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[Gentile]

But someone has to make the decisions. And therein lies the rub.

As a developer, I like to liase directly with the key users, and make all the design decisions myself.
Sometimes the boss takes over and you end up building a disaster zone.


Which takes me neatly to my current project. The MD has put an analist between me and the users.

On the detail screen for the main record, he insisted upon the same field being there twice, with different lables. I sh!t you not

he's a nice guy, but so far out of his depth he has little fish swimming around him with fishing rods on their 'eads

Software development is definitely becoming more of a team game these days, especially in the Public Sector and banks. However, my honest experience is that whilst a good BA is worth their weight in gold, the 90% of them that don't have a clue give the rest a bad name. And with "UX Designers" you can make that 100%.

As I say, performing a meaningful analysis of the problem and building a competent solution to that well-understood problem are the hard parts. Merely coming up with ideas about what individual screens will look like is the easy part.

UX Designers are the Personal Shoppers of the software development world. No project actually needs one, but boy can they waste everyone's time if you entertain giving someone that role without other more tangible responsibilities to go along with.

[EternalOptimist]

You dont need a BA. You need a top developer, a project manager and a top infrastructure guy and a top user


that's occams razor that is

[Notascooby]

Back in the days when I cut code I hated making things look pretty. The best project I was on had a web developer who's only task was farting around with the front-end UI.

Bliss - just get the results to the view and let him make it look pretty and play around with old skool HTML.

This was when you wasted a hell of a lot of time on these things...when MVC1 was bleeding edge.

[Gentile]

You dont need a BA. You need a top developer, a project manager and a top infrastructure guy and a top user


that's occams razor that is

And a tester or ten. The other side of the rub is that, whilst projects in non-profit-making sectors regularly entertain roles like "BA" and "UX Designer", many of those same sectors fail to invest heavily enough in proper human testing. That's also a feature of the smaller, more competent teams typically used by business sectors that are actually profitable.

Of the projects I've worked on, easily 80% of them haven't employed a single tester. And of the ones that have, there have always been more developers than testers, even where there's more than one component to the overall solution getting built that needs to be tested. I'd say you need at least as many testers as you have developers, and usually about 25% more, to catch all of the usability issues and bugs as they come up. But unfortunately you never see that balance and focus on the end result in any team.

[EternalOptimist]

The users make the best testers, usually.
These guys have to live with the system for years, they have an interest in getting it right, and if you play the psychology right, they will come to view the system as 'theirs'.

You will never get more fierce defenders of your work if you can pull it off

[Gentile]

Back in the days when I cut code I hated making things look pretty. The best project I was on had a web developer who's only task was farting around with the front-end UI.

Bliss - just get the results to the view and let him make it look pretty and play around with old skool HTML.

This was when you wasted a hell of a lot of time on these things...when MVC1 was bleeding edge.

That's different, I think: if they're an actual developer, fair enough. Same with graphic designers - they've got an eye for beautiful design that most of us don't have.

I actually like mucking around with front ends as much as I enjoy making middleware work, and ensuring that database designs achieve the right balance between normalisation and the sort of non-normalised structures that are sometimes necessary for BI-type solutions, such as being able to efficiently build OLAP Cubes, etc. There's a "flow" through that set of technical problems that I find useful to consider as a continuum: starting with user expectations, and engineering towards a practical solution that meets their needs whilst insulating users from the underlying technical issues.

The "UX Designers" I'm talking about, by contrast, are those people that are solely employed to nit pick over stuff like the exact format of dates, or which fields will appear on which screens, but that don't possess any actual technical skills themselves that would inform decisions about those sort of issues.

[Gentile]

The users make the best testers, usually.
These guys have to live with the system for years, they have an interest in getting it right, and if you play the psychology right, they will come to view the system as 'theirs'.

You will never get more fierce defenders of your work if you can pull it off

Agreed. If you can get them to invest the time necessary, that's the ideal situation.

[original PM]

You dont need a BA. You need a top developer, a project manager and a top infrastructure guy and a top user


that's occams razor that is

Bang on - a project will always work better with 4 or 5 dedicated experts comitted to getting the job done than a huge project team playing political games and looking to take the credit but shirk the blame.

[MyUserName]

Personally I like developing a good UI which is clean and easy to use, I also like interfacing it with business logic and interfacing that with storage etc. I just like doing things well.

I have never met a UI designer with no technical skills who's only job is designing UI. Our BAs used to do that at a previous bank, the one I worked with was ace. He had been involved in the bank's trading sector for years and had a good feel for what the user wanted, was happy to back down to technical constraints and had no problems being corrected.

People who do nothing apart from set up a UI are largely unrequired as far I can tell. I am guessing they sense that which is probably why they make such a huge deal over every small detail.

[cojak]

You dont need a BA. You need a top developer, a project manager and a top infrastructure guy and a top user


that's occams razor that is

So it's just as well for me that your magical razor doesn't often exist in the same company at the same time IRL.