Review of Wrench in the System: What’s Sabotaging Your Business Software
By Jeff Cogswell
This is a beautiful hardcover book printed on glossy pages with full-color photos, and the author says exactly what’s been on my mind for a long time. When I was into the first chapter, I grabbed a highlighter, thinking I’d copy a paragraph or two for this article, but I soon found I was highlighting the entire book.
The first chapter starts right out talking about how so much software has turned into lemons—yet, unlike other products, we can’t just send it back for a refund. The author points out, “If you pay more than $25 for almost any product that doesn’t work properly despite its written warranty, the Magnuson-Moss Act will back you in court … which enables buyers to obtain satisfaction for goods that fail to perform…” But this doesn’t apply to software, thanks to the licensing agreements. He adds: “The owner of a $15 million software product that turns out to be too difficult to use has much less chance of obtaining a refund or a replacement than the buyer of a defective DustBuster.” Put simply (and these are my words, not the author’s): If the software sucks, you’re screwed.
Much of the book is devoted to good design in software. But design here means not just the architecture we programmers usually think of when we hear “design” but also the outer cover, the GUI, the thing the user sees and interacts with when using your software. Does the software actually do what it’s supposed to do without forcing the users to jump through hoops, and without slowing them down?
We’ve heard it before, yet so many of us refuse to listen. Good design matters.
And the good news with this book is that while pointing out the problems in so much software, Hambrose offers good, solid solutions for how you can improve your software. You won’t find any actual code in this book; in fact, Hambrose’s formal education is in design and not programming. But that’s actually good. They say that if you want to know what you’re really like, don’t look in the mirror but instead ask other people. Other people see things about us that we don’t see. And the same is true with an industry. With this book, we have an intelligent outsider who has stepped into our industry to provide us with what he sees is a fundamental problem. Sometimes that’s what it takes to kick us into high gear. But he’s not just an outside complaining; rather, he’s spent many years now immersed in our industry and is now a part of it, and offers excellent solutions that we would be wise to follow.
Will we learn from this? Will our software finally become usable? I certainly hope so. We can all start by picking up a copy of Wrench in the System by Harold Hambrose.
