Tue 31 Mar 2009
Sales is understanding and satisfying clients’ needs, not pushing a product or solution onto them. Agile’s contribution is bringing back the understanding of the fact that what is the clients’ true need in software industry is, well, software.
March 31st, 2009 at 15:15
But software development is also: letting developers choose proper tools, and not forcing them to use suboptimal ones just because the client decides so… it’s not forcing them to stop working on fix for a significant security hole just because the client believes security is not important… it’s accepting their coding standards and QA procedures when client’s representatives decide to commit some code of their own… it’s at least listening to their adivce about unusable UI, as they might be the people who spend the most time with that UI (as they are spending 8 hours a day with the system being built).
April 2nd, 2009 at 0:27
I’m afraid you missed the point. Not that I think what you say is unimportant – but this is not the point I’m trying to make here.
And when it comes to security I beg to differ. It is client’s system. Our duty is to tell them about security problems, but if they are aware of them and make a conscious decision to keep them they have all the right to do so.
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:20
Andy, you and I will always differ on this point, I suspect. A client may have a right to shoot himself in the foot, but not with my gun.
April 2nd, 2009 at 15:34
Well, with security the issue is always balancing the protection and what is being protected. A different level is expected in a banking web app, a very different in a social network or, say, Twitter. Someone has to decide if the risk present warrants the effort to plug that particular hole. I think it is the client who is best qualified to make this decision.