Developers are not carpenters

At least not figurally speaking :-)

I spoke to a colleague the other day. He had just had a meeting with a (potentially new) customer. This customer had had some bad experiences from previous suppliers. The customer then said: “If I want to build a house. Don’t you know how much it will cost me and how long it will take to build it?” And my colleague tried to answer: “But what kind of house?” “You know, a standard house”. My colleague tried his best “But that still depends, where do you want to place e.g. the kitchen and how do you want it to look like and design it etc. etc.” But the reply still was kind of “As a carpenter, you should know”.

But the metaphor is far from complete. Creating software is not building a house! Software has a soul, a heart, a life. It needs to live, grow up, mature, be fed, be nursed. And who will do that? Both the customer and the developers! And I think that it has been their main problem all the time; as a customer, the more involved in the development you are the better development it will be.

So next time. Reply with “How much is a pet? And how long will it take to breed it?” And also, you just don’t buy a pet and think it will take care of it self and don’t need any attention (the whole point of having a pet at all). The metaphor is just as good (or bad).

 

…”What kind of pet?” “A standard pet?”