It's been ten years since the publication of that seminal work on project management,
The Mythical Man-Month. We still haven't learned the lesson.
Reaching out to the user consists of gathering them in a conference room once every few months and discussing program features in an environment far removed from actual clinical setting.
Forget the last paragraph. We seldom discuss features any more. We now discuss quick fixes for problems caused by wrong design decisions. And those decisions were wrong because we were making them in an environment far removed from actual clinical setting. So it's a vicious cycle. The quick fixes, conceived in the same isolated environment, will cause their own problems. A few months later, we will go through the same hell.
We never really
correct a problem. We hide it by adding another validity check, or by disabling a certain button on the screen, or by changing the colour of something so it looks more alarming.
We never have the courage to experiment. We never think of several solutions, get them programmed into real prototypes, and discard all but the best one.
Functional specifications are not something you can write from the beginning to the end in one attempt, without making any corrections. We behave as if they are.
We get off on the wrong start in the beginning. Then we try to patch things up at the end. We throw people at the project, or scale down, or release buggy stuff. One strange thing though: We never ever dare to miss the deadline. Even if the deadline is something we made up for ourselves and there's no imminent need to release.
Once released, no one will dare to change designs, because "the users have gotten used to them". Even if those designs are wrong.
We purport to do user acceptance testing, but users are not involved in the testing process. We think about how to fit data elements into the pre-determined database structure. We don't think about how the user will feel.
Isn't testing supposed to uncover bad designs so we can revert them and re-do from scratch? We don't do that often enough.
Enough rant. Back to the death spiral.
