Software Development's Evolution towards Product Design

An anonymous reader writes: "The Lost Garden site has an excellent post on software development's evolution into product design. He starts with the first attempts at software design (for yourself or a colleague), and brings the conversation forward to modern design settings." From the article: "At the dawn of software history, programmers wrote software for other programmers. This was a golden era. Life was so simple. The programmers understood their own technical needs quite intimately and were able to produce software that served those needs. The act of software development was a closed circuit. A programmer could sit in a corner and write code that he wanted. By default it also happened to apply to other programmers."

Comments

Walk a mile in their shoes...

[Quintios]

That's one of the things I've found most interesting in my n00bie programming travels. As a chemical engineer, I find that the programming I do (mostly scripting for automating Office and text manipulation to get stuff into Excel, or Word, etc.) serves me and my buddies quite well, but the solutions developed by central IT are usually complicated, buggy, and just plain awful. They seem to have little idea of what *our* (the engineers) workflow/work process is.

Understanding the actual needs of the enduser, I think, is one of the biggest challenges for programmers. What do they really need? Will they understand it? Will new "gee-whiz" features really be welcomed? And for that matter, do the programmers really undersand my job?

To sum up, it's easier to program for yourself than for others, it seems. You know your job better than anyone else. Otherwise, you have to do a lot of interviewing and discussing before you code a single line. You'll end up with a *much* better product if you listen to your endusers well.

Re:Walk a mile in their shoes...

[TubeSteak]

You sound like every engineer I've ever talked to.

Engineers always say that if the suits just asked, the engineers would help make everything better. The suits, in the meantime, are busy doing everything but listening to the engineers.

Why is there such a fundamental disconnect between the engineers and *everyone* else in a business environment?

Product "Designers"

[wrook]

Hrmph...

Seems to be yet another self-agrandizing Product Designer/Manager whose thinks that they "understand" the software development process. What's crazy about this article is that I haven't worked in a company that *doesn't* work like this. And yes, we have generally produced large quantities of user-useless poo.

The problem is largely due to the attitude of these guys. It's just another "throw it over the wall" to the programmers illusion. "If we just work out all the details before we write any code, we'll get it right the first time!"

The difference between most consumer goods and most computer software, is that computer software is a great deal more interactive than other things. It's therefore orders of magnitude more difficult to understand the subtleties of human interaction problems.

Usually, what I find is that these "product designers" have only a vaugue understanding of what they want, because they are not techinical (well, pedantic is a better word) enough to understand the difference. They figure out 10% of the problem and "throw it over the wall" to the programmers, saying "implement this, and I don't want any backtalk, you unwashed heathens".

So the programmers do what they do best -- solve problems. Only since they've never even seen a customer let alone talked to one, they get it all bass ackwards. The product "designers" then say, "Oh, well I told him what I wanted, but he insisted on doing his own thing -- it's not my fault".

Production pipeline indeed. It's some kind of pipe, but I'm not going to smoke it.