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.