In the biggest Duh! story of the year (so far, it's only 3 days in, give it time), this article blames programmers for crash-prone, confusing software. I repeat, Duh! Who else is to blame? The story does give one good piece of advice to programmers: "YOUR. USER. IS. NOT. YOU." Now, to be fair, the reporter is absolutely biased against programmers, because there is not one quote from someone who deals with idiot customers who do not know what they want ("Can you make the font bigger? And pink?"). That being said, as a social group, software programmers are not the best representatives of people-persons, so maybe some more sit-ins with quality-assurance volunteers during the development phase of the GUI could be a good suggestion.
Hi Mr. Schmo...and Happy New Year!
ReplyDeleteRead the article. It depends.
Decent software, like any project be it software, mechanical, or service, begins with getting accurate requirements. The requirements ideally come from the end users-the actual customers of the product. Far too often the requirments come from a management or a level higher than an end user and do not accurately reflect what the user or the business actually needs. Which leads to a sloppy end product-one that doesnt match the actual needs even though it might meet spec.
That being said, a lot of programmers dont like users. They like code. Speaking from my own experience, they also behave more like artists-tempermental and hard to schedule.
Several years ago, The Standish Group and Gartner Group came out with a couple of White Papers on software projects that were quite good. They pretty much showed that one out of four software projects was successful in terms of schedule, budget, and scope. Two out of four projects failed in some fashion, and one out of four projects was a complete failure. The main reasons for the failures were poor requirements planning and lack of end user training.
Sven
Heya Sven! Happy New Year to you!
ReplyDeleteAs a former programmer and current power user, I agree with the paragraph that says that most software starts out good, but then gets jiggered with because of demands by big clients and vocal individuals. Well-defined requirements is definitely the key to avoiding aggravating software bugs... uh, features, yeah, that's the ticket.