WorldWide Drilling Resource

24 NOVEMBER 2016 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® Celebrate Simplicity by Britt Storkson Owner, P2FlowLLC Simplicity doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. People like simple, not because they are dumb and can’t or won’t learn anything. Most people simply don’t want to spend the intellectual “capital” - the time and effort - it takes to learn a particular thing. They would rather spend the time doing other things, and there’s nothing wrong with it. There are other advantages to simplicity. If you’re an employer and training your employees in certain methods or machinery, you would realize considerable cost savings if training time took 2-3 hours instead of 2-3 days or more. You could have your employees doing something productive for your company instead of spending their time learning something. Complexity in and of itself also creates additional problems as the more steps one must go through to do something, the greater the likelihood of error being introduced. This concept is exponential, not linear. So if an operation which could be done in two steps is done in four steps, the likelihood of error in the process increases four times, not two. Make the operations consistent. Don’t have one operation require one routine, and another require another routine. Having consistent terminology for various operations as much as possible makes it much easier for the operator to “interface” with the machine. Also, make the computer deal with the minutiae, not the operator. Having the operator do something the computer can and should do does nothing but add frustration, and greatly increases the chances of introducing errors. Computers should take care of the little things, not burden the operator with them. A good example of this is the “save” or “enter” function. I have a sprinkler timer which requires the operator to press “enter” when certain functions are changed, but not others. After changing the sprinkler on duration time (the time the particular sprin- kler “zone” is on) even though you see the correct time on the display, it is not changed (internally) until you press “enter”. If you leave this adjustment without pressing “enter” the “old” time will be used, not the new one. You might think you changed it, but you really didn’t unless you pressed “enter”. With the controls I build, the adjustment settings are always updated and saved in nonvolatile memory (meaning retained without power) almost immediately after the operator makes the adjustment. This way there is no “enter” key to press, and much less confusion. What the operator puts into the control unit is what is retained until he or she changes it. I’d like to leave you with a collection of quotes celebrating simplicity: There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no defi- ciencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. ~ C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers; it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test; it introduces security challenges; and it causes end user and administrator frustration. ~ Ray Ozzie Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ~ Leonardo da Vinci Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance. ~ Jon Franklin Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does. ~ Larry Bossidy Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no struc- tural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. ~ Alan Kay Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is sup- posed to do, then everything else about it matters little. ~ Bertrand Meyer The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there. ~ Gordon Bell If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how fast it doesn’t work. ~ Mich Ravera If we’d asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses”. ~ Henry Ford Britt Britt Storkson may be contacted via e-mail to michele@ worldwidedrillingresource.com