[clue-talk] L

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 12:30:36 -0700
Collins Richey wrote:

> > But, I can say that the most successful projects I have worked on have
> > an actual working prototype as the first deliverable.
> 
> Amen, brother. Among other things, you get user buy-in for the
> project. They get a chance to say "I like it, but it needs ..." or "No
> way that will work" BEFORE you have invested man-years in a
> deliverable that doesn't meet their needs. All too often, a user will
> request xyz, but when they are shown a prototype of xyz, they will
> realize that they really wanted abc.

But it's a 2-edged sword. There is (or used to be?) a time-honored rule of
thumb: prototypes aren't. The scenario being that when the users get the
prototype, they then want to immediately start having that functionality
available, and the prototype winds up being the delivered system. I don't
know how often this happens, and I've encountered it only once, on a
system that had already been in production for a while when I joined the
team. (Which is how I wound up writing Basic+2 -- and later Macro-11 -- on
a PDP-11.)

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