Software for an iPad
A group of professionals see an opportunity for software that does what they want.
Historically, computer programmers wrote software and gave you what they understood. Maybe only your bosses, who don't have hands-on, would talk to them. Or they'd do a Requirements Capture, but only using management-friendly individuals or with middle-managers answering the questions. The real-life difficulties or best practices would fail to make it into the Requirements Capture.
A more productive way came and has been soundly ignored for years. That you the worker are the expert at what you do. Not your boss, who would share your pragmatic ways if he only engaged with the workers or the work, but probably never does. You are the expert in your job.
The dogmatic approach can be telling people how to do their jobs and punishments, or understanding the problems and adapting. New capability is to make life easier. It needs to connect with everyone, not just the self-deluded.
The chap you are about to see introduced that wisdom, that you are the expert, the programming bit is easy and you should be in charge of what you need.
Hava a look from a sense of history. Don't be frightened by the acronyms and don't even read anything. Just have a look at Bjarne Stroustrup. He is your hero too.
You can have your program written in any language. What Bjarne is saying is, that your years of experience at what the program should do, make you more important than the standard processes which a programmer can show you. The programmer knows nothing about your subject. A Requirements Capture isn't going to cut it, because you would not teach someone to do your job in that way. There would be practice and mistakes, forgetting and asking questions, as part of a learning curve. The best software will come from an iterative process, with you teaching the programmer how to do your job and the programmer showing you what can be done. You don't need to learn how to do what he does it, but he does need to learn what you do.
Most programmers are socially inept. To help you, here is programming in two paragraphs.
Imagine either the old arcade game Space Invaders, with aliens tramping down the screen en-masse, or the game Lemmings. Each Lemming looked pretty much the same, because they were a sequence of the same four pictures simulating movement. Each lemming was a copy of computer code, even though each copy had a different position on the screen and was moving left, right, or standing still. The computer took each lemming in turn and decided what to do with it. Whichever way you are walking, you are about to take one step forward. If there is a wall there, turn around. If there is another lemming there, march on the spot. If there is a hole, you will follow this next sequence of code to make you drop to the next level. This is Object Orientated Programming. We haven't made the decisions, we've created the rules. Each lemming follows its own path, without our planning it.
Second paragraph pending
The learning curve for this project took time, to learn some generic skills. It was also delayed by waiting for 3rd party software to develop to meet some specific requirements.
The standard skills, transferrable to any project, included looking for pitfalls in the following.
An on-line download, once payment has been received from PayPal, Visa etc, including suggesting to a customer the right version for their operating system
A Setup.exe program. Microsoft recommend WiX, the Windows Installer, because it allows the Windows Operating System iteself to install a new program. It's the difference between surgical precision and butchery which may not always work.
A database which will allow users to update or share data
Delivering an app through the