>I wonder how many of our developers out there already use this approach, given the ease of proto-typing in VFP? :-)
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>Tau
>
>
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000356.htmlI have to agree with Joel's assessment on this. Customer's rarely know what it is they want. If I can't help them figure it out, I'm useless to them. I like using UI's drawn up in a notebook to walk them through how I might solve their problem for them. As easy as it is to create a UI in VFP, it's still easier to do it on paper. Plus, I'm not giving anyone the impression that I'm almost done. The UI gives us something concrete that we can discuss. They can bring up all the "oh yeah, by the way, our company does business in 20 countries and we need to handle the currency for all of them" issues up front. Stuff like that seems to be impossible to drag out of people until they have something (anything) to look at. People know what they want when they see it (or, sometimes more importantly, know what they don't want).
As frustrating as it can be, if you can just accept the idea that they can't tell you exactly what they want, the happier you'll be.
BTW - the joelonsoftware.com site has a lot of good articles about software development; it's worth spending half a day reading them. We've also been running FogBugz here for a while (version 3 is much better than 2) and if you don't have any bug tracking software, it's definitely worth looking at.
