[GNC] balance of interests between users and developers

[Michael or Penny Novack]

Precisely because I am a retired pro, I have not worked on development 
in this volunteer environment.

See, my experience was in a different environment when we had end user 
commitment to the project. By which I mean end user TIME. Not "I want" 
but "I am willing to commit to the end user part of software 
development". In the work world I came from, about 20% of the project 
time was at the start formalizing the requirements (what is this thing 
supposed to do). So yes, we business analysts and systems analysts took 
part in that phase, but mainly asking questions of the clients/users 
"OK, but what do you want it to do in THIS situation?" << because 
initially, all the clients/users picture is how it is to work normally 
-- NOT picturing all the rare cases/exceptions that might come up -- and 
roughly 80% of the code will end up being what handles these odd 
situations >>

THEN maybe 30% of the time to make really formal definition and spec it 
out and 30% to code it.

But at the end, the clients/users need to come back to provide the 
testers, the final 20%. In other words, about 40% of the time commitment 
would not be us analysts and programmers but USERS.

Of course in that "world" the users were there because they were being 
paid to be there just like we analysts/programmers were. Sorry, but in 
this voluntary environment I am NOT seeing the users who are saying that 
they want thus and ALSO saying ":and to get that, we will commit to our 
part of the project"


Michael D Novack