In my experience, it can make a huge difference if the developers are allowed to talk directly to the users of their product. The users tell them which parts of the product hurt them most, and the developers find a way to fix that.
If instead the communication is something like "the end users give information to their manager, their manager gives information to our analyst, our analyst gives information to our manager, our manager creates Jira tasks for us", there is often a lot of information lost at every step.
For example, once my team made a web application that allowed users to edit some forms. When we asked how many rows there will on a form, we got an answer "five, on average". So we made forms that supported unlimited number of lines, tested them with about 10 rows, everything worked, we considered our job well done.
One day, we met a guy who actually used the software. He complained about how it sucks, that validating or saving the form takes forever, that he sometimes loses data because of a timeout, etc. It turned out that although most of the forms contained about five rows, some of them actually contained thousands of rows. And yes, with over ten thousand rows in a form, on a bad day the web application lost the data because of a timeout.
The developers were quite shocked. We complained about the analysis, but the analyst insisted that the average number of rows per form was about five, so the analysis was not wrong. (Technically correct; the best kind of correct.) Had we known this in advance, we certainly would have chosen a different web framework, but now it was too late to rewrite everything from scratch. So we just did what we could at this moment, some ugly hack like validating only 1000 rows at a time, so the end user had to push the validation button multiple times for very long forms or something like that, but at least he didn't get a timeout. The hack took about a week to implement and test, and the end user was happy, because it was a huge improvement over the previous situation.
The management still insisted that developers meeting with the end users were wasting time. There were Jira tasks waiting to do, no time for chat.
> In my experience, it can make a huge difference if the developers are allowed to talk directly to the users of their product.
Yes. But also HELL NO.
Back when we were a small company and I did a bit of everything, from infrastructure management to support, on top of actually doing dev work, taking to them was the bit I dreaded most at times!
I do occasionally interact with our customers' technology/security teams as part of my remit is dealing with ingesting this party data and pushing information (or making it available to be pulled) the other way. That can be irritating enough, you would not believe the amount of people working in that area that don't properly understand SFTP and, for instance, get thoroughly confused by key based auth.
If instead the communication is something like "the end users give information to their manager, their manager gives information to our analyst, our analyst gives information to our manager, our manager creates Jira tasks for us", there is often a lot of information lost at every step.
For example, once my team made a web application that allowed users to edit some forms. When we asked how many rows there will on a form, we got an answer "five, on average". So we made forms that supported unlimited number of lines, tested them with about 10 rows, everything worked, we considered our job well done.
One day, we met a guy who actually used the software. He complained about how it sucks, that validating or saving the form takes forever, that he sometimes loses data because of a timeout, etc. It turned out that although most of the forms contained about five rows, some of them actually contained thousands of rows. And yes, with over ten thousand rows in a form, on a bad day the web application lost the data because of a timeout.
The developers were quite shocked. We complained about the analysis, but the analyst insisted that the average number of rows per form was about five, so the analysis was not wrong. (Technically correct; the best kind of correct.) Had we known this in advance, we certainly would have chosen a different web framework, but now it was too late to rewrite everything from scratch. So we just did what we could at this moment, some ugly hack like validating only 1000 rows at a time, so the end user had to push the validation button multiple times for very long forms or something like that, but at least he didn't get a timeout. The hack took about a week to implement and test, and the end user was happy, because it was a huge improvement over the previous situation.
The management still insisted that developers meeting with the end users were wasting time. There were Jira tasks waiting to do, no time for chat.