The Inmates are Running the Asylum Ch 3-5

Summary

Chapter 3 – Wasting Money – This chapter discusses deadline management. A lot of projects are just rushed out the door, and most times this is not the best idea. Is better to have a good program in 6 months than a bad program in 3.  The chapter talks about several points. First, in order to be able to ship a product and ship it right we first must know what “done” looks like; this means we should know from the beginning what exactly do we want t ship and how do we want it to look. Second, we should understand that shipping late is not the end of the world. Third, feature lists are not problem solving tools; as in fact more features doesn’t translate into a better program. Finally, we must understand the actual costs of bad software, including the money spent on technical support. In summary, we should not define the boundaries of a development project only in terms of deadlines and feature lists.

Chapter 4 – The Dancing Bear – the chapters describes what bad software really means. The first problem is that people don’t really realize that they are utilizing bad software; they think that if it gets the job done then is good enough. However, most of these products don’t make the user happy or even more effective. The chapter then goes on and explains how simple products like email programs, scheduling programs, and calendar software fail. So what is wrong with software? According to the chapter it forgets, is lazy, is parsimonious with information, is inflexible, it blames users, and it won’t take responsibility.

Chapter 5 – Customer Disloyalty – this chapter discusses the importance of customer loyalty and how it is achieve. Design is an incredible important part of the process, as it turns a product that can be built and performs well (engineering capability), and that can be distributed and sold profitably (business capability), into something that people really want (design capability.) Based on this, design will get you customer loyalty… and customer loyalty will bring success to a company.

Discussion

I really like all the examples that the book uses as that way it is much easier to understand what they mean. I think it is interesting how in all these book the “feature” problem keeps reappearing. Apparently, it is obvious to everybody except the programmers that are building the software. Also, the importance of customer loyalty is truly remarkable and obvious in today’s market. There are tons of products out there with practically the same exact set of functions and features. However, customer loyalty could make one product successful while all the others fail.