Britt Blaser has an article about drafting a press release before doing the actual work. Sounds like a strange advise, at least on first sight. Or at least to me. But it makes a lot of sense. The key part in his story (to me):
By drafting the press release, even 12 to 24 months before product launch, you'll be forced to think about the product's benefits rather than its features, and you'll design a better product.
It doesn't need to be the definitive press release, but at least it makes you think about what your customer wants. In my case, the customer doesn't want RDF and OWL. That's behind-the-scenes stuff.
On the other hand, keep in mind who your customer is. If you're building not for end-users but for other programmers - they might be interested in an OWL/RDF based solution instead of plain XML.
I'll give it a whirl and see if it's as good a tip as it sounds to be.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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