Customers don’t know what they need

When it comes to software, customers know what they want but not what they need. In my many years as a software consultant I have dealt with numerous companies of various sizes. These customers make cutting-edge products and many of them are household names in embedded software. They are world leaders in their fields and in the products they make. However, making software is not their core business. Their core business is making their fantastic, innovative products. Software is ‘a necessary evil’. This is especially true of small companies, which typically have just a handful of developers. For them, software is a part of those fantastic products, but not the reason they got started in business. So they’re not software experts; their expertise is in another field.

As a result, they simply don’t know how to write good software: high quality and on time. They don’t know how to write good, testable requirements. They don’t know how to create a solid, continuously improving test process. Nor do they know how to organize a software team for maximum efficiency and the best possible communication with management. And they don’t know that they don’t know this. They know their software is buggy and late, but they don’t know why.