How many degrees of separation are there between your developers and users?

James Governor of Redmonk shared a great tweet today (he is @monkchips)

@dhague: 6 degrees of separation between developers and end-users is 3 too many. It’s hard to keep users happy with that disconnect

Now here’s one way to think about the degrees of separation between your users and your developers:

1. Users tell an analyst what they want
2. The analyst writes a requirement document or a high-level specification
3. A technical design gets developed
4. Code gets written to implement this design
5. Testing finds flaws and issues and these get resolved
6. The user gets to try and use the resulting application

Well look at that – 6 degrees of separation

If instead the users sit down with the analysts to write the rules that are needed and the developers enhance those rules with the technical details or to take account of implementation issues before reviewing those same rules with the users and the analysts. And if the resulting rules, still readable and even editable by the users and the analysts, can be tested and simulated by programmers, anlaysts and users …

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Copyright © 2009 James Taylor. Visit the original article at How many degrees of separation are there between your developers and users?.

James Governor of Redmonk shared a great tweet today (he is @monkchips)

@dhague: 6 degrees of separation between developers and end-users is 3 too many. It’s hard to keep users happy with that disconnect

Now here’s one way to think about the degrees of separation between your users and your developers:

1. Users tell an analyst what they want
2. The analyst writes a requirement document or a high-level specification
3. A technical design gets developed
4. Code gets written to implement this design
5. Testing finds flaws and issues and these get resolved
6. The user gets to try and use the resulting application

Well look at that – 6 degrees of separation

If instead the users sit down with the analysts to write the rules that are needed and the developers enhance those rules with the technical details or to take account of implementation issues before reviewing those same rules with the users and the analysts. And if the resulting rules, still readable and even editable by the users and the analysts, can be tested and simulated by programmers, anlaysts and users then suddenly the degrees of separation goes WAY down.

Using business rules to manage the logic in critical decisions – the parts of your applications where business know-how and an understanding of company policy and government regulation are most critical and where constant change is the norm – eliminates these degrees of separation. Result, more agile and more accurate business logic where you really need it.

All this talk of twitter reminds me that you can follow me on twitter – jamet123

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