Software Developers Won’t Answer These Project Questions
Software developers have been called a bad bunch by people in the business. They think they are a set of people who won’t answer straight questions.
Here are some of those questions, and why software developers are reticent to answer these particular queries.
Don’t you have a degree in this?
The correct answer to this question is, what does that have to do with anything?
What sort of software developer has a degree?
When can you deliver this project?
At the beginning of a project, most software developers don’t know if it is achievable. Even the simplest projects have some elements that are new to a seasoned software developer.
Putting a deadline on a software developer early in the project puts a noose around their neck, and the developer knows that. Unwilling to answer it? They sure are.
It will take me between 1 minute and 1 million years.
Who do you need on your team?
Software development is a tricky business. Essentially you need to convert customer wants to customer needs. Or even interpret the customers’ wants for them. Something like the following might explain the issue:
Without defining the customer’s needs, who knows what needs to be done? If you don’t know what needs to be done how do you define the required resources?
Who cares about the customer?
Are you going to document that?
Documentation is a pipe dream when you are discovering how to solve a problem, but it is difficult to document it at the same time.
Plus, documentation takes time, and you know that tight deadline you set? That’s at odds with quality documentation and you wanted the deadline to come first.
The questioner needs to decide their priorities to allow this to be answered.
Documentation isn’t for me.
Are you going to stop hacking together solutions?
Dirty Hacks get fixed when there is time. When there is no time, they must go into the code. Calling software developers hacks causes other issues within the organization.
Good code takes time!
Call me a hacker again, and I might cry.
How can you prevent bugs?
The true answer to this is to stop coding entirely.
Refactoring often means introducing bugs but produces better and more stable code overall.
When new features are coded, they should be QA’d before going into production.
In both cases this question can be answered — you can’t.
The only bugs in my code are someone else's fault.
Conclusion
Software developers can be seen to be obstinate and difficult to work with. As a result, there are some “classic questions” that are fired towards software developers.
This article has covered some of those questions, and how they might be tackled.
If you have more of these types of questions and how they might be tackled, please do get in touch using the comments section. You know you want to.