On 12/2/10 11:05 AM, Arthur Richards wrote:
As a predominantly back-end developer, it's become clear to me over the last few years that usability is not just a front-end concern. 'Users' don't necessarily only interact with the 'front end'. Particularly in an open-source paradigm, 'users' need to be thought of much more broadly than just the person who clicks links on your website.
This is especially true of our projects.
Like, there's a thread over on Commons Village Pump right now about how to change certain strings that are hardcoded into the upload process. Apparently this kind of bug lasts for years rather than five minutes, just because the people who are most exercised about it don't have PHP skills or don't have commit access.
We have all kinds of contributors who know how to hack one layer of the system but not others.
That said, I think the deeper we go into the code, it becomes more about good documentation. At the outer layers things have to be more discoverable.