Tuesday, March 1, 2011
User Who?
Although I have been working as a software developer in the industry for a relatively short amount of time, I learned quickly that the user comes first. In a recent project of mine, infrequent releases and not enough attention paid to the user ultimately proved to be the the primary factor of a delayed final product. History has shown, particularly in the production of open-source software, that this communication is critical to success. It is unfortunate but all-too common that developers and users view the other as simply a burden to their own success, inhibiting them from producing their best work. Rather, it is essential that both work together to be able to create great programs that suit both sides well.
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The reason why open source development succeeds at all is because the target market is the developers themselves.
ReplyDelete@mlayton
ReplyDeleteIn the beginning of development, I would agree wholeheartedly. But, sites like sourceforge.net show that the target market changes quite a bit. Programs such as 7-zip, Filezilla, GIMP, and TortoiseSVN are all open source and are receiving more than 100,000 downloads every single week. I would imagine that there are nowhere near 100,000 contributors to any of these programs. This shows that the current people that are working on these projects are catering to their users at this point, not themselves.
Users are good for delaying projects too. They never have an end to feature requests. I had a project drag on a month and a half longer than it should have since my client kept changing his mind about what he wanted.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I get frustrated with Microsoft for not adding certain features or for removing ones I like.
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