InfoQ: Danger! Software Craftsmen at Work

I never liked presentations in which the presenter reads too much, or at least gives that impression; this is one of the reasons for which I found this presentation on InfoQ way too long. Furthermore, I think David Harvey takes things to the limit a little bit.

Yet, there is a sentence that I'd like to quote:

The customer is always right, but sometimes they need a little help... and we need to learn about the customer's world.

So there is a real danger here, and it lies within us. Mark the second part of the sentence, because that's the real important one: customers pay us because we provide value for their business, not because we write beautiful code. Customers don't care at all about the quality of our work as far as their business is concerned. To businessmen only business is important, not code.

A word of caution: that doesn't means that we have to be sloppy, for at least a couple of reasons:

• our personal pride on what we do (after all, we claim to be craftsmans, don't we?)
• I know someone will not care about this point. I do.

• customers will sooner or later notice that each and every simple functionality they ask for costs more and more as time passes and functionalities are added, thus throwing us out of their business.
• This would probably be no good, because we would end up showing boards...