This is the classical test of a journeyman programmer, balancing their
understanding of the situation (the math problem, the way the world
works, what their class of customers has done in the past) to balance
"doing the simplest thing" with "building an extensible framework for
the next change."
Yup. Drives me nuts, too.
I'm an in-house programmer, not a customer-service provider.
Regardless of what users think or say they want, I have an
affirmative responsibility to do what I can to make various process
as efficient and cost-effective as possible.
In my case, users are sometimes not very motivated to help me make
those kinds of decisions. In fact, sometimes they resist being
helpful because they believe that automation threatens their jobs.
Even when they are looking for help from the computer, it's pretty
rare that they are able or willing to take the time necessary to
carry out the ideal full-blown "user story" planning and design
process. I am sometimes forced to take vague concepts and try to
develop workable implementations. Unlike an independent programming
consultant who is selling a service, I can't tell them, "my way or
the highway".
And there are some people who I know so well that I can predict that
the first time they pose a problem to me, they will come back a week
or a month later with a slight variation on the problem, and a week
or month or 6 months later with another one. So I do have to plan
ahead if I don't want to create a maintenance nightmare for myself.
Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org
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