Sunday, January 18, 2009

To do today

If you're a developer, you're asked to do a lot: deliver creative solutions on extremely tight deadlines that are robust enough to withstand unforeseeable and, frankly, unbelievable misuse and abuse from users. Meanwhile, you have to stay on top of technology, deal with the personalities around you, navigate all the infrastructure, and have a life.

I know all this. I once compiled a list of over a hundred attributes a coder could be evaluated on, and each of those could be decomposed into multiple sub-attributes, so believe me, I do know all this. I lived it for many years.

Still, I'm going to add something to your pile, near the top of the list.

Communicate with your user.

This means getting access as often as possible to product owners. Ask lots of questions right to the experts. Hopefully you do your own demos to them as well.

On a daily basis, you should see someone on the business. "Any reactions to the new order entry screen?" "How are the requirements looking for New Customer?" If it's 3 pm and you haven't talked to anyone on the business side, take a 5 minute break, walk to the trading floor or the sales cubes, or whatever business it is that you support, and ask "How's the market?" "You see what Competitor A released last week?"

If you don't have someone with whom you can do this without feeling awkward, that's a clear indication that you aren't doing this enough. Over time, you'll find some people who are easy to approach and open to talking to you.

Daily conversation keeps you in the loop. More importantly, it establishes a collegial basis on which to have difficult discussions that could come up later. It's going to be a lot easier to ask your sales expert questions about customer demand while setting requirements if it's not the first time in 3 months that you're talking to her.

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