Entering edit mode
Alex F. Bokov
▴
50
@alex-f-bokov-306
Last seen 10.2 years ago
So here goes, I am about to risk getting myself blacklisted by the
very
people I can least afford to be blacklisted by, and at the very start
of
my career no less. Why am I taking this risk? Because I love
Bioconductor, it's the most useful thing currently installed on my PC,
and I'm deeply grateful to the developer and user community for making
such a wonderful tool. The following constructive criticism is how I
hope to make it better.
Here is an essay by Eric S. Raymond describing the difficulties he had
configuring a software package on Linux. Obviously the last person
you'd
think of as "computer illiterate", "lazy", or "clueless".
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
Once you wade through the technical minutia of his specific software
struggle, the main message appears to be that software is often
written
by individuals who are so knowledgeable in their particular field that
their idea of "obvious", "self explanatory", "intuitive", "user
friendly", and even "adequately documented" may be completely
different
from the rest of humanity! I immediately thought of certain BioC
packages I've recently bashed my head over (and over and over).
At the end of the essay ESR presents a checklist for telling whether
your software suffers from problems similar to the ones he describes.
For the benefit of any package developers/maintainers who may still be
reading this, here's my version of that checklist as revised
specifically for Bioconductor:
1. What does the package look like to a computer person who isn't a
statistician or a statistician who isn't a computer person? What
would be the most obvious thing someone unfamiliar with your
package would try to use it for... and if they did, would they
succeed after having done nothing more than read the manpage?
2. Is there any dialogue in the Tcl widgets which is a dead end,
without giving guidance on what the choices actually do?
(although
if you read ESR's essay you might conclude that there's no point
to even having widgets, since a GUI does not automatically
translate into user friendliness)
3. The requirement that end-users read documentation is NOT a sign
of
failure for a program such as R which mostly lacks a UI...
but...
* Is every argument, method, and slot of every non-private
object documented in the manpage
*for that object* (rather than referring to some other
manpage which in turn refers to another manpage, ad
nauseum)?
* Are the usage examples you give in the manpage simple,
general, and comprehensible both to statisticians who
aren't
computer people and computer people who aren't
statisticians? Hint: gratuitous use of functions that
aren't
from the package you're documenting reduces
comprehensibility.
* Does the documentation rely on references to hardcopy
publications to explain crucial portions of the object's
functionality instead of using external references as
supplementary/background material?
* If there is a significant number of usage scenarios where
the default argument values will be inappropriate, is the
user warned?
* Are the manpages in sync with the current package version?
4. Do you ever find yourself using any phrase resembling "The
syntax
is just like it is for the S-Plus version"?
5. Does your project welcome and respond to usability feedback from
non-expert users?
6. Do error messages give enough information to be able to
distinguish between malformed input/arguments, platform
limitations (memory, drive space, access permissions), problems
in
R itself, and other ("other" presumably being the real bugs)?
Thank you for your patience in reading this. I don't pretend to
understand the technical complexity of your work, nor your motivations
for doing it. However, if you do write open source software such as
Bioconductor packages, it would be logical to at least assume that you
want other people to use your software. Hopefully the above
considerations will assist in making that happen.
