Tech Innovation and Products - Who Should Raise It?
So - the typical thing I hear a lot is to do only what the client wants, business requirements.
This is usually about the "functioning" of the system - there may be some technical requirements - "should be based on web browsers", "Should be stored permanently"
But who do you think specifies
WebForms v WPF v SilverLight
Performance is a business requirement, but who's to say what to use this technology?
Should there be
- Developers?
- project manager?
- software manager?
- software architect
- corporate architect
- users?
Should users find out what's going on and is available? Do you show and talk about the new gui features?
Developers tend to want to move on to shiny new things, but some don't want to see the learning curve again (problems with change I know)
Solution architects make decisions about which technologies to use to implement a solution based on a set of client requirements. They tend to have the broadest knowledge of different technologies and their suitability for specific requirements. Some of the factors that can influence the decision making process will actually be acceptable to the technology, but they may also need to consult with the Dev developer about human resources. There may be skill or financial constraints on the existing team that prevent or hinder the use of a particular technology.
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In our company, this is a combination of developers and the "graphics department" (the guys who decide how the interface should look like). I don't think there should be only one part making this decision, because sometimes you can do “colder” things, for example. Silverlight than ex. WebForms.
We have sites that are supposed to be cool, here we tend to use more Flash. We have other admin sites that shouldn't be cool. We are using WebForms here. We (the developers) try to avoid flash as much as possible, and the graphics guys want it a lot.
Project managers / software developer / architects, etc. usually not eligible for this. Sometimes stakeholders may have requirements for this (eg "UI should be sexy and sleek, use Flash"). Users? Well, to be honest, nobody listens to them about this ...: - / And we also didn't have any feedback from users on this issue. (But we're actually changing it)
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