IT administration user experience

Jenni Merrifield: "It really doesn't have to be an 'Either/Or' choice between having a good GUI or a good CLI."

Indeed, it generally shouldn't be. All administrators are not the same, and they will have different working sets. What Admin A does day in day out, can rattle out command lines in his sleep and has developed a whole pile of slick scripts around his particular usage pattern, Admin B does once in a blue moon and could really do with an explanatory GUI and a friendly help system -- just the sort of things that would slow Admin A down. Conversely, Admin B's everyday tasks may be unfamiliar and scary to Admin A.

With modern component technologies, this is actually very cheap and easy to do because the actual functionality should be embedded in an object model that can be reused in thin GUIs and CLIs. We've successfully used this approach for data import/export -- our system configuration tool is a GUI, but we also have command-line tools for certain functions so we can use them in our build and test scripts. Both the GUI and CLI tools are thin wrappers over the object library where all the work happens, so the overhead cost of having two interfaces was minimal.

Jenni also notes that a CLI "should be designed with ease of use in mind" and gives as an example "parameter names should be meaningful." Hmm. One of the things CLI wizards tend to value is terseness, even at the expense of readability to the uninitiated. (Sometimes I think especially at the expense of readability.) Most CLIs nowadays seem to support both verbose and terse ways of expressing parameters or verbs e.g. Subversion's "svn checkout" or "svn co", which is a nice approach. Personally, I think the best way to achieve ease of use in an admin-oriented CLI is to standardise common options and parameters the way GUIs standardise menu names and locations -- that way Admin B can begin to transfer his expertise with CLI Tool B over to CLI Tool A and is not burdened with remembering two sets of cryptic parameters.