Business-focused custom software

A question I get regularly from my customers is along the lines of “what does this feature do?” or “how does this feature work?”. This is a bit surprising to me because I always think “I built it as you requested, so don’t YOU know how it should work?”

Of courses that’s pretty unfair. Any non-trivial piece of software will have features that are used less frequently, and therefore may have feature details that are not easy to remember. Also, my contact person at the customer is often not the primary user of the software I’ve built.They aren’t going to remember how features they don’t use regularly work.

The other day a customer asked me to remove a feature, as they thought it was redundant.Before I took his request at face value, I investigated and explained to him the differences, so he could make an informed decision.

In the end he decided to leave the software as is. That’s the benefit of working with a software development partner instead of just a order-taker. You want someone who can question your requests, so that you don’t make costly mistakes.