3 ms·
Software tends to suck when either you build the wrong thing or you bit off more than you could chew and the implementation of a good thing ends in disaster. Or
by benohear 15y ago
Software tends to suck when either you build the wrong thing or you bit off more than you could chew and the implementation of a good thing ends in disaster. Or both.
Generally the "lean startup" credo holds true here: Build an MVP fast, get feedback and iterate.
However, there is one technique which doesn't get enough airtime in my view and that is paper prototyping. It gives you a surprising amount of quality feedback with a fraction of the effort of coding something up (and no bugs!), and allows you to iterate there and then.
- gaius 15y agoVery amusing that you think that as that approach is what got us into this mess. MS (not to single anyone out in particular) has always been notorious for rushing a buggy 1.0 to market then iterating it. That's why you need a quad-core 3Ghz PC with 8G RAM to write a single page of A4 now.
- serbrech 15y agoI can't agree that a buggy and slow version of a product is an MVP. There are a lot of things that you can cut from a product to make it minimal. I don't believe quality is one of them. However, I also believe that user feedback cannot be the only factor to build something truly great.
- gaius 15y agoWindows 1.0 and Word 1.0 were viable by definition, as people did buy them.
- benohear 15y agoPoint taken, though I meant minimal feature set, not buggy. Also, 2000 and later Office and Windows are hardly the worst offenders in terms of "software that sucks"