Pragmatic Book Club: Chapter 8

Before the project — After last week’s chapter about things to do while you are coding, this week we’re back into things to do around the coding bits.

The mistake new developers make often it to take this statement of need and implement a solution for it.

In our experience, this initial statement of need is not an absolute requirement. The client may not realise this but it is really an invitation to explore

Love this ^^. I think we are a bit patchy in how much we have internalised this. It is an issue I see fairly frequently. There are lots of techniques to open up a discussion but my favourite is just to ask “why?”.

Your job is to help the client understand the consequences of their stated requirements

Preach!

What times can you think of where a more curious and flexible approach to “requirements” would have resulted in getting to the final implemented solution quicker?

May I sit with you for a week while you do your job?

Yes! At (now defunct) energy company bulb, all software engineers also did sporadic shifts as Energy Specialists — the people who answered support requests — so that they could understand the customer needs, and the needs of the people they were building the internal systems for. Some engineers really didn’t enjoy this work but it certainly raised the understanding of the problems the team was trying to fix.

Is there anyone we should be trying to sit with while they do their jobs? Have you ever tried this before? How was it?