Larry Adams
Posts: 2
Nickname: adams314
Registered: Jul, 2003
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Re: What's My Point?
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Posted: Jul 24, 2003 8:07 AM
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A common theme is shining through: "they" don't understand "us". Or, they don't understand how we work, or solve problems, and so on. This should not come as a great shock, since our backgrounds and training are often very different. As an aside, one of the reasons I think philosophers make good developers and/or users is because they have classical training in logic, something woefully missing from most academic curricula.
To make a blanket statement as one of the contributors has that software customers want a button to do their job for them is a gross oversimplification. Further, I think the attitude among many engineers that the business folk don't know what is going on (or make things more complicated than they are) is counterproductive. Once you get past these biases and try to communicate with people who view a problem differently than you, things get simpler.
I take a Socratic approach to solving problems that others bring to me, asking more and more detailed questions until the answers reveal themselves. My newest trick is to make someone restate their question a couple times before I attempt to answer. Generally, by the second or third time, we are speaking the same language, and I can avoid embarrasing the person by saying, "what you really want to know is X." Even if I know from their first misguided question what they are trying to get at, if I can help them learn to ask better questions, everyone will benefit when the next problem arises.
Software is just codified human interactions and rules applied to some data. If you can establish a common understanding of the priniciples of these interactions and rules and data, solving the problem becomes less complex, if not simple.
p.s. Eric Raymond has an interesting essay on asking questions. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
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