Inadvertent Straight Talk

Most of the real straight talk you (or I anyway) get from SW employees is under non-disclosure or personal conversations that really can”t be made public. Bummer. I wear multiple hats in my relationships with SW Corporate. Personal friend, Customer, Partner, Alpha/Beta tester, User Group leader, and big-mouth blogger. The blogger side of the equation is at odds with the other aspects, except maybe as a customer advocate. So I have to pick which battles I”m allowed to fight, and what tools I can use while doing that. Sometimes its an uncomfortable relationship because while the right hand is ranting and bashing the interface and documentation, the left hand is being calm and rational while alpha testing new functionality that I can”t mention or I”d never get the opportunity again.

So if I want to post criticism of SW and use facts based on a SW employee”s words to do it, I have to be very careful to get those words from a legitimate source, probably not one involved in any of my NDA type endeavors. That”s what I did this time.

I started by asking if I could interview a behind the scenes person who was not a direct SW employee, and was not executive level, but who had a lot of direct hands on knowledge of how things got done. Of course that got nixed. It was a little too raw maybe for SW Corp, but exactly what I was looking for.

Instead, the official channels supplied an executive, albeit one I didn”t know. I sent a bevy of questions looking for some sort of an indication of how SolidWorks learns as an organization. I wanted to know how they determined when they had made a mistake and how they changed directions.

In the end, out of maybe a dozen questions, I got one answer that was usable for my purpose. The rest of it is the same sort of guarded and carefully measured language we are used to hearing from executive level, and the folks who get promoted. I think in the end what I got with this one answer was inadvertent straight talk. It is an admission of sorts that it seems like this fellow did not think was a very important matter, but to me seems to explain a lot of what we see going on in the software today.

The victim offered up by the PR folks was Paul Chastell, and in his own words “I’m the director of SolidWorks software development, responsible for development of SW Office, both new releases and maintenance of old. ”

My question to Mr. Chastell was: Does SW employ anyone who plays devil”s advocate when negotiating new functionality? What sorts of tools or techniques do you have to look at ideas critically?

What I was looking for here was just an indication of how SW looks at issues critically. How they might take into account multiple points of view. I wanted a statement other than “we do extensive customer testing”, which is simply a blind assertion which explains nothing at all. Here was Paul”s response.

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We do not employ any devil’s advocates but nor do we work in a vacuum either. Our project cycle is not one where Product Definition throw a spec at development, who throw the result at QA who throw the bugs back. The entire project team (Product Definition, QA, development, usability) are involved from the very birth of a project. In addition certain projects will have other “sponsors” from other groups such as Technical Support who have an interest in the outcome and involvement in the process and with some projects we will include customers in early discussions and early testing.

So while we don’t have a devil’s advocate we do have a number of people, with different concerns, who are able to change the direction of a project even before any code is written.

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Most of this is something you have heard before. The only parts of this that I have not heard before are “We do not employ any devil’s advocates ” and “we don’t have a devil’s advocate”. It sounds to me that he didn”t have the same take on the question that I did. He completely ignored the “looking at ideas critically part”.

One phrase I heard from a SW employee many years ago was “you never think your baby is ugly”. The people evaluating the ideas all have a vested interest in the idea. They don”t have anyone to ocassionally stand up and say the obvious: “Hey, what an ugly baby!” While it is often an uncomfortable function, all product development groups do need someone willing to be a critical voice. Not to say “negative”, but someone who is not afraid to look at the downside honestly as well as the upside. SW owes their customers that much. It is irresponsible to only look at ideas they send us from the sun-shiney side of the street.

I agree that you do need blind optimists in an organization. They will sometimes see things that aren”t there, and while delusional, that point of view can be a valuable source of unconventional ideas. Still, when it comes to shipping actual software to paying customers, you really do at some point need to connect with the ground and fess up to reality. Hope is a good thing, but it is not enough when it comes to engineering products.

When you look at the changes to the 2008 software in some depth, I think the lack of a devil”s advocate in the process becomes obvious. To me the biggest giveaway is the irresponsible change of defaults to the most radical options possible. It is as if they are expecting that no one is going to read the what”s new, and that the only way people are going to know what”s new is if everything new is right up in your face like a raw Boston cabbie trying to get your attention on Boylston St. That point of view is actually valid for an Alpha or Beta release, but not for SP0.

It looks to me that there was no advocate for the user. The changes served the needs of the company. You can save a lot on documentation if change is right up in your face.

Further, there was no advocate for the CAD administrator. Large installations where training and settings are controlled are the ones most affected by the changes in 2008. If someone had taken a critical look at the default settings from a CAD administration point of view before cutting the disks, I firmly believe that 2008 would have been received much differently. I know my reaction to it would have been different if it installed looking familiar, and added options, rather than installed looking quite foreign and removed options. If that were the case, 2008 would have looked like a benefit rather than an impediment, without having changed the actual content of the new software.

In the end, I think SW2008 is a slap in the face for long time users. SW employees have suggested that 2008 is a transitional release, and that we can look for future releases to complete the changes started in 2008. Is that supposed to make me feel better or is it aimed at making me think I should skip 2008 and wait for 2009? Why would you release something as “released software” which is in fact only half done? This is another argument for lengthening the development cycle.

[As an aside, SolidWorks Corporation seems to be operating under the crazy assumption that the Beta cycle is for users, and shortening it is a favor to us so we don”t get bored with a long Beta. From my point of view, Beta is partially for finding bugs, but it is even more for fixing bugs. Cutting the length of beta essentially cuts the amount of time SW has to fix bugs, which is exactly backwards from the rest of the positive signals we”ve had from Concord since SWWorld.]

I don”t think there is any room left for the optimist/cynic to question the assertion that SW08 is a slow adopter. My 2007 book is still selling better than any of the 2008 books on the Amazon SolidWorks category. SW needs to take a critical look at the software that ships out the door, and look at it from the perspective of a customer rather than a QA “good enough” manager or a Marketing “on schedule” manager or a Development “too many resources” manager. The Devil”s Advocate role is one that we now know for certain is missing from the SolidWorks process.