Steven S. Ross

If you work for a company where you deliver solutions to other businesses you may dread the final delivery (or iterative delivery of your project). Because as software developers and solution providers we have learned by now that anytime we deliver a product it isn’t going to meet everyone’s expectations. Especially if you work in an environment where decisions have to be made concerning the cutting out of features for the sake of the timeline.

While it may be hard to do it, as developers who care about the product and the end user we need to be willing to ask them this question when we deliver the gold version: Please get back to me with anything you think is missing and/or could be done better. Even if the product is not going to be upgraded, has made it through QA and is going into a strict “bug fix only mode” we need to show the user/business that we actually give a crap about what we just built for them.

It will increase your success because you aren’t coming off as the high and mighty developer who cares not for your peon users. Here is another pro to doing this: It will make you a better developer. To start thinking critically of your own work and see that you don’t always know what is best will improve what you do overall because you are willing to listen to reason when it comes to delivering something good for everyone and not just a product that you yourself can use. It goes back to this, when you test software you inevitably know how to test it. Now I don’t mean this in a good way. I mean you know how to make it function. You don’t enter arabic characters into a text-box because you know your database doesn’t support double-byte characters. However, your QA person or customer might, and your app should handle it gracefully, thus making a more friendly application that is easier to use and gets you into a mode of thinking about the user and not just focused on your task of “making it work”.

Give it a shot, you may even learn to like a critical analysis of your work as you make stronger applications focused on meeting the needs of your users and not just the business requirements of your current project.