Chapter 3 focuses on how software development processes waste money. The author argues that in a lot of software development there is no clear end defined. This causes many projects to define their completion by the ship date. When this happens, poor software is released which isn't used and fails miserably. The next chapter discusses, in more detail, the authors notion of what he calls "The Dancing Bear." The dancing bear is an analogy for software that accomplishes a task that people are so relieved to see accomplished, that they don't care how badly the software accomplishes it. The final chapter of this excerpt details customer disloyalty and more appropriately, how to get it. Cooper argues that customer disloyalty will ultimately bring any company down eventually and that this should be avoided at all costs.
The ideas around how software development can waste money seem very well thought out and I generally agree with Cooper on this. From reading this book in CHI, I know that I often times do not agree with Cooper but in the third chapter I really think he hit it on the head. The number of software products that seem doomed by their schedule and lack of planning is just astronomical. It is a very unfortunate truth in the industry.
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