2 ms·

I think this is why lots of software projects fail - not because they are wrong - but it is just not what people want (and people might want things that are not

by ozim 2y ago

I think this is why lots of software projects fail - not because they are wrong - but it is just not what people want (and people might want things that are not according to the law ;) ). Then if it rubs the wrong way people who are in power then even if your project is technically right it gets canned and they blame developers on not delivering :( I can see it in business software I work on. Interesting part is "required fields", someone makes 10-20 fields required on a form to fill in - but then people start complaining it takes too much time and why they have to fill in those fields and managers of those people come over complaining that software sucks ... well, great but we did not make the requirements, that was company/customer that wanted that.

devjab 2y ago
We incorporated all the different ways they wanted as feature flagged options. Then it was very easy to remove them when they asked us to do that. I get where you come from though. What we tend to do is to stage/gate things so that different teams have different required fields. Sometimes the same team depending on the process. Sometimes all the fields are optional until the “status” of a project needs to go forward, so that they can create a project with very little info but can’t actually pass it on to the next team until they have the required data. Of course it’s not exactly a magical solution to angry managers and internal corporate politics but it helped us.
- ozim 2y ago
  Magical solution would be filling in data from open sources or from that customer CRM. But it is question who will pay for that - we as SaaS don’t want to invest in what single customer uses. Customer expects we do it within their SaaS subscription. End result is that it sucks for people on the ground using it having to copy over data.

2 ms·

I think this is why lots of software projects fail - not because they are wrong - but it is just not what people want (and people might want things that are not

by ozim 2y ago

devjab 2y ago
We incorporated all the different ways they wanted as feature flagged options. Then it was very easy to remove them when they asked us to do that. I get where you come from though. What we tend to do is to stage/gate things so that different teams have different required fields. Sometimes the same team depending on the process. Sometimes all the fields are optional until the “status” of a project needs to go forward, so that they can create a project with very little info but can’t actually pass it on to the next team until they have the required data. Of course it’s not exactly a magical solution to angry managers and internal corporate politics but it helped us.
- ozim 2y ago
  Magical solution would be filling in data from open sources or from that customer CRM. But it is question who will pay for that - we as SaaS don’t want to invest in what single customer uses. Customer expects we do it within their SaaS subscription. End result is that it sucks for people on the ground using it having to copy over data.