

What Verna Taught Me - wallflower
http://20bits.com/articles/what-verna-taught-me/

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sachmanb
This is a fundamental practice of quality management. In the 'Total Quality
Management' approach (inspired by Deming's work) the idea is called Kansei and
it essentially means: watching how the user users the product will lead to
improvements in the product. We see how this has worked well for Agile and
Scrum, methodologies in which customer collaboration and feedback are
frequent.

The four main principles of the TQM idea are:

Kaizen: Continuous Process Improvement

Atarimae Hinshitsu: things should work as they are supposed to

Kansei: understanding how the user uses the product will lead to improvements
in the product

Miryokuteki Hinshitsu: things should have an aesthetic quality, be pleasant

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radu_floricica
There are two things programmers should always do, but are way too lazy
(myself included). In my case, it helps I know i'll deal myself with the
consequences of shoddy programming, but it's still hard to go against your
nature.

1\. Test anything. My apps tend to be flat and simple (business software with
web interface) so automated testing is not a real option. Simply going through
the motions before uploading on the servers finds 80% of bugs... but it
requires considerable discipline to go through 10 minutes of data entry to
check a bug fix which took you 5 minutes to code.

2\. Occasionally put yourself in the user's shoes and do whatever he's doing
every day. I seldom did this and not come up with an idea or two.

