Why you should care (why it is so important to get it right)

Why you should care (why it is so important to get it right!)

We do not believe any developer or developer shop wants to deliver substandard products in a substandard way. In fact, we are sure developers do not want to deliver superior products to their customers in a substandard way. We feel this section merely states the obvious.

You know it takes what feels like a lifetime to develop solid, trusting relationships with your customers. It only takes one bad experiences with developers who are not prepared or not professional to erode that relationship. Even if you are lucky enough to have a very solid relationship with your customers, repeated bad deployments definitely strain the business relationship. If failure is repeated often enough, customers will ask for refunds , not pay their invoices, and may begin looking for other developers to take over your job or ask someone at your company to replace you in this role.

Deployment of an application is usually the first impression you make with the actual end users. It is our experience that we typically develop applications with the subject matter experts, someone in a position of authority, or someone very experienced in the company. The application is used by people in the trenches doing the tasks automated by the application. We want to make a good impression with the end users because we will be working closely with them in technical support situations and they will be the ones driving the enhancement requests . We want them to be impressed with our services so the post-implementation phase is as enjoyable as the development phase of the project. If we install the application on their machine and now the machine is disabled, or we install a new ActiveX control that breaks another application we wrote for this customer, how happy do you think they will be?

Doing it right this time means the customers will trust you the next time, or at least trust you a little more. We often take over failing projects for customers. Making the first deployment work right the first time can make the difference between being invited back the next time or having them move on to yet another developer. One project this author took over from another developer was almost ready for user acceptance testing. The original developer was behind schedule and attempting to rush the implementation of the application on the end user ‚ s machine. ‚“Attempting to install it ‚½ might be a bit harsh ; ‚“getting it to run on the end user ‚ s machine ‚½ would be more accurate. The application kept triggering an error when the executable was started. We got a call based on a recommendation from another one of our clients to see if we could help. With only a couple hours of time, we determined the ActiveX control used in the application was loaded in the wrong place. Most of the time involved adding an error handler to the program and finding out what error was being triggered. The original developer never tested the executable on a machine other than the development machine where the environment was established. That developer lost the trust of the customer forever. The lesson learned: take time to test the implementation before doing it for real.