by Alan Cooper
Chapters 3,4, and 5 are titled wasting money, the dancing bear, and customer disloyalty, respectively. People thing it is really easy to waste millions of dollars but the truth of it is that it really isn't. One key issue that results in wasting money is deadline management. People will push and push to meet a deadline spending extra money just to reach it and when they finally get there, they realize that they still have more to do. Managers worry about two major things which are if the programmers will be able to finish and whether the product will succeed. This makes a manager feel like the programming needs to get started as soon as possible and finish as soon as possible. This can really hurt a project especially if your coders are programming without direction. You could be wasting valuable time and resources because the programmers don't have the overall picture. Bad software is everywhere these days. Most people don't even realize that it is bad because it is all they have used and until they see a good product, they will be ignorant. How to programmers create good programs? It is not so much the programmers fault as one would think. Software in itself has a lot of constraints that prevent it from being friendly. It is inflexible, it can't remember, etc. This really makes it difficult to create a program that is easy and friendly to use. We are inclined to create good products because of the customer loyalty it generates. In software engineering, it seems like the level of loyalty is tenfold. This customer loyalty is a huge benefit to a company because it almost acts like a networking device. Without that loyalty, your company is suspect to competition.
These three issues that the author addresses are extremely important in present times. I have had my fair share of crappy software and it really drives me nuts especially being a computer scientist. The sad part is is that there isn't much a person can do individually to affect the creation of bad software. You honestly have to just hope that there is something better out there to use. In the case of our elearning site, there isn't... This doesn't make me lose all hope however because there truly is some amazing programs out there. We need a better way to hold companies accountable for the software they produce. I know that usually are free market will take care of it and weed out the companies that aren't deserving but what if it really is the only product that you can use. Would you rather be stuck with a bad program or not having any program?
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