Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
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Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#2Sounds like doctorsplaining. A better idea would be to hire nurses and technicians who spend thousands of hours in the trenches and let them tell you everything that really goes on.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#3Example of a more general problem: developers not understanding the business domain. Developers often blame “poor requirements” for schedule and budget overruns, but they didn’t spend any time learning the business domain.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#4Sounds like doctorsplaining. A better idea would be to hire nurses and technicians who spend thousands of hours in the trenches and let them tell you everything that really goes on.
>Sounds like doctorsplaining
Sounds like userblaming. Works wonders when the users aren't the ones choosing the software to use, or have much input.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#5Similar problem in the UK https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/18/nhs_buntu_trademark...
The issues the NHS has with IT (with the glaring exception of WannaCry) are related to the vast fortunes they expend with outsourcing companies for custom software that doesn’t work. Doing the same thing but on Ubuntu won’t be any better. But the engineers don’t care, they have an ideological axe to grind so they focus on something irrelevant.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#6Example of a more general problem: developers not understanding the business domain. Developers often blame “poor requirements” for schedule and budget overruns, but they didn’t spend any time learning the business domain.
If you do learn the business, you have to explain to management why you wasted all that time. You cant say your application is cheaper in user errors, downtime, maintenance, licences, change requests etc... as that would mean all the other expensive software is garbage.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#7Sounds like doctorsplaining. A better idea would be to hire nurses and technicians who spend thousands of hours in the trenches and let them tell you everything that really goes on.
I've worked in biomedical informatics IT at a clinical research university. I think it's reasonable to understand what the user's goals and priorities are by going to the point of use, Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物), in order to tailor something to make work processes smoother and better. I wouldn't hold off on assuming anything negative without more listening to understand them.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#8Sounds like doctorsplaining. A better idea would be to hire nurses and technicians who spend thousands of hours in the trenches and let them tell you everything that really goes on.
>Sounds like doctorsplaining Sounds like userblaming. Works wonders when the users aren't the ones choosing the software to use, or have much input.
Absolutely. It's vital to listen carefully to users and think broadly and wisely. The programmer must understand what the users have to deal with in order to provide something useful to them. If not, the user will hate the result, it will make them miserable, cost the employer time to redo it and the cost of not being able to do what needs doing (or worse) without software.
tl;dr: get to something most useful soonest by quick, small iterations until it's satisficing. No BDU project fails, and no assumption fails.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#9I worked a tiny bit over a year around 2013 at a hospital network and was on a team that maintained custom integrations with Cerner, an EHR system.
It was by far one of the coziest jobs I ever had. Low stress environment, redundant meetings, etc. But development of any kind of god awful. It was extremely sluggish, lots of red type, and seemed to follow a manual QA approach over any sort of automated testing. Things were just too lax in general.
Myself and another junior developer left after we noticed that an intermediate engineer on our time hadn't committed in over 3 months.
My point of this story is that hospitals didn't seem to attract/retain passionate software developers. With high turnover or apathetic developers, most software built custom for hospitals is probably Frankensteined.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#10Example of a more general problem: developers not understanding the business domain. Developers often blame “poor requirements” for schedule and budget overruns, but they didn’t spend any time learning the business domain.
If you do learn the business, you have to explain to management why you wasted all that time. You cant say your application is cheaper in user errors, downtime, maintenance, licences, change requests etc... as that would mean all the other expensive software is garbage.
Domain expertise is not wasted time. It makes the difference between a useful application and a pile of code. Developers should not assume they know more about a business domain than the people working in it.