Recently I saw an article lauding the diversity of the participant group for the Zurich workshop on SEMAT. That bothered me for two reasons. One, the post seemed to assume that the gathered group was sufficiently diverse in viewpoint to solve (SEMAT’s current view of) the software problem. Two, the group didn’t seem that diverse to me in many important regards other than methodological viewpoint.
This creates risks which are, ironically, far from uncommon to software development. Assuming that you know your customers well enough (or that you are them), and know what they need, can be a recipe for building a technically sound product that doesn’t “sell” and won’t be used. I don’t want to see that happen to SEMAT. Here’s why I’m concerned that it might.
