This email conversation with Karen, my wife, reminded me of the early stages of a software project...
Karen: Make sure sausages are ready
Me: What needs doing with them? oven, frying pan, etc?
Karen: CUT UP AND PUT IN FRYING PAN
Me: Do you actually want them frying, or just left ready for when you get home? How do you want them cutting? Does the pan need any oil in, etc?
Karen: OH FOR GODS SAKE GUY SLICE IN HALF NOT OIL IN PAN AND COOK THEM
Now, as you can imagine, Karen is quite irate at all my seemingly stoopid questions, however until I know what the specifications are for the sausage preparation, I can't really do much more. Currently only Karen knows how she wants them preparing and as we've only got a limited window of availability for preparing the sausages I can't afford to get it wrong otherwise they won't meet her rigid specifications and dinner will be a disaster resulting in me sleeping in the spare bedroom.
All software and design projects tend to go through this phase. The customer (usually) knows what they want but they have to specify enough information before the project can proceed - if they don't, we have to start asking seemingly stupid questions to ensure that the project we start working on is actually what the customer wants, otherwise we could end up delivering something that works perfectly as far as we are concerned but isn't remotely close to what the customer was expecting.
Due to experience, we can do a lot of accurate guess work and reduce the number of questions we ask, but the more information the customer can provide up-front (pictures help!) the better as it allows us to quickly get through the fact-finding process and on to production.
Right, I'm off to cut some sausages in half (is that end-to-end or across the middle?) and fry them without oil (but for how long?) so they are ready for Karen getting home (at what time?)... Wish me luck!
Added by
Yay, dinner was a success - cut the sausages end-to-end, they weren't completely burnt and were ready for Karen getting home. Phew!
Lol, I can't believe you don't know how to cook sausages! I mean, I know how to make a simple 1 page website that contains a logo image in its centre, lol xx
It's not that I don't know how to make sausages, I just had no idea what they were being eaten with or of they were just a sub-ingredient of some larger meal design. For example, if they'd been for "toad in the hole" or something like that, the preparation would have been different.
"toad in the hole"?
I know how to cook sausages, how to create a website from scratch with almost any technologies, how to install Confluence and Theme Builder, how to cook lots of meal but what the hell is "toad in the hole"?
Yes, I know, that's not the subject of this news ^^