The Pit of Flexibility

As software creators, our passion (and livelihood) is to translate some human want or problem into CPU instructions. Often as the application matures and expands, regardless of architecture, there is a significant burden placed on the trainers and support staff as they work through inquiries by the user community. When an inquiry is strange enough, it can finally make it back to the developers to handle (which will rank nearly as fun as writing documentation). Sometimes your users will continue to demand additional options from the application, and as those are added, so does your support/training efforts... This article explores the contributing factors and proposes some guidance to reducing the user tax of your applications.