Software Engineering Stack Exchange
Software Engineering Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [customer-relations]

55 questions
458
votes
22 answers

My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

Working as a freelancer, I often see strange requests from my customers, some of which can negatively affect my daily work¹, and others trying to set some sort of control. I usually encounter those things during preliminary negotiations, so it's…
Arseni Mourzenko
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81
votes
12 answers

How to respond to a rude bug report?

I just received a quite rude bug report. The user basically says that we're doing it all wrong using capital letters here and there, although he's in fact just pointing at one bug. On one hand, I care a lot about our users and want to maintain a…
aioobe
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33
votes
9 answers

How to reply to incomplete requests from potential customers?

Working as a freelancer, I receive many weird, invalid or incomplete requests from the actual or potential customers. The most frequent case is this one: Hi, I need a website where people can register and there are also postings and ratings. How…
Arseni Mourzenko
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24
votes
4 answers

How to dissuade a customer who just learned a technology and wants to use it everywhere?

My customer recently discovered what is URL Rewriting, without completely understanding what it is, how it works and the pros and cons of it. Now, he asks for lots of strange changes in actual requirements of current projects and changes in old…
Arseni Mourzenko
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22
votes
8 answers

Explaining floating point precision to customers

What is the best way to explain floating point rounding issue to customers? I know http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html as well as the entries in the C++ FAQ and various other pages aimed at developers and…
Eric Grange
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22
votes
11 answers

Hand over source code to customer

I have made a couple iPhone applications for a customer and was asked today to hand over the source code so that they could do the maintenance if this should be required. Until now, no code issues were ever discussed. Is there any "common" practice…
egil
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20
votes
10 answers

How can my team avoid frequent errors after refactoring?

To give you a little background: I work for a company with roughly twelve Ruby on Rails developers (+/- interns). Remote work is common. Our product is made out of two parts: a rather fat core, and thin up to big customer projects built upon it.…
SDD64
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19
votes
7 answers

How do you respond to: "Ever since the update..." questions from clients?

Ever since the update, people keep calling and saying "Ever since the update X, Y and Z are slow, bad and crashing" This has happened ever since the dawn of updates. What do people expect? Gamma comes after beta, and gamma testing always turns…
Peter Turner
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17
votes
8 answers

Customer buys software for function it cannot do and then complains. How to resolve?

I have come across this several times when selling a prepackaged solution. Customer buys the package, which clearly sets out that it can do XYZ, but the customer wanted it to do ABC. The customer then emails for support. I inform the customer…
psx
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17
votes
1 answer

How do I write a functional specification quickly and efficiently

So I just read some fabulous articles by Joel on specs here. (Was written in 2000!!) I read all 4 parts, but I'm looking for some methodical approaches to writing my specs. I'm the only lonely dev, working on this fairly complicated app (or family…
gideon
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17
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4 answers

Should I continue to perform freelance work for customers who keep on demanding more without paying?

So a client comes to me and says it needs some work done. Basically 4 tasks, which I agreed to perform for a certain price. The customer creates the job offer (a fixed time and price job) on ODesk, I accept it, but it took some days and constant…
Alex
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16
votes
10 answers

How can I get paid for reducing technical debt?

I'm currently working for small company that has few technically complicated products. I'm the one and only developer for one of them. About a year ago, I got the legacy version of the product and started "supporting" it. Customer only talks about…
Andrey Agibalov
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16
votes
7 answers

What is the best practice for gathering requirements when a customer does not know what he wants?

Possible Duplicate: How do you deal with changing requirements? This question must have been asked a thousand times but there seems to be little progress in this area: I have asked the customer what he would like the system to do, to little…
Phil C
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14
votes
6 answers

Hourly rate benefits for the customer

It is good for a developer to work on a per-hour basis, but it's hard to explain the advantages of hourly rate to the customer. What are your arguments on the hourly rate for the customer? How do you explain him his benefits and how do you argue on…
Andrey
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14
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4 answers

Are patches a bad sign for the customer?

At the office we just got out of a long period where we released patches on a too-frequent basis. Near the end of that period we were doing almost three patches per week on average. Beside that this was very demotivating for the developers, I was…
Mixxiphoid
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