Hints and Heuristics

A few snippets that may come in handy when writing programs...

• The human mind can keep track of 5-9 things at once (known as the "7+/-2 rule").

  Avoid having more than that many items anywhere in your design. Perhaps you can rearrange them into several smaller groups? If not, at least make sure that that part is as simple as possible in all other ways.

  This applies doubly so to the HMI, which will be used for a much greater amount of time and by a larger group of people. Thus, menus should generally have about seven items, procedures about seven steps, phone numbers about seven digits, and so on.

• 100% efficiency leads to infinite queues.

  Be careful with anything 100% (or zero). They can both lead to problems.

$Date: 2004/12/28 05:32:12 $