the pinky-blue house

It’s a sentence. Well, it’s more of a word in reality. It usually comes right at the end of a long list of desired functionality.

And it’s the bane of every developer (and I dare say a good number of BA’s too).

It goes like this:

We want “eTunes” to show the user a catalogue of music, allow them to download it and us to bill their credit cards for it, and if possible we’d also like to show the user some music we’ve picked based on what they’ve bought before. Oh, and we want it to be flexible.

In my experience that last sentence basically means “If we change our mind at any point it should be really easy for you to make our changes”.

Let me translate that into architect-speak for you. We’ve built your house, three stories, five bedrooms, double-glazed windows, everything you’ve asked for. We’ve even painted it that lovely shade of baby blue you asked for a couple of months ago.

But looking at it now, it just blends in with the sky a little too much. It’s not making the statement you were looking for. So you want to repaint it. Pink.

Sweet! That’s fine. We’re architects, we know all about people changing their minds. After all, you have to live in it. So we repaint it, and give you the bill for the painting. And then you say hang on just a gosh-darned minute! I said I wanted the house colouring to be flexible on the original drawings!

You see the problem. We’ve still painted it. We still need to pay for the paint and the painters. It doesn’t matter at all whether it was blue, green, or purple with black polka dots before we painted it. And now we’ve done what you’ve asked.

Now, don’t take this the wrong way. We’re all about flexibility. In fact, it’s our middle name (Code to Flexible Customer makes it sound like we’ll only write code for you if you can do a Full One Legged King Pigeon). That’s why we make sure we’re in constant communication with all our customers.

We know, stuff changes. You see your shiny new site there and another bright idea hits you, or you do some user testing and no-one can spot the “buy” button. That’s great - that’s why you chose us, and you chose Rails. Because we can make those changes - and we can make ‘em fast.

But please, don’t assume that just because you said “flexible” three months ago, suddenly any change is trivial.

Okay, rant over.