A few weeks ago I dropped some balls on the question if Software Development is, or is not, a Democratic process. And of course it is. We just need to listen to the right people and have to decide who our civilians are (if we still like to work with the metaphor). This simply means that we are at work for the end user, where the real value is to be gained. Not the software development team, the architects or the test team. If everything is fine, we all work to develop for the end user.
When we look at User Experience, it’s one of the largely undermined topics in Business Software Development. In business to customer software development the insights User Experience gives us are widely adopted, but in the business to business section, departmental software, we walk distances behind.
And of course, a ‘don’t make me think’ approach would certainly help in understanding the principles people use to do their daily work. We all develop for a wide variety of users, highly specialized in their own work, we just support them. This is, as I see it, something some in software development seem to forget. But we don’t have to.
If we’re looking at raising the bar on user acceptance of any system we develop, we must be aware that a large amount of interaction with the real end users works. And we do it all the time. But sometimes we just focus on the users that are not really the acceptors of the system. I’ve noticed a lot of situations where the real end user was represented in the development team by a (ex-)developer. Why?
Participation of the real end user might look dangerous, because we might think that they don’t actually know what it takes to develop a system. But who are we to decide that. Participation and information really helps end users to give the right insights and helpful information to us in the right time.
When we take a look at progressive participation in Software Development (Yeah, I know, I like to ‘steal’ insights from different sources, this is from the Dutch Democratic Party, D66. Thanks for that.) we learn that we have a few levels of participation where we can take the end user serious.
The steps are: inform, consult, advise, coproduce , decide and Self-control. And I will talk about these steps very soon, because I think it can help us.
Do you know a method, insight, advice, example or something else on participation or a democratic process in software development? Post it in the comments, I will certainly take it with me when I return on this subject.
