I am glad that Jim brought up the QA team. They should have specs, scenarios or prototypes from which to build test plans. If eng knows they'll get a bug filed against them, they're more likely to implement to spec.
Designers should also be brought into the QA cycle to catch visual problems that a QA team might not see. After being trained on good bug reporting and process, of course. Finally, I read a lot of "engineers need to learn what we do and why we do it so that know it shouldn't be changed on a whim", which is good. However designers also need to provide work that's worthy of pixel-perfect implementation. That means having some understanding of and empathy for what engineers do. Bringing them into the design process to hear from them what their concerns are about implementing is important. Being available to answer any questions or provide alternative solutions for difficult-to-impossible implementation problems is also important (I work on teams that actually assign bugs to the design team for these kinds of questions, which is great for making us a part of the implementation team). However we must also be respectful of their time. I recently spec'd some work for a designer who was too busy, and found no fewer than 13 shades of grey, at least half of which were barely distinguishable from the other half. Spacing that was 9 pixels here, 12 pixels there... you could imagine the same kinds of problems on an interaction level. Is the engineer really supposed to implement this exactly perfectly (in which case, what a waste of time to deal with 13 shades of gray!)? Or was the designer being a bit slipshod, and expects the engineer to extrapolate? How much or how little are they supposed to extrapolate? Thinking of engineering as internal clients and being mindful and respectful of their time and skill set is a critical part of getting a design implemented as spec'd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=44968 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
