To complement and counter this post, I find that soliciting input from the end user is invaluable. This should be done during the planning and design phase as well as after release, ideally. You'll get the same input as if you were using it yourself, but you don't have to go around actually using all the code you write.

I've found that some/many coders and companies try to predict what users want, instead of actually asking the users. While there's nothing wrong with coming up with your own good ideas, I'm sure there are always things that you wouldn't have thought of that a daily user of your product is just itching to tell you about. A valuable side-effect of asking your users what they want and then giving it to them is that you appear to actually care about them. (Whether you actually do or not is irrelevant.)

---
It's all fine and dandy until someone has to look at the code.

In reply to Re^2: Managing By Walking Around: from 1982 to 2006 by kwaping
in thread Managing By Walking Around: from 1982 to 2006 by talexb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.