Why communication is very important in software development

Communication is usually a topic that is not given much attention, because as programmers, we just want to write code and spend all day in front of a computer. But this desire is what causes our communication skills to be very weak, in my experience, I have noticed that we don’t have too many social interactions with other people than our teammates.

For me, one of the most important aspects of communication in software development are meetings with clients.What would happen if there was a bad communication between the clients and us the programmers? Software requirements are very likely to be misunderstood because of the poor communication, this will have the consequence that the task assignments are not what the client expects, leading to a loss of time and money, and the tasks performed must be done again.

Not all communications problems are oral, there are also communication problems when it is not written in the best way. These are the ones that in my opinion are the most frequent to find, especially in the writing of user stories. A very common mistake when writing is the fact of assuming many factors, because they can be very obvious for the writer, but they cannot be for the reader. So every time you write a user story, please try to be transparent, and avoid being verbose.

When a user story is very poorly written, a lot of time is wasted trying to understand what to do, and this can affect productivity. For this reason, my advice is, every time something is written, make the effort to read it from the point of view of another person (the reader). If you do this, many people will be very grateful for that.