A mistake that a lot of people make when creating software is to try to automate everything. When you are making software for a business, you are generally automating a process and there is often a desire or drive that people have to make software that automates the whole process. They get into an all-or-nothing frame of mind that, unfortunately, usually ends up with nothing getting deployed, or, even worse, software that gets deployed which tries to do it all and fails, disrupting the business and wasting a lot more money.
There are many different strategies and methodologies to deal with this situation. Agile is probably the most popular and successful. One of the main tenets of Agile is to deliver business value as soon as possible. And in most situations in order to deliver that value quickly, you obviously can't program everything. And if you can't program everything, you are going to have to learn how to design humans into your system. This is something that a lot of software people seem uncomfortable with because they view the system they are building purely as a piece of software and think that automation is the ideal. But full automation is not necessarily the goal, creating business value is. (I'll have more to say on this in a later post.)
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