An interesting observation

[Derek Parnell]

On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:36:30 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
> They said I should do a javascript compiler, because what the world 
> needed was a fast javascript engine. So I built one, it ran twice as 
> fast as jscript, and I couldn't give it away <g>.
> 
> Meanwhile, D took off.

I can add another anecdote to that. 

Recently I was asked by a major client to visit them so we could have a
face-to-face discussion about a project my company was developing for them.
So I went to interstate to the client's offices for a couple days, prepared
to get my behind figuratively beaten, because the project is nearing its
drop dead date but still with some apparently significant issues.

At the first meeting, which had the client's top technical people present,
they started describing the details of some changes to the specification.
They admitted that my company had delivered software which had accurately
implemented the previous specification, but after considerable testing they
decided that there was some omissions from the specification. 

I listened for a good ten minutes before I interrupted with the question
"what business decisions will this new specification affect?". After a
couple of stalled attempts, the technicians said that it wouldn't affect
any business process. In fact, it seems that quite a few aspects of the
existing specification (which had already been revised three times) were
also irrelevant to the people who would actually use the system.

It turned out that after some initial meetings with the business people,
the client's technicians formed the opinion that the system they had
proposed was too complex for the business people, so they stopped talking
to them. Instead, the technicians kept tweaking and adding to it (making it
even more complex) and resolved to go back and 'sell' the system to the
business people after it was implemented, and help retrain them how to do
their job.

At this point I called a halt to the meeting and demanded that we hear
directly from the business people themselves, who were the real domain
experts. In a few short hours, the managers could see that their
technicians had gotten it wrong and that their business people were not
happy. I spent the few days redrafting the client's specification along the
lines of what the business really wanted and could use. 

Fortunately, only a dozen or so of the three hundred plus programs needed
changing, but now we have a system that is easily understood and delivers
what the users wanted. It is not as sophisticated as the earlier
specification asked for, but that's why it better.

The moral of the story : the better programs are those that are truly
useful rather than those that deliver what engineers believe would be
useful, no matter how 'superior' those programs might be.

-- 
Derek
(skype: derek.j.parnell)
Melbourne, Australia
9/11/2007 5:08:49 PM