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Discussion on: What is the best quality a developer can have?

 
sapien profile image
Prateek Thapa

Okay :)

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cubiclebuddha profile image
Cubicle Buddha

If you have a good specs may not even need to talk or chat to anyone

Judging from your use of the word “specs,” it seems to me that your experience with software development has mostly been with waterfall processes (or some variant where specs are created up front and the developer has little to say about the requirements for the feature). Or perhaps you worked with people who use the word “Agile” but don’t embody Agile’s iterative learning approach.

But for some developers, the ideal situation is where you accept the fact that we can’t know what the user wants— and when you can’t know, you don’t write specs. So you follow an iterative (I.e. Agile) process so you can develop -> learn -> develop -> learn.

And learning about your users involves being able to empathize with your uses needs so you can properly listen to what they really want you to build. And sometimes they don’t know until they’ve tried your software. That’s why in my opinion specs don’t work.