[thelist] developer ethics?

[Wade Armstrong]

on 3/5/02 12:24 PM, David Kutcher at david_kutcher at hotmail.com wrote:

>> The flip side of this is, most of our clients come to us with no idea of
> how
>> they want to use the Web. What they really want is for us to tell them
> what
>> they want to do and then do it for them. I would like to think that, at my
>> best, I would be looking out for the client's best interests and making
> sure
>> that I helped them to develop an appropriate concept and scope of work.
>
> So what is a client supposed to do when they obviously didn't know enough
> about becoming a company on the web when they signed the contract, nor had
> the expertise to ensure a good product was delivered?
>
> I personally feel strongly about educating the client and creating a detailed
> scope of work based on that education. The consultant followed the letter of
> the contract... but did they fulfill the contract?
>

I'm afraid they did fulfill the contract, and I'm not saying that's a good
thing. What I'm saying is that, at some point in time, we have to be able to
say "We're done!" The contract provides ways to measure that point. We can't
be put in a position where the client can come back after the fact and
demand changes.

The problem in this case is that maybe the most important work, requirements
development and the concomitant client education, was not included in the
contract. This was a Bad Idea, but certainly not an uncommon practice.

Maybe the problem really is not that the initial designers did a bad job,
it's that they didn't know how to do a good job (and that the client didn't
know how to tell that). So how do we help developers do their job right?
Bill Haenel proposes that we hold ourselves to standards:
> ALL parties must come together to form AGREED UPON standards that point to
> the specifications. Show of hands: How many of you have seen the ISO
> standard that references the W3C HTML Spec? OK, now how many of your clients
> have seen it or care about it? Are they ISO registered? So if they are, how
> come they don't know about XHTML or even HTML 4.01 Trans. compliance?

Some coding standards would've helped here. But six-deep tables validate,
and so does Flash, and so do horribly unusable forms. Standards are part of
doing our job right, I'll agree to that - but so are knowing workarounds to
make our sites work in Netscape 4 and IE 3, and those will never be
standards.

Now I'm kind of getting at best practices here (aagh! buzzword!). Best
practices include coding to the spec - and choosing which spec to code to
based on knowledge about the target audience. If we could codify some of
those best practices, we could certify based upon them, and perhaps that
would be of value to customers.

Anybody got any idea what those best practices are?

Wade