Traditional and User-Driven Software Creation

User created content is everywhere.  YouTube, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Digg are just a few of the myriad of websites that depend entirely on content generated or contributed  by their users.  Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace also provide their users with loads of content that their peers have submitted.  With such a focus on end-user creation, it’s no surprise that user-driven software tools are on the rise.

Traditional software development typically iterates the following steps (the more computer science savvy among you will recognize these steps as the waterfall model):

1. Requirements - the needs of the user are determined
2. Design - a software design that meets the needs of the user is created
3. Implementation - the actual software is written
4. Verification - software is tested to ensure that the requirements are met
5. Maintenance - after the software is delivered, it is maintained to eliminate bugs, adapt to different platforms, add new features, etc.

(Not all modern development methods exactly follow the above steps, but they’ll suffice for the purpose of this discussion.)

In addition to generally following some variation of the steps described above, traditional software is created by professional programmers using complex tools such as Eclipse, Xcode, and Visual Studio.  These programmers have, in most cases, gone through years of school and spent years in industry learning how to design and develop software.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have user-driven software tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly that enable end-users to create their own web-based software in a matter of minutes with virtually no experience or education necessary.  Users simply login to a web page and they are presented with a set of visual tools to help them piece together various program components that come together to create custom software.  In their current state, these software tools do not provide enough functionality to be incredibly useful (see my previous posts on Pipes and Popfly), but with enough time and effort from traditional developers, tools can (and will) be developed that enable users to create their own quality software projects.

Old school:

New school:

-Scott B.

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Tags: youtube, wikipedia, wordpress, digg, facebook, twitter, myspace, waterfall, eclipse, xcode, visualstudio, pipes, popfly, software, user-driven, content

~ by sblackburn on April 4, 2008.