Business people really trust in us!

When you are writing enterprise applications, on most cases you are automating information flow, enforcing business rules and managing persistence. No matter what programming language are you using, you need to understand the business. In this post I wanna share some questions that are in my mind...

1. What is the most difficult stuff about making enterprise applications?
In the applications I'm working on, persistence or UI related stuff is not difficult. The hardest thing is to understand business needs, understand their rules and writing them in a way that a computer can understand. We state our understandings using use cases and other requirements documents, then our business people leave us alone, hoping that we really understood them.

2. How much trust do business people put in our teams?
Wow, I think they trust us a lot! We wrote the use cases, they approved them and after several months without seeing the actual software working, we release the software they'll use. Their jobs depend on us doing the right thing.

3. How do we respond to that trust?
Many times, we as software developers aren't conscious on the critical nature of our software, but we want to make a good product. At my job, we apply some agile practices, but our process relies on a big initial requirements phase and a final testing phase. We use TDD, Continuous Integration, we do code inspections and try to go on with the schedule. Then testers try to understand what the use cases state the software should do and use it in our testing servers. An business people? They are trusting in that the product that they have not seen yet is what they expect. Wow, they trust us so much! BUT maybe, the software works great but isn't what they are expecting. Maybe we automated some calculus but they haven't had a chance to use it with real sample data... We software developers do the best but I think we need one more thing.

4. How do we know that they are confident that their business rules are enforced by the software?
We need to be better in our communication. Let's speak more with the business, let us not rely only in formulas, let's ask the business people for real data examples. Last week I found put that they use Excel a lot for explaining their intents. They can give us many tables of example data. Real data that could assert that our software does what they want.

And that's the goal right? Great software solves real needs. it doesn't matter If software is delivered on time, on budget and according to requirements documents, but isn't what the real users need. Quality is perceived in working software doing the right stuff.

So, as a conclusion, why don't you give users the possibility to give you real examples, use them throughout your development and try everyday to improve your communication. Collaborate more, we are on the same team.