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Software is Magic!

“We need a piece of software”… “ABRACADABRA”… “Et voilà, votre software est prêt*”… A perfect Software is up and running in no time! Is this possible? Till now, I haven’t seen this in custom development projects, specially that most of the projects I worked in varied between medium and large sizes projects (we’ll talk about projects’ sizes in details later). The majority of clients believe that Software is Magic, they think that developers just dream about the program code and then it comes to life with no effort… We all wish we can reach this stage, but unfortunately, the production of new software still takes time, effort and money…

Software is maturing… People are not

SoftwareIsMagicI remember when I was a kid and I started learning programming, I invented a language of my own and I used it to write my diary. The language was simply a set of symbols very similar to the Latin character set. People around me thought “She is writing Computer”, this is the exact sentence they used to describe the weird thing I was doing though this language had nothing to do with computers or programming. People always tend to rely on the easiest explanation for the things they can’t understand… they didn’t understand my symbol language and they didn’t understand computers… so they concluded that I was writing Computer!

I also remember that in one of the UAT sessions for a certain project, users requested to remove a specific field, then we moved to the next screen in same demo session, the same field was there, which is normal of course. Users were angry as the field was still there!! Users believe that their thoughts and requests should be applied in Software immediately just because it’s Software!

Till now, many people don’t know how to deal with Software, they still believe that computers are magic boxes that only magicians can deal with them to produce their artifacts. They think that Software people are the Experts… They have to be expert in everything, and they have to know everything… and of course, they should develop new programs in no time and with no bugs… They should also produce applications with additional features capable of performing what users will think about in the future!

Software from Inside

NoMagicLampSoftware people are not magicians or gymnasts… They learn and make mistakes like normal people… Software is not tangible and cannot be ruled or weighted… It’s art manufacturing, but usually people look at the end result without thinking about how we reached it and the effort it took to develop such Software. They don’t understand that no 2 projects are the same, they don’t realize that we always try to improve time, quality, performance and cost.

Software is not about occultism or lamp rubbing, it’s a work that needs effort and it is normal to be a continuously improving and developing field.

*(French): Here you are, your software is ready.

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BLUE said…
“Et voilà, votre software est prêt*...TO7FA :D
April 15, 2011 at 11:12 AM
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