Yet another great posting on Joel on Software.
Here are some of my favorite highlights:
Customers Don't Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What they Want. It's just never going to happen. Get over it.
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2. "We built it exactly the way they wanted. The contract specified the whole thing
down to the smallest detail. We delivered exactly what the contract said. But
when we delivered it, they were crestfallen."
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3. "Our miserable sales person agreed to a fixed price contract to build what was basically unspecified, and the customer's lawyers were sharp enough to get a clause in the contract that they don't have to pay us until 'acceptance by customer,' so we
had to put a team of nine developers on their project for two years and only got
paid $800."
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Important Corollary One. If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface that is 90% worse, they will think that the program is 90% worse.
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Important Corollary Two. If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.
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