maandag 9 januari 2012

Flexibility vs ease-of-use

Ah ... the sun was nice - a memory only though, being back in the dark&windy Netherlands. Gran Canaria was also rather windy, true, but at 23 degrees C and nicely sunny that's a lot easier to handle. And ehhh, what beautiful islands they are, the Canary islands. No geological stuff on volcanics on this blog, though.

I only read, via the mail feed, some of the latest Agile Geosciences blog postings. Some were about things we didn't have in OpendTect. The cepstrum, integrated traces, all sorts of averages.

That is: we had all the tools in the code, or already available via the UI - but not easily, readily available. This is a nice illustration of a common issue in software development: flexible vs easy-to-use. Very often, flexibility and ease of use are antagonists. Very flexible tools are often very difficult to use. And the other way round.

The Agile way - if there is one - is to try to get the 80/20 benefit in both domains. 80% of the benefit for 20% of the effort. That. magically, will often result in an optimal usability vs flexibility.

In any case, in the next OpendTect releases we will go for ease-of-use for the cepstrum (i.e. we put in programming effort to make it single-click), integrated traces were already so easy to do that a mailing list post on the 'how' will do, and the averages are easy for the ones that are important in OpendTect (average, median, RMS and most-frequent).

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