Fwd: IMP development practices suggestion

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

----- Forwarded message from Richard <poboxcanada@yahoo.com> -----
    Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 09:17:37 -0800 (PST)
    From: Richard <poboxcanada@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: Richard <poboxcanada@yahoo.com>
 Subject: IMP development practices suggestion
      To: chuck@horde.org

Hi Chuck,

I've been following the [IMP] mail list for some time,
and have recently began following [DEV].  Regarding
the option and feature suggestions that are often
bantered about, there seems to me to be a lot of
speculation as to what impact a particular option or
feature would have on the "typical" or "average" user.
 Because the discourse is based largely on opinion and
not fact, the door is always open for disagreement as
to what the user would like and find useful, or what
the user would dislike and find useless.  In my
opinion making development decisions based on
speculation serves neither the development team nor
the product well.

I would think that in the persuit of making IMP (or
any product for that matter) a successful and well
respected product, it would behoove the developers to
find out from the user what works for them and what
does not rather than to speculate such.  That is,
research your target user group (even if your target
user group is "just about anyone").  Let their
feedback and/or human factors data be a bit of a
guide.

Of course, this would add some time to the development
cycle, but as a professional developer, you know as
well as I do that decisions made early in the
development cycle are crutial.  Retrofitting becomes
increasingly difficult and costly with time.  Further,
the "final" product may be 100% bug free, but if the
user doesn't like to use it or finds another product
more to their liking, you're left with a white
elephant.  It would be a shame to see a tremendous
amount of blood and sweat go into a product to be used
by a few people.

I'm not going to put forward any suggestions at this
time as to how to approach a product research effort. 
I just wanted to float this by you.  Having said that,
if a product research effort is made for IMP, I'd be
happy to help out any way I could.



=====
Cheers,
Richard Blackwell
Programmer/Analyst             -- on a clear disk,
Simon Fraser University              you can seek forever.
Burnaby, BC   Canada

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----- End forwarded message -----



-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chuck@horde.org>
Entropy. It's what's for dinner.