Wireframing is not prototyping

Quplog’s post talks something interesting about what I’m dealing with these days. Loads of new application pretending to be a mix of prototype and wireframing tool are ruining some viewpoints.

I’ve seen some Microsoft SketchFlow users claiming they are doing wireframe when actually they are working in prototype. In fact, they were just wasting time. Concepts differ, have look at:

Wikipedia defines website wireframes as follows:

“A website wireframe is a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages.”

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_wireframe

Prototyping, on the other hand, gets the following summary:

“The conventional purpose of a prototype is to allow users of the software to evaluate developers’ proposals for the design of the eventual product by actually trying them out”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_prototyping

Behavior and visuals indeed has different audiences to attend. Software prototyping is about evaluation, testing, verification, and function. Not wireframing. And doesn’t matter whether you’re working on desktop or web application. If you starting a project with a powerful tool which can deliver code when you’re still wireframing, you’ll have to think about framework, logical and physical structure, components and other hell things which you shouldn’t care at that moment. If you do so, please, consider to have some training and education at the subject.

Anyway, these are 18 tools on the subject. I use Balamiq, because it is simple, nice, productive and license is affordable cheap.

2009 Balance

Since January 1st, I was trying to write a balance about what was 2009 for me. I’m in middle of my holidays and I stood in silence whilst enjoying a bucolical moment up in mountains in Rio and I can say 2009 became one of the most important year for my career.

Long ago, I was missing people to talk about advanced issue while seeing that most of us don’t have time to really be up to date in some subjects I like. But, I was lucky to be on my team and have all friends who had patience while listing when I wanted to say and while deaf when was busy on my job and dreams. Of course, special thanks to my wife which became smarter in TI industry as I was saying lot things she couldn’t ever dream of before – sometimes boring her.

I was involved in project of one the greatest press company in Brazil – working within the heart of money in there; My Company (commercial, managers and Team) did very well upside down, my boses also contributed to my advancements on commercial behavior (thanks Mr. Allak) and Continuous Integration practical assets (thanks Mr. Tensfeld). Also, my friends Robson Waterkemper and Werther Azevedo which are brazilian perls in Usability and Design.

I have met important industry leaders personally which are changing the way software developments happen in Brazil (thanks to Juan Bernabó an argentine geezer doing well in São Paulo and Rodrigo Toledo from Rio de Janeiro (PUC).

Besides all that, I also have listened to many writes by reading their works and making Amazon.com richer:

• Mme Mary Poppendieck
• Paul C. Clements
• Thomas Erl
• John Goodson
• Joe Duffy
• Sir Robert C. Martin
• Michael T. Nygard
• Sir Andrew S. Tanenbaum
• Jared Richardson
• William Gwaltney
• Paul Dyson
• Andrew Longshaw
• Sir Ted Faison
• Scott W. Ambler
• Pramodkumar J. Sadalage
• Alan Cooper
• William Gwaltney
• Andrew Hunt
• Daniel Pink
• along many others American, European and few Brazilian ones.

Note when I say “Sir” or “Mme” is because I’ve read more than one title they wrote or same book twice. Those authors really did good work and really contributed in way it changed me. The most special was Mary Poppendieck and Ted Faison which I must translate their names in following sentence:

“doing well for the business while avoid complexity by understand what that means”.

Last time I counted my readings it was 25. Some books I tried and stopped because the book cover was saying more than the content. Anyway, next are the subject which was feelingly involved in 2009:

• Product Development
• Lean
• Scrum
• Model Agile Techniques
• Advanced Object oriented programming
• Event-based system
• SOA
• Testing techniques (BBD and TDD)
• Continuous integration environments for applications and databases
• Concurrent techniques for application in multicore computers

In this February I’m pretty sure I’m really different from last one.

Lean Principles

I wanted to show lean principles as something I stand for. So I did use the html structure from Przemysław Bielicki blog as she also copied the principle from Tom and Mary Poppendieck’s book too.