The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Ch. 3-5

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Ch. 3-5
Cooper, Alan
Sams Publishing, 2004

The third chapter focuses on the disadvantages of rushing a software product out to market. The author suggests that managers tend to focus more on rushing products out to market so that the product will have a quicker time to market and will be more successful. Often time this comes at the expense of features and usability. The author believes that product development should focus the most on usability and focus less on the number of features and time to market.

Chapter four discusses how poor usability can cause software to fail when used by non power users. When software is overly complicated it can be hard for inexperienced users to navigate to the features that they actually want to use. This can cause the user to get frustrated or even feel that they are at fault for not being able to operate the software when the poor interaction is really just a result of poor design. 

Chapter 5 gives a brief discussion of a model for successful software products. The model consists of the components of capability, viability, and desirability. Capability is the factor that determines whether or not the software product is able to be made, viability is the measure of whether or not the product will be able to sell, and desirability is the ability of the software product to deliver features that customers want.

Discussion:

This reading is significant because it discusses many aspects of software development that are often overlooked. For instance, the model of success discusses in chapter 5 provides discusses the factors that make for the commercial success of a product rather than the technical success. The only faults I found with this reading is that the author seems to discuss software that is intended for a broad audience and does not discuss custom software or software targeted at technical professionals. This work can be used by anyone who is going into the business of selling software or developing software to be sold.