Some time ago I worked on an ecommerce system, which allowed for very flexible promotions setup. If I remember correctly, it was poosible to create roughly 30 types of promotions. As you might imagine, testing all of it was a pain, since for every single promotion type I would need at least 10 test cases. So instead I decided to find out what combinations are actually used and focus only on realistic scenarios.

One day later I learned that business used only 5 fairly static kinds of promotions. And thank you very much for asking, they are happy with that number. They don’t need more. But since we’re already talking, would it be possible to have a promotion name in a dropdown and prepopulate fields accordingly? Most of the setup was static per promotion type and there was sooo much clicking, wouldn’t it be easier to just select a name from the dropdown, enter one number and voila, new promotion is ready? Knowing that promotions are much less complicated than we thought would also simplify implementation, not to mention testing…

I remembered that situation when Udi Dahan told us a universal reporting tool story during his ADSD course. He asked if we were ever told to create a universal reporting tool with all sorts of fancy filtering, sorting and presentation features? Did it allow for saving all those uber-flexible setups and giving them names, so business can run the same reports over and over on regular basis? Maybe you also find it disturbingly familiar?

The problem with flexible tools is that building them is extremely complex, they need to perform well on huge amounts of data and using all possible combinations of available options. That’s exactly what MSExcel does and Microsoft worked on it for a number of years now. Yet, usually we’re asked to build ‘mini-excel’ in much shorter time and given much smaller team.

The sad part is that most of the time the flexibility is not really useful. Most users save their 5 or, in extreme cases, maybe 10 static setups and run reports on them for months. So first of all, it’s a wasted effort. The exception is small percentage of users that really don’t know what they’re looking for in data until they actually see it. They play with models, look for patterns. But they’re minority and would be probably better off using tools dedicated for that kind of exploration.

Then, knowing what information user looks for, we could give them much better experience, so it’s also a lost opportunity. In case of promotions, we could save them typing and clicking. Given they had to setup dozens of promotions each month that would add up very fast and result in much better experience. In case of reporting we could think about generating ‘real time reports’ and sending them alerts. For example if every day somebody needs to run a report to check whether there were any orders matching some parameters, wouldn’t it be great if they got an email every time it actually happened? I bet they would love you for that feature. Not to mention how much work you would save yourself by implementing simpler, narrow solution.

So if ‘the other way’ is so bright why we keep working on universal, super flexible, yet not fully utilized features? In my experience the following factors contribute to the problem:

• We don’t talk (enough) to business. The most obvious one. Maybe we’re not interested in business side of things, or maybe we don’t have opportunity to talk to the right people. Either way it’s obvious that something is missing here.
• Business has to constantly fight for IT resources. So since we’re already doing something for them, they tend to ask for anything they can think of. After all nobody knows when they get hold of any geek the next time. By having a flexible tool they can do their job without needing us that often.
• We (as an industry) taught business to speak our language. As an industry we didn’t do a very good job in learning how to get requirements out of business users. Not stories, not features, not “I want Y shown when I click X on ABC screen”, not CRUD. I’m talking about getting to the source, to what problem business is trying to solve with the feature they dream about, about discovering their why. Only then we can help them to come up with a good solution. Blindly following the specification is just not enough. Business users don’t come up with best solutions and designs. That’s our job.
• The more complicated the feature, the more fun it is to implement. Let’s face it, sometimes it’s just too tempting 🙂

Are there any more factors you observed? Please, share them in comments.