A Quote by Fred Brooks
The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build the most important function that software builders do for their clients is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements. For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want. They usually do not know what questions must be answered, and they have almost never thought of the problem in the detail that must be specified.
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The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.
I refer the largest number of my clients to Payce Payroll because the specialize in the restaurant and contractors industries. I am pleased with the service they provide, competitive fees and responsiveness to clients. What most impressed me was that one of the founders, Gus, came to personally meet with me and a client to establish their payroll software. They truly care about their clients.
We must understand what is on clients' minds and what their needs are, and we must also be close to our teams who are serving our clients. At day's end, it is all about delivering value to our clients as defined by them.
To treat programming scientifically, it must be possible to specify the required properties of programs precisely. Formality is certainly not an end in itself. The importance of formal specifications must ultimately rest in their utility -in whether or not they are used to improve the quality of software or to reduce the cost of producing and maintaining software.
I realized that I spent more time thinking about my problem clients than my great clients. I had to stop feeding the drama of the problem clients-and other problems in my life.
Culturally intelligent leaders will not assume they know what will build trust with clients or staff. Instead, they'll discover what's most important for communicating and building trust.
Most clients expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.
I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.
The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.
With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.
The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.
I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.
Perhaps the most important job of a financial advisor is to get their clients in the right place on the efficient frontier in their portfolios. But their No. 2 job, a very close second, is to create portfolios that their clients are comfortable with. Advisors can create the best portfolios in the world, but they won't really matter if the clients don't stay in them.
There is no one "root of all evil" in software development. Design is hard in many ways. People tend to underestimate the intellectual and practical difficulties involved in building a significant system involving software. It is not and will not be reduced to a simple mechanical "assembly line" process. Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.
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