scene. Some considered PS work to be something of an elite job. It came with international travel, expense accounts and overtime, but it meant living from a suitcase, sometimes for weeks on end. There was intense pressure to perform, to deliver the goods on customer sites. Many in office-bound engineering roles relished the stories but it also gave meaning and importance to their work too. PS had an unvarnished view of both client projects and Orbix's capabilities. The information was golden, what customers were attempting to do, what worked, what didn’t and somewhere within all that, what the `next big thing' could be? Orbix product quality or features were never far off. Heroic tales and gripping yarns if you knew the jargon; version, source code, debug, compiler, ridiculously large IDL, memory leak, o/s patch, hot-fix.

Paula, VP of Engineering, couldn't help overhearing...
Brian, Mark, Pierce and James were talking about one such tale, set in a secure bunker for some government contractor. Exciting stuff if you enjoyed that kind of thing, but it annoyed Brian (the QA guy); The problem shouldn’t have occurred in the first place he complained. It was preventable!

Mark, the PS engineer, had resolved a major issue on site at an undisclosed location in California. This particular customer site (some muttering about the security or defence sector) was completely locked down. Mark had had to reach out to home base. He had been on the phone to Dublin for hours. First to James (a software engineer in customer support), then Pierce (a software engineer on the product team). The three of them had worked through a day and night, frantically trying, first to reproduce the problem, and then devise a fix or workaround to perhaps make a patch for Orbix 2.3c. Finally, Pierce had a fix (he thought). A two line code change. He compiled the patch and copied it to the FTP server. But no! The customer site wasn't just firewalled, it was physically disconnected from the internet. Mark had a choice, go outside through six layers of security, copy the fix to a disk and walk it back in to apply it, or... he had a local source snapshot on his laptop. Could Pierce not talk him through the lines of code? It would be quicker to recompile a new Orbix daemon on the laptop and copy it directly to the live environment...

These discussions played an essential part in making sense of the market for Iona's product managers and the engineers, if only because PS engineers were in ‘the field’, often isolated behind government or corporate firewalls and multiple layers of military grade security. Being on-site demanded absolute commitment, technical ability, some heroics, but it also depended strong social connections between  engineers throughout the organisation.

References:

• Baker, S. (2000) The Making of Orbix and the iPortal Suite. ICSE 2000. Limerick, Ireland, ACM.
• Computergram (1994) Motorola Admits to Deal with Iona on Iridium. Computer Business Review. (link)
• Durham, J. (2001) History-making components : Tracing the roots of components from OOP through WS. IBM. (link)
• Iona Technologies (1997) Best of Breed Products: On time everytime. Dublin, Iona Technologies.
• Mason, J. (2009) jmason.org. (link)Dublin.
• Newcomer, E. (2006). Iona Technologies. (link)
• Sterne, J. (2004) Adventures in Code: The Story of the Irish Software Industry, Dublin, Ireland, The Liffey Press.
• Horn, C. (2010) Be Inspired. Be an Entrepreneur, DIT Hothouse 'Be Inspired' Seminars (link)