The equipment you provide to developers

If you're a manager of a software development project, you may want to consider carefully the equipment you provide your developers.

You probably do think about the equipment you provide to your team. Certainly the cost and capabilities, and probably reliability and conformance to your organization's IT standards. Yet there is one aspect of the equipment that you may have overlooked.

That aspect is the minimum hardware required to use your product.

In today's world of cloud-based applications, one rarely thinks about minimum requirements for hardware. Such requirements were more noticeable in the age of Windows desktop applications, and even in PC-DOS applications. Back then, when software was purchased in a box and installed (from CD-ROM or perhaps even floppy disk), minimum requirements were on everyone's mind. It was a necessary factor to review before purchasing software.

Today, personal computers are mostly uniform: 64-bit Intel processor, 4 GB of RAM (possibly more), 500 GB of disk (probably more), and access to the internet. The only variable is screen size. Desktops probably have a 22-inch (or larger) display, and laptops may be anywhere from 11 inches to 17 inches.

The other variable is operating system: Windows (most likely), mac OS (less likely), or Linux (a very small probability). But operating systems are easy to identify, and you probably know which ones your shop uses.

Display size is the troublemaker, the one variable that can cause software to work well or to be a source of irritation.

But what does this have to do with the equipment you provide to your developers?

Back in the 1980s, we recognized that developers designed and wrote systems that worked on their computers. That is, the software was built for the capabilities of their computers -- and not smaller or less capable systems. If developers were given workstations with lots of memory and large displays, the software would require lots of memory and a large display. Call this effect the "law of minimum requirements".

The law is still with us.

Last week, someone (i forget who) complained that the latest version of mac OS worked well on large displays but seemed "off" for small screens such as an 11-inch Macbook Air. (Apple had apparently tweaked the spacing between graphical elements in its UI.)

My guess is that the law of minimum requirements is acting here. My guess is that Apple provides its developers with large, capable machines. Possibly Mac Pro workstations with multiple large displays, perhaps 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with large external display.

It is quite possible that the developers made changes to the UI and reviewed them on their workstations, and didn't check the experience on smaller equipment. Perhaps no-one did. Or, someone may have noticed the issue late in the development cycle, too late to make changes and meet the delivery date. The actual process doesn't really matter. The result is a new version of mac OS that works poorly for those with small screens.

Apple isn't alone in this.

A web app that I use has a similar fault. Once I log in, the page for data entry is large -- so large that I must expand my browser to almost the entire size of my display to see everything and to enter data. (The web page is said to be not "responsive to screen size".)

It's not that I keep my browser set to a very small window. I visit many different web sites (newspapers, banks, government payment portals, social media sites, and others) and they all fit in my browser. It is just this one page that demands many more pixels.

Here again, I see the law of minimum requirements in action. The developers for this one particular web site used large displays, and for them the web site was acceptable. They did not consider that other users might have smaller displays, or smaller browser windows.

I do have to point out that building such a web site requires effort. HTML is designed to allow for different screen sizes. Browsers are designed to adjust the sizes of screen elements. A screen that provides a "fixed format" experience requires extra code to override the behaviors that one gets "for free" with HTML. But that's a different issue.

The law of minimum requirements is a thing. The equipment we provide to developers shapes the resulting system, often in ways that are not obvious (until we look back with hindsight). Be aware of the minimum equipment you expect your end-users to use, and test for those configurations early in the development cycle. Doing so can reduce irritation and improve the experience for the customer.