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by dion.
Original Post: How to Produce Good Software, Part 6
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Graham Glass is continuing to discuss his philosophy on building good technology with How to Produce Good Software, Part 6.
Common sense is a common key to Grahams thoughts. It is nice to hear anecdotes which back up that common sense:
Id like to share an anecdote about one of the items in the above list: listening to users more than analysts when determining feature sets. In the early days of web services, analysts were saying that adoption of web services would not take off until XML-based security standards like WS-security were available. Because of this sentiment, we thought that Glue might not be adopted until we implemented this particular standard. But due to resource constraints, Glue 1.0 only shipped with support for SOAP over HTTP and HTTPS. But to our surprise, most of our customers didnt really care about WS-Security, and found that HTTPS was sufficient for secure communications. This was an example where users had a significantly different set of needs than those being suggested by the analyst community. Later, of course, we added support for WS-Security, but even to this day it is a feature that is rarely used.
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