Giving the Customer What They Wanted?

Longjmp asks: "Once again I though about how often programmers find themselves in a situation where they may have a specification for their work but, as it turns out later, the specs didn't really meet the customers' requirements. Techies and customers almost always speak a completely different language and likely the specs were written by a tech person who doesn't quite comprehend the customer's workflow, or sometimes even worse, by the customer himself, trying to 'speak tech' without having the technical background. In either case, the resulting product would be right out of a Douglas Adams novel: 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.' How often do you (as programmers) get a chance to talk to customers directly or watch them in order to understand their workflow? How often did you as a customer (or user) talk to the techies? What are your experiences?"

"Sometimes these different views can result in almost funny situations:

Back in the stone age of programming, we had a customer who wanted to have the result of a database query sorted by a specific field ('usable' databases at that time were either incredibly expensive or simply unavailable, so we had created our own proprietary database). He asked for this because the old software they were using could do this. However, we couldn't, and everyone was horrified by the thought of programming this 'ASAP' but we were ready to do it.

Eventually we talked to him and asked him what exactly he wanted this for. It turned out that he didn't even want a sorted list. He wanted look for a specific value in that field (something the old software couldn't do), and he got it by looking at the sorted query results. Our software, however, was capable of searching for field values already and return matching results only.

At this point both parts were happy: he got what he wanted and we didn't have to write a single line of code. Of course, there will always be the geek with the 'use-it-my-way-or-f*ck-off'-attitude. For me however, talking to customers and trying to understand what they want (as opposed to what they tell you) was always a big part of what made developing software fun and satisfying.

So, how often did you find yourself in a similar situation?"

Comments

Customers never know what they really want

[Mr. Shiny And New]

This is why software evolves, and this is the power of extreme programming and rapid prototyping approaches to software development. You try to get a good idea up front what the customer wants, but then you build stuff really fast and show them something. Then they can try it and see what they think of it. You will find that new requirements pop up and old ones disappear.

I thought

[inerte]

That this was one of the main reason Extreme Programming was invented.

Re:Use Cases

[e8johan]

I must agree! User cases is the way to discuss software with users. You can draw user cases as in UML to make things really clear.

In mu profession I often write software to replace or complement older software. My applications are often used to reduce paperwork and to avoid doing things manually. To be able to do this in a good way, you need to know what your user does how and when and, idealy, why. This is why I often spend many hours letting the users explain their current work to me. When they are done, I put together a number of user cases trying to redescribe what they've explained to me and then schedule another meating. On the second meeting I try to explain what the user is supposed to do, and I explicitly as the user if this fits into the way they work. This process can take a few iterations 3-5 meetings (including the first 2), but always yeild good software and great user feedback.