Communication Problems Between Developers & Non-Developers
Hey this is the daily overpass my name is Eric and I make apps. Now today I want to talk about communication problems between developers and non developers.
All right so today I wanted to talk about something that happened earlier today which was kind of funny and kind of annoying. But it has to do with the communications between developers and non developers.
Oh and let me start off by saying that I try to keep these videos a little bit more varied, so every so often I go outside to this big field outside the office. So if you're ever wondering why I'm always walking around in the woods like some sort of serial killer, it's not because I've just buried my latest victims and decided to talk about apps afterwards. It's just because it's outside right.
Anyway so we had this issue with the communication. And I pride myself at being able to communicate in technical and non-technical ways. I mean we all do in some respects. So able to explain things to our clients in a way that they understand a lot of times using metaphors or you're explaining you know an example. this this sort of works in this way imagine if it was this and that. right so I pride myself on that.
And a lot of times the clients really like to work with us because of that reason. they don't you know we don't they don't feel like we're dumbing it down or we're looking down on them because they don't speak the technical lingo. but then also to be able to talk to the developers about you know how this should work you know what types of technology we should use the structure the variable you know that kind of stuff the typical coding standards type of stuff so I pride myself on that but sometimes we get it wrong.
So here's the issue: so we have a project that we're just finishing up. it's a browser-based project and we're just doing the final stages that we have an issues list of certain things that we have to check. and we have so basically we're testing it on all the different types of browsers, so we have some things that are done and not done.
and the process is that the developers they do the work. they tell the QA tester that it's done. she'll test it she'll set it from you know unresolved to resolved or set it from yellow to green. or to red if it fails the test. and and that's how it goes.
so they've come to her weeks ago and said the site is now responsive and she looked at the spreadsheet and there was nothing on there so that's fine. she didn't change anything, but the spreadsheet says it needs to be mobile-friendly. and it didn't say anything about responsive. and it was just this disconnect right.
so I was getting annoyed like, why is this still not resolved? right? because and because she didn't know that by mobile-friendly we meant responsive and vice versa. and I mean they're not synonyms really. if you're a proper CSS person responsive means that the the site just responds to the changes in the screen size but most the time we when we talk about mobile-friendly websites we talk about them being responsive.
So that was it so anyway with just a little thing that even the client was saying, "why isn't this resolved yet?" and so it was done. It was like a nice easy fix, all we had to do is get the people in the right room. She was so apologetic about it, saying "I'm sorry, I didn't know that," and I thought, "well, that's not really her job to know that."
I specifically don't want technical people or developers being QA z', because I know from experience myself when I'm testing something and developers should test it anyway, but when I'm testing something as a developer, a lot of times I go straight for the SQL injection things, or I'll type in funny characters, and I'll try to do all this stuff to stress test the app, and I'll miss something completely blatantly obvious like a button has the wrong text on it or it's not lined up or something like that.
It's good to have somebody from, in my experience, my QA tester, I want them to be as close to the end-user as possible. So, I wasn't really upset that that was done, but it was just one of these kind of things where you learn about it, and it's funny. As developers, we have to be multilingual, we have to think in two different languages, and I suppose doctors are the same. Doctors have their technical language, we have our technical language, and anyway, just something to think about that I tell you guys about today. I thought it was kind of funny, even maybe a little annoying, but still kind of funny.
Anyway, That is it for today. I'll talk to you guys again tomorrow.