Marney’s Bonehead List

March 10, 2006 3:07 am General

Marney mailed today saying that she was leaving Sun – pity, she was one of those really great people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with, although our interaction wasn’t what you’d call frequent. Best of luck Marney!

On her office whiteboard, she’s had a list of questions on it for a long, long time. She calls it the Bonehead List because the questions weren’t rocket science – more often than not they were difficult to answer and rarely asked. For the most part, I think these are an excellent guide to software development. I figured they were worth a blog and pass this on. Marney takes credit for compiling all of them –

  1. Is it accessible to people with disabilities or people in special situations? (Trivial example: can you run it without a mouse?)
  2. Is it fully internationalized, with a localization plan?
  3. Is someone else in SMI doing anything like this? Might someone have useful insights?
  4. Who is affected by or has an interest in this? How are the needs of internal or external partners met by this?
  5. Who are the users? What problem in their lives are we trying to address? How will this feature/product/system achieve that?
  6. Specifically, concretely, and measurably: What are the goals, at what cost? Especially: What does “ease of use” mean for this?
  7. How do we want customers to perceive this? What are the marketing messages that our design should support?
  8. Two years from now, how will this be used?
  9. Can or should this be done in phases?
  10. What are the internal and external dependencies? What other products, platforms, or technologies are required for this to work? What are the detailed implications of those dependencies?
  11. How do users transition from what they’re using to this new feature/product/system?
  12. How do open source considerations affect this? How will existing open source communities react to this? Will this accommodate open source or third-party apps running on or with it?
  13. Describe the boundaries of this feature, application or system you are designing. What’s on the other side of the boundary? (For example, how did the user start this feature/app or enter this world? What happens when he or she stops using it?)
  14. What aspects of this might be patentable?
  15. How do competitive products do this?

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