…a little bit at a time.

So yesterday at TWU we had a session called Analysis in Context, which was (for me at least) exactly what I have been looking for in terms of lessons that I can wholeheartedly agree with. During the session, the “dirty secret of software development” was revealed to us. I’ll release the dirty secret for the whole wide interweb to hear:

Software Development might not be about software at all.

Can you believe it? I certainly can. Now, this is in no way meant to put down all those people who spend many of their waking hours writing code. I just mean to underscore the fact that software users don’t want or need to use software just for the sake of getting code to work…they just want to do their thing. People want help working on the things that they enjoy working on, which may or may not have anything to do with a computer.

Writing good software requires good research. One really has to figure out the nature of the problem at hand. It’s not about what the client or user wants, it’s about what they do.