Most people are familiar with the concept behind the 80/20 rule or Pareto Principle. It generally states that 20% of a population consumes 80% of the resources. It’s attributed to a 19th century Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who realized that 80% of the wealth in a given population was concentrated in the hands of 20% of the people. Pareto referred to this inequality as the “Vital Few” versus the “Trivial Many.” This observation has since found its way into numerous disciplines, including logistics, management, inventory control, biology and (you guessed it) software.

Put another way, 80% of something can be accounted for by just 20% of the total possible reasons or causes for it. One common adage in the IT industry is that 80% of all end users typically use just 20% of a software application’s features. In software testing, 80% of observed errors are often caused by 20% of the entire pool of known bugs. And so on.

Depending upon who you ask, the 80/20 rule cruelly predicts that in every human endeavor effort and payoff are inversely related.

At Microsoft, the 80/20 rule was treated like gospel and frequently cited by software testers, engineers, group managers and even the CEO, Steve Ballmer. Microsoft applied the 80/20 rule to everything from balancing DHCP server usage to analyzing crash reports for Windows and predicting how Chairman Bill Gates would divide his time between Microsoft and the Gates Foundation.

In a memo to his employees, Ballmer wrote about an epiphany he had with his company’s error-reporting tool:

One really exciting thing we learned is how, among all these software bugs involved in the report, a relatively small proportion causes most of the errors. About 20 percent of the bugs causes 80 percent of all errors, and—this is stunning to me—1 percent of bugs caused half of all errors.

Applying logic to this statement, the inverse must also be true: 80% of the bug-free functionality is produced by 20% of the code.

If this is true, then software engineers—not just at Microsoft, but all engineers—are writing an awful lot of crappy code.

Enter the Zone of Suck
A similar distribution exists for the requirements of a software project. The project manager knows this well—it’s their job, after all, to understand the full set of requirements, keep a project on track, on budget and delivered on time to the satisfaction of the customer. The project manager’s mantra for their team, therefore, is to focus on the 20% that matters. I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard this phrase uttered during my career.

Every software team knows that projects begin with a set of requirements and proceed through a series of steps where the original specifications are compared with the end product for completeness and acceptability. Without going into the various software development methodologies, generally speaking it’s a process of refinement and revision. During each revision, if the requirements of the process follows a Pareto distribution, a few key issues will bubble up and need to be addressed, while old requirements will gradually fade away. Here’s an example Pareto distribution for a software project:

The left vertical axis is an arbitrary measure of the importance of a requirement while the right axis indicates a cumulative percentage. To apply an 80/20 rule of requirements management to a project, two lines (above) are added to indicate the 80% cut-off between the significant few, at left, and the insignificant many.

Another software adage which bears emphasizing here is that, in a given project, the first 80% is easy while the last 20% is hard. Early in the project life cycle, decisions are made about things like the choice of platform, database, data model, programming language and core functionality of the software. These decisions, once made, very seldom change. As with all things, the devil is in the details.

As one who’s worked for big software companies, small software shops and startups, it’s nearly always attention to the last 20% that makes a software project “pop” or fall flat. The engineer may report that they’ve coded the first 80% of an application according to the specification, but if the last 20% is rushed or neglected then code defects, poorly implemented features and performance bottlenecks can kill a project. Budgets are exhausted, deadlines missed, the customer is unhappy and the engineers are fed up. At this stage, the project may be said to have entered the Zone of Suck. It’s a place no one wants to be.

Failure to identify and respond to the last 20%—the significant few—near the end of a software project’s life cycle is what separates a usable, elegant, high-performing application from one that, well…isn’t. In the case of web applications, the ones that fail to impress usually reveal a similar set of problems: lackluster user interfaces, sloppy CSS, poor usability, missing features, slow response times and so on. Too often, shortcuts are taken to rush a product out the door and this critical last 20% (i.e., what the customer notices and expects) suffers as a result.

A Better Alternative
If we accept that the 80/20 rule has some merit, then it’s possible for software teams to anticipate the last 20% and avoid the Zone of Suck. Proponents of the Agile software development methodology will tell you that their principles are ideally suited to anticipating the last 20%. They’ll further tell you that changing requirements, even late in the process, are welcome so long as they satisfy the customer. Happy customers lead to repeat business, referrals and more revenue for the software makers. For startups, it can mean the difference between securing a second round of funding, a major liquidity event, or a lot of unhappy users and investors.

Regardless of which development methodology is used, a software business should never tell the customer, “it wasn’t in our contract,” that something which is clearly an oversight is “expected behavior,” or that it’s okay to release a beta version product with 20% of the bugs outstanding. This points to a major failure and is the quickest way to develop a poor reputation and kill off any hope of future business or funding.

Being involved in a winning software project feels great. The project managers, engineers and client are all stoked. If you’re lucky, the end-users you’ve designed it for will love it, too, and your application attains the Holy Grail of web software: the hockey stick moment.

The good news is it’s possible to change, if your team is willing to listen, engage with the customer and commit to the last 20%.

Throughout the week I make note of interesting news pieces, blog posts, online debates and trending topics with a focus on technology and Africa. This is an experiment in sharing some of these items, filtered by yours truly, in a blog post. Wherever possible I’ll try to include appropriate links to the people behind the stories so readers can follow them online. We’ll see if this turns into a weekly habit.

The much-anticipated arrival of the SEACOM cable, linking east and southern Africa to Europe and India, topped African tech news and sparked a great deal of controversy online. Rebekah Heacock collects reactions from the blogosphere over at Global Voices Online. Whiteafrican does a comprehensive roundup of the debate surrounding the event on tweets and blogs.

A group of Nigerian twitterers and bloggers started a movement called Light Up Nigeria with the intent of mobilizing Nigerians to demand reliable electricity from their government. Solomon Sydelle gives an excellent backgrounder on the problem and provides a growing list of social media contacts related to the movement. Blacklooks collects critical reactions to the online campaign and suggests that what Nigeria really needs are flyers and a Banksy to address the problem at the street level.

TED Africa Director Emeka Okafor has a short post and YouTube video link about the Eden Campus, a school that teaches business skills and entrepreneurship to marginalized South Africans.

StartupAfrica offers some technical tips for building an African micro-blogging platform with a listing of existing services and an interesting discussion by a variety of Africa tech heads.

Africa Rural Connect teams up with the NPCA to ask the question, “What’s your best idea for Africa?” with a focus on improving the lives of farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The ARC launch party was held on July 21st in Washington DC. Here’s Molly Mattessich describing the inspiration for ARC in a video presentation.

I’d be remiss without mentioning something about TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford. Trying to follow the live stream of mind-blowing presentations online is like drinking from a fire hose. Brainpicker filters the stream with some selected highlights. Among all the talks, an unexpected favorite came from Brother Paulus Terwitte, a German friar who thinks we’ve become like primitive hunter-gatherers, preoccupied with collecting information, instead of taking in less and deepening our lives.

The irony of Brother Terwitte’s message in the context of this post is not lost on this blogger. With this, I am going outside for a Sunday stroll.

There’s been a lot of buzz in African tech circles lately about Naijaborn.com, a web community for Nigerian residents and diasporans, which entered its public beta on June 1st. The self-funded startup is a partnership between Francis Omokhape Oghuma of Qubestreet (Nigeria and South Africa) and Mambe Nanje Churchill of AfroVisioN Group (Cameroon). Churchill was interviewed on this blog in November of last year.

Naijaborn is not a Nigerian Facebook
Nor is it a Nigerian clone of LinkedIn, MySpace or any other social network, as Mambe Nanje Churchill was quick to point out in a recent interview. Naijaborn (or “Nigerian born”) is a uniquely African web venture built without any external code or whitebox social networks. The site aims to be a people/business directory designed specifically for Nigerians at home and abroad. Says Churchill:

Naijaborn is a naija talents database, a people/business search engine for Nigerians, a business marketing tool, magazine, media platform, and last but not least Naijaborn is proudly Naijaborn. It’s built from scratch, making it unique and very easy to adapt to future market trends. So we stand out because we will be able to rewrite our system any day anytime while most won’t because they don’t build from scratch.

The ability to deliver custom features is one of Naijaborn’s great strengths. This stands in contrast to many online social hubs, which nearly anyone can have up and running in no time with Ning or Flux. The downside to these sites is customization is usually limited and they often end up looking like one of hundreds of others. Moreover, Flux and Ning sites aren’t optimized for low-bandwidth connections, making them slow loading in most of Africa. By comparison, Naijaborn.com is snappy even in a crowded cyber cafe.

Mobile, Maps and Music
The public beta is only the beginning for Naijaborn’s founders, who have plans to integrate mobile features by partnering with iYam.mobi (reviewed here and here) to enable on-the-go SMS searches for people or businesses. iYam.mobi would permit anyone with a mobile phone to send a query such as “find doctor lagos” to the Naijaborn.com SMS gateway and get the top results returned via SMS.

The founders also want to add map search functionality to Naijaborn, whereby users might plot their locations on a world map with links to their profiles. Churchill reports that they’re still actively developing the search module, which will support both geolocation and features like natural language queries to enable searches like “web developer in nigeria using php.”

Perhaps the most compelling feature is one that will enable Nigerian artists to showcase their music online. Churchill from the Naijafeed interview:

Naijaborn already has music upload and we will strive to make a vibrant way for indie artists to showcase their music and later on it will include a sales system where someone can launch his/her album exclusively on Naijaborn. So www.naijaborn.com/beta/music is something that will evolve beyond the naijaborn.com domain. So sure, we’re going to get something like Myspace but it will be a 100% naija way of doing it.

With Nigeria’s burgeoning music scene, it’s not difficult to imagine a near future when singles or entire albums are launched exclusively on the site.

Final thoughts
Naijaborn borrows elements of a social business directory (LinkedIn), a social network (Facebook) and a hub for artists/musicians (MySpace) and remixes them with Africa-appropriate tech to suit a specific target audience. It makes sense to use proprietary code to achieve this, but support for Google’s OpenSocial standard could further enhance the site with add-ons for external services such as Google Profiles, Twitter or Gatorpeeps.

Either way, it’s an impressive start for an African web venture. With creative young netrepreneurs like these at the helm and millions of web-savvy Nigerians looking to connect online, this will surely be one to watch in the coming year.

Follow Naijaborn online
Twitter: naijaborn
CruchBase: Naijaborn
Facebook: Naijaborn
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It’s no secret that mobile devices are the predominant mode of telephony in almost every African country. In a continent of one billion people, the number of African mobile subscribers today is estimated to be around 300 million, representing a penetration rate of roughly 30%, according to the Africa Telecom News Mobile Factbook. With the popularity of handset sharing in smaller communities, the actual number of Africans using mobiles is likely to be higher, with growth rates that continue to outpace North America and Asia.

Africans increasingly depend on mobile telephony and information technologies for both social and economic interactions. Pan regional giants MTN, Vodacom, Orascom and others, together with smaller regional telecoms, are rolling out 3G and EDGE-based mobile data services to their subscribers. Despite this, handheld devices with Internet access remain a comparative luxury for most Sub-Saharan Africans. SMS is still the most popular, and affordable, non-voice value-added service. Meanwhile, broadband penetration in Africa continues to hover at around one percent.

Given these factors, wouldn’t it be nice if there was an intuitive method for mobile users to find, connect and interact with one another?

The First Mobile Mobile Phone Directory
This was the question posed by Fritz Ekwoge, the enterprising coder behind Kerawa.com (interviewed on this blog and profiled here). He noted that there was no mobile phone directory in Cameroon, not to mention for most of the continent. Without an easy way of contacting businesses in his country, Fritz set to work prototyping Africa’s first mobile mobile phone directory. That’s not a tautology, Fritz points out. His new directory service, iYam.mobi, is purely SMS-based, which means that any handset is capable of creating a profile and querying the iYam directory with a simple text message. Thus, it’s the mobile directory that goes everywhere you do.

iYam is a targeted, wholly appropriate solution designed specifically for African mobile users. It’s also the sort of service that, after using it the first time, leaves you wondering, “why didn’t I think of that?”

I was fortunate to give iYam a test drive during the private beta, along with Erik Hersman and others. During this time the iYam prototype was running on a modest hardware platform consisting of a pair of Samsung mobile phones connected to a laptop with Bluetooth. My impressions are given below. The service enters its public beta today.

Using the iYam Directory
The beauty of the iYam directory is its simplicity and ease-of-use. Since the service is entirely SMS-based, getting listed in the directory is as easy as sending a text message. iYam permits you to use only 155 characters to describe yourself. With this constraint, you’re forced to make those characters count. Twitter users are already familiar with this concept.

Fritz sent me a pointer to some simple instructions on using iYam’s service. Less than a minute later my profile was registered in the iYam directory and searchable by anyone in Cameroon—or Africa, for that matter. I simply composed the following SMS:

…and sent it to iYam’s MTN number. iYam replied with an SMS indicating that my profile had been created. Next, I sent a request to iYam to see who else was listed in the directory. This took the form of the straightforward query, “find engineer limbe” which returned an SMS with the contact information for the top five software engineers in my area. I found several new people who I might then contact for an impromptu meetup, or hire for their services.

Directory results are returned as an abbreviated list of names and corresponding phone numbers. Want to view someone’s profile? No problem. Simply send “whois [number]” to iYam and you’ll receive additional details for that individual or business. The fourth and final command you can send to the directory is “me” which returns the profile associated with your mobile number.

Thoughts on iYam’s Future
Needless to say, the potential for this application is huge. I demonstrated iYam to friends and business owners in my neighborhood, all of whom grasped the value of the service immediately. The first response from nearly every Cameroonian business owner was, “how do I get listed in the directory?”

Currently, finding a product or service in Cameroon depends on local knowledge, referrals from friends, luck or some combination thereof. For example, searching for a specific laptop model in Douala may involve an exchange of phone calls and text messages with a half dozen well-informed friends. Imagine instead sending “find laptop douala” to iYam and getting a list of results back. One might then send an SMS with specifics to each of the top five business listings and receive replies on pricing and availability.

One obvious usability question has to do with accessing paged results, as the directory currently returns only the top five listings. Fritz indicated that he’s heard several suggestions for how to handle this, so expect to see an update in the near future.

There’s the bigger question of how to shape iYam into a business. Erik Hersman tackled this side of the equation with Fritz in our email exchange, so I’ll defer to him in his parallel coverage of iYam.

That the service requires nothing more than a low-range mobile phone and SMS is perhaps its greatest strength. This was clearly borne out by the informal product testing I did with local Cameroonian business owners. People genuinely appreciate that a computer or Internet access isn’t required to create a profile or query the directory. It’s a powerful democratizing service built on an inexpensive, familiar, widely available device.

I think iYam also succeeds in just about every way by capitalizing on the philosophy of small software, in which a competitive advantage is gained from the unique challenges posed by Africa—challenges that are typically perceived as hindrances rather than conditions for innovation.

Fritz reports that availability of the service will be 20-24 hours every day during the week, and 24 hours per day on weekends. Beta testers in Ghana, Gabon, Niger, Benin, the UK and Cameroon have tried the service so far. With increased usage during the public beta, Fritz says he will scale the hardware accordingly.

iYam currently operates from two servers: one for MTN, and a second for Orange. MTN requests are served by iYam MTN (00237 7487 3391). Orange requests are served by iYam Orange (00237 9626 5496). International numbers are served by iYam MTN.