Why is it that people see software developers as tradies? As plumbers who drive around in a ute[1]? As guys you look over their shoulder while they fix the drain when they're in your house?
When you hire a developer you're hiring this person for their knowledge and experience, much like when you hire a laywer or when you go see a doctor. Would you ask these questions to lawyer or a doctor?
A lot of clients are simply not capable of working like this with their developer. For this kind of transparency a client needs to have certain knowledge and experience about the development process. If they don't, they will simply be a nuisance and they will make everything much more difficult.
E.g. I build websites for a living. The amount of time that I've wasted over the years dealing with clients who were going to reinvent how to navigate a website is simply astonishing. As an expert I know what is right for their website but will they take my advice? Of course not. When clients are involved in your project on a micro level they will be in a state of mind where everything in new to them so every decision is a new discovery that needs to be analyzed. When all avenues have been discovered they end up at what you suggested to them in the first place.
My advice. Unless your client is savvy enough to be involved, keep 'm out of the development process and black-box everything as much as possible.
People increasingly do ask these sorts of questions of lawyers and especially doctors. It's an inevitable march based on access to information. Informed customers are a good thing; it forces professionals to stay on top of their game to survive and enables transparency as you mentioned. Some number of micromanaging customers are also inevitable; perhaps the goal is to bring in enough business to fire the bad customers?
The article actually advises clients what questions to ask, and this advice is appropriate, because a client that is reading this kind of article in the first place is probably tech savvy enough to be involved in the development process. I've once even worked with a client with more actual technical and programming experience than we had, but they simply outsourced the work to us because they had too many concurrent projects and they also just moved up the food chain. Just dont try to do things by the "one-size-fits-all" mindset. Even having a legal guy to make very personalized and very different contracts for different clients is good if you can have it this way.
Why is it that people see software developers as tradies? As plumbers who drive around in a ute[1]? As guys you look over their shoulder while they fix the drain when they're in your house?
When you hire a developer you're hiring this person for their knowledge and experience, much like when you hire a laywer or when you go see a doctor. Would you ask these questions to lawyer or a doctor?
A lot of clients are simply not capable of working like this with their developer. For this kind of transparency a client needs to have certain knowledge and experience about the development process. If they don't, they will simply be a nuisance and they will make everything much more difficult.
E.g. I build websites for a living. The amount of time that I've wasted over the years dealing with clients who were going to reinvent how to navigate a website is simply astonishing. As an expert I know what is right for their website but will they take my advice? Of course not. When clients are involved in your project on a micro level they will be in a state of mind where everything in new to them so every decision is a new discovery that needs to be analyzed. When all avenues have been discovered they end up at what you suggested to them in the first place.
My advice. Unless your client is savvy enough to be involved, keep 'm out of the development process and black-box everything as much as possible.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle) (reference for non-Australians)