Let's say you have a specific project on hand, it can be divided to parts, and you are not completely sure about all the difficulties that will arise.
Time is of the essence.
How do you decide whether a part should use software product or your own code? (considering, that some tools are awesome, but will require much time to learn)
How do you choose the right software product?
How much time (as a percentage) should this stage of choosing the right product, if any, take, and how much time to evaluate a single product?
Is there a way-back, is it o.k to change your mind, after putting efforts in a product, and finding it not suitable?
I would love to hear any rules of thumb about those.
Changing your decisions is like changing your blueprint for a house while it's already being built.
It will entirely depend on what you have spent in time and money to that point.
Some considerations:
0) Understand the problem in clear and simple terms before beginning. Know what's critical to it's success and then use that list to see if any software, language, or tool will aid it, and at what cost, and if the cost outweighs the benefit.
1) Use a crammer's schedule. Build it in the order of what you would build if you only had 1 day or 1 week and no more to work on it. It's amazing how much doesn't matter anymore when you have to do 50% of the features at 100% of the quality. Focus on value, value, value. Read something like 37 Signal's book Getting Real for more on this.
2) Do not re-invent the wheel. It's always easier it seems to build something from scratch. Unless you are doing a fraction of the implementation and it's truly simpler, meaning you can avoid abstraction until you forget what you were building, consider it. If you can build it faster, better, cheaper and in the same amount of time, do it.
3) Know the features of your tools, and the benefits any tools need to give your solution. You should be familiar with or at least aware of many of the tools out there that you may or may not integrate.
4) Pick a language that is used to solve a lot of problems. Chances are you will find many great libraries and tools to build your software that will save your time. If you need something that delivers, can run, and you can lean on the smarts of others, use something established, or a language that can access .NET or Java easily if need be.
For each part of your software you recognize as a software component/package:
How do you decide whether a part should use software product or your own code?
(considering, that some tools are awesome, but will require much time to learn)
Ask yourself whether the component you are considering is a part of your product's main business core.
If not then it is usually better to use an existing solution and not send too much time on it.
If it is then make sure there is no existing product that is better than what you are planning. - It there is, consider purchasing licenses to it instead of developing your product.
Search online for similar components (commercial, open source and even articles/demo-source-code).
Do any of them implement all of your requirements from the components?
How much do they cost, would it cost you more to develop and maintain a similar component?
What are the license conditions? - Are they OK for your product?
If component includes a user-interface, is it plesent to look at and easy to use?
If you answered yes to all the above then do not develop the component yourself.
If not:
Is the component open source or published in an article / demo-code? - If so, it robust, could you take the code an improve it or use it as an example to help you write code that is more suitable for your requirements? - If so write your own code, use code as part of your own component that is not developed from scratch.
If your answer to the above is no, then you'll have to develop your own (or you're searching in the wrong places).
How do you choose the right software product?
See answers to 1.
How much time (as a percentage) should this stage of choosing the right product, if any, take, and how much time to evaluate a single product?
Clear an entire day, search for existing components, read about them (features, prices, reviews) and download + install up to 5 of them.
Clear another day evaluate 2-3 products, compare demos/examples, look at code, write 2 small examples of using each (same example different product).
If you choose more than 3, clear another day and test the others.
Is there a way-back, is it o.k to change your mind, after putting efforts in a product, and finding it not suitable?
Always design your software so that every component is replaceable.
This guarantees that there is always "a way back".
(Use interfaces & adapter design pattern, divide to many assemblies, connect all components as loosely as possible (using events, binding, as etc.) - loose coupling.
Even if you implement something yourself make sure there is a way back - sometime you may use the wrong technology/design and have to replace a component with a new one you develop/purchase.
Other rules of thumb:
Consider which application-wide technologies to use before considering each component.
Writing in assembly would take the longest, in C less, in C++ even less, in more modern languages such as C#, Java, Delphi even less.
Which has more of the self components that are relevant to you? What does your team have experience in.
If you are using .NET (C#), then WPF could help you lower the coupling between GUI and business logic and make a better looking GUI, however it take time to learn how to use it (a 5 day minimum course is very much recommended).
As in any art the difficulty is composing a good solution based on a very large possible solutions space. There as many ways to go about this as there are developers.
I’d normally spend some time understanding the problem and stating it clearly and succinctly as possible, preferably in a written form. The problem description should be completely abstracted away from any possible solutions. Next I’d normally list available constraints that will need to be applied to the solution (time, budget, legal, political, performance, usability, skill availability within team and so on).
Then the theory goes that you need to look on the market for something that solves the problem and meets the constraints at the same time. In practise, the process is not that straight-forward: you try to identify market categories that are likely to be useful, then research them, see what is available and continuously try to reduce the gap between the constraints and capabilities as much as possible, often by going back and revisiting and re-negotiating the constraints.
A few generic tips:
During the research keep coming back to the original problem.
There is always more than one solution, try to extend breadth (concentrating on very different ways of solving the problem) of the search space before going deeper.
Be clear on a number of options it’s worth researching, and amount of time worth spending on each of them before making a decision whether to investigate further.
It’s seldom worth finding an optimal solution, especially then technological landscape keeps changing very rapidly. Look for a solution that is good enough: “The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less”.
It’s rarely worth turning to users for help (unless they are software experts) on choosing between several options. If you’ve got a number of options all looking equally attractive that means you need to go back and understand the original problem better, it’s likely you’ve missed a requirement or two.
Some further notes on using third-party components (refers to GUI components, but easy to apply to other software areas as well).
And even more notes on scoping, composing and researching for a project.
How do you decide whether a part should use software product or your own code? (considering, that some tools are awesome, but will require much time to learn)
Ask your self two questions.
1) Is it a mature product. If yes, then
2) How long it would take to create the functionality it provides on your own. If that value times your hourly rate is greater than the cost of the product, then use that product.
How do you choose the right software product?
Consult your network of other developers. Have they used it, did they run into problems. Consult the interweb. Create a prototype using the product. Does it work well? Any major bugs?
How much time (as a percentage) should this stage of choosing the right product, if any, take, and how much time to evaluate a single product?
It depends on the size of the project, and the criticality of the product to the success. Most of the time, you are going to be able to get a high level view of the product in a very short amount of time.
It may be just a few minutes using it before you say, nope - not ready for prime time. If it makes past that, a day or two of experimentation may tell you that it passes muster for your project.
If it's a huge project with many developers, then you probably want to spend more time doing a prototype application with it to be sure it's worth investing all that time in.
Is there a way-back, is it o.k to change your mind, after putting efforts in a product, and finding it not suitable?
If you find it's not working out, there's nothing wrong with going back. In fact you probably have to. Ideally you will find this out early. Not at the 11th hour. Again, this is the purpose of prototyping.
There are already some really good answers here, so I won't repeat it, however there is one point you should definitely consider, and though I would have thought its obvious I havent seen it mentioned here yet:
The personnel you have available to implement the solution, their core competency, and their general level of competence.
Who you have to implement this (assuming it's a team, and not just yourself - but relevant even if its just you, too...) can have a HUGE effect on the outcome. If you don't have experienced programmers to help you develop this, you're better off looking for some OTS product to do the work for you... Or, even if you have programmers who are not likely to succeed, you still might want to find a solution with lower overall project risk.
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Lately I've been feeling like I'm being pulled in different directions. In my company there are a lot of forces demanding my time and I'm having a hard time deciding which direction to focus my energies.
I have the choice of several different coding projects, some of which could demand a lot more work over time, and present unknown challenges.
How do you decide what to work on next in the big picture? Grease the squeakier wheels? Low hanging fruit? (translation: easier projects)
Do you have a system for determining and reaching your goals?
We've used a value graph to identify projects based on value vs. effort, as a part of lean.
A few of the things I ask that affect what I work on :
Are any of my tasks holding up other developers or keeping other people from being able to do their work? If so, it'll probably get done first.
Do I have any tasks with deadlines coming up? If so, it might be the next candidate to work on, unless I can justify something else being worth the task slipping schedule.
Will work on any of the tasks affect (make obsolete / make easier / make more difficult) any of the other tasks I have? If so, it might get moved up.
Is there a good chance that any of the tasks will change (requirements still not concrete / other tasks out there that might affect it), making time spent on it now likely wasted? If so, it gets moved down.
Are there any things that just really bug me, that I think I can get done before anyone notices that I'm not working on whatever my boss thinks is the highest priority. (which is justified because it'll distract me from thinking about the other things).
Are there any tasks I should work on while things are still fresh in my mind?
... other than that, we go with a combination of whatever sort of fixed deadlines I have, what tasks I have that might be holding up other people, what the boss wants first (I like this boss, and I only have one giving me tasks ... in the past, I'd've answered differently), which ones seem more interesting, which ones I can get done quickly to just get them off the list, etc.
There have been times when I've had more than one manager, and I just had to put everything on a list on a whiteboard, and told them to number them (17 items, which kept growing). Management balked, but I was sick of getting bitched out at meetings week after week with stuff not being done, and having to go through the list of every 'emergency' task I was given. (and being told that any manager in the department was allowed to task me in the case of an emergency ... which was something like 30 people ... and being bitched at when I asked who got to decide if it was an emergency or not.)
When I have the choice: whatever seems to be the biggest challenge with the most fun attached.
Fun + challenge = rapid learning, to me.
And sometimes that takes me away from the technical stuff - people can be a fun challenge too.
I tend to weigh 4 items based on things when deciding what to work on next:
Is this item a requirement for something else?
Can I work on this item yet (ie, am I waiting on something for it)?
How fast/easily can I get this item done?
How interesting do I find the work required for this item?
I my current team (working on a variety of Business Intelligence software projects), we've recently started adopting a variant of classical "agile" project planning and estimating -- everybody seems to be pretty happy with it so far, including us (developers of different levels of experience), the product managers (highly technical people, typically also with some development experience, but mostly interested in the business side of things), management (pretty technical at the level we report to, but also less-technical, more-businessy directors and VPs), and other stakeholders (users and would-be users of our software). But, of course, it is early times, and we'll adjust as we go along. (In the past few years I used other variants of this in very different application areas, such as cluster management software; but I've often also used more ad-hoc, less-structured approaches).
The outline is as follows. At each iteration (we're currently on 2-week iteration cycles), the PMs choose some "elementary units of business value" that they might like to get from projects in our area -- a typical unit would be one feature, a bug fix, some optimization aspect, etc. In a small meeting with tech leads and one or two senior engineers, each unit is decomposed into engineering tasks (and dependencies among tasks are identified). In a larger whole-team meeting, the relative "cost" of each task (how much time, roughly, it will take to perform that task relative to other tasks) is collectively assessed (we're using completely abstract units of effort we call "points", though I've seen other teams use less abstract units such as "ideal engineering-days"). The costs assessed include unit testing and technical documentation.
The tasks, each with its assessed cost, go on what's called "the backlog" for the team, together with "internal restructuring" tasks (typically refactorings that will deliver no new user-observable plus, but will make further development and maintenance more productive), also with assessed costs and a summary of expected benefits (which must be expressed in ways understandable to the PMs -- fortunately, as I said, ours are highly technical people). A refactoring may also, by engineering team consensus, be deemed a prerequisite of certain business-requested tasks (e.g. "makes no sense to work further on component X until class Y, too large, is properly split, which will take N points").
The PMs now get to order the tasks in the backlog in any way they prefer, based on the business value that completing the units those tasks make up would deliver, subject to the dependency constraints. They have a good idea of roughly how many "points" the team may accomplish in a 2-week iteration (our "velocity") based on past results, so they try to make sure some business-valuable release can be performed at the end of the iteration (as opposed to having many business-valuable thingies "in flight"... but none completed and deliverable to stakeholders yet!-).
The team then devotes about 80% of its time and effort to tackling the top-priority tasks as designed by the PMs (including pair programming some of the time, for particularly urgent tasks or for situations where one team member needs to learn more about some technology or some part of the codebase, and another team member who's an expert in those is available for pairing up with them for a while). The priority order is an important indication, but it's not entirey rigid (e.g. if the top task requires extensive work in Java, and the second one requires it in Python, I may well pick the second one, as my relative productivity will be enormously higher that way -- and vice versa for a team member who's a Java guru, etc etc).
"Priority 0" aka "Code Red" issues may arise at any time, and, if they do, by definition they will take priority over any other task (and be accounted for only retroactively in the planning, to make sure velocity is assessed properly). But, as we do a pretty good job with testing, release engineering, and other quality-assurance practices, those emergencies are fortunately few and far between.
This, plus other "mandatory" ways for engineers to spend their time (training courses, all-hands meetings, quarterly performance self-evaluations and peer reviews, etc), is supposed to account for about 80% of engineers' time -- the remaining 20% being time each engineer should devote to "something completely different" ("blue-sky" exploratory projects, "egineering community" efforts, open-source contributions, etc, etc), not directly related to the projects at hand. Nobody actually measures the hours precisely, but that's still a useful guideline (I keep thinking of ways to make measurement easy and painless that I could implement in my 20% time, to help me allocate time and effort more precisely, but I haven't actually gotten any round tuits yet;-).
Easy. I ask my boss.
High value + Low risk.
Only go on high value + something with higher risk if you already have a track record in the company / credibility.
Easy: What is the highest and best use of my time.
If I am involved in a project and that isn't the answer to that question, I ask myself why I'm working on it and how soon can I finish it.
:) On Job i left this decision n my Project Leader and Team Leader, As they know better
"What is project priority"
At home, i do where i see fun, learning and challenge
When I have a choice about which job to start next I try to find a balance between two things: quick, easy fixes that are highly visible (e.g. fix the non-critical bug that a user has been complaining about) and taking on a project where I can use something I've been learning about. I find if I alternate between those types of jobs I can keep myself and my co-workers happy.
I'd look at what has the highest priority from management's perspective for an intial prioritizing of upcoming projects. If they are all priority 1 projects, then there are a few other factors that may help my decision:
Do I see how valuable the project will be to the organization? Is this the type of thing that really helps with the competitive advantage that we have?
Does there seem to be a buildup of projects of a specific size? For example, are lots of little projects being ignored for the few really big ones? If so, I may take some of the little ones that may be seen as quick wins that may help my team look good.
Do any of these projects use my strengths? This can be a bit hard to determine but it could help a lot with motivation, at least using the Marcus Buckingham interpretation of a strength.
What teams and structures are in place for the other projects? I don't think I'd want to join a project that looks like a massive train wreck about to happen. Is there enough structure so that I won't go off and do my own thing that may hurt the project's chances of success? Do I believe I could handle working with X using methodology Y and technology Z?
Those are a few of how I'd look at making the decision, along with talking to my manager as part of this is his job, right?
You should ask yourself a question. Are you pursuing a general IT career path which may or may not include your current company, or, do you intend to have a long career with your current employer?
If you intend to have a succesful IT career moving around differnet employers then, sadly, the most succesful strategy is "buzzword collecting". Identify the current/next big thing and try to get it on your CV. e.g. FInd a trivial AJAX with SOA back end project which may never go to production, this will enhance your value to future employers even if the project had little value to your current temployer.
If you plan on a long career with your current employer, the most succesful strategey would be to align your goals with the business. For instance the most critical project for the business may be upgrading an old unsexy VB/Oracle stock control package to include an ancient EDIFACT interface with a new supplier. If you are seen as a key player in the success of such a project you will rank very highly (and rightly so) in your employers esteem, and your opinions and advice will be taken seriously.
Since you didn't specify whether you talk from developer or manager perspective, I'll try to cover both.
Providing a framework for prioritisation of efforts is a management’s direct job. The immediate day-to-day prioritisation may stay with management or be handed over to developers.
The decision who should work on what and when in average company is likely to be perceived as a matter of power, control and prestige by both groups and one who makes the most prioritisation decisions as clearly more important player.
In shrewd companies, however, it is well understood that decisions have several interesting properties:
Each takes time and effort to make, which is diverted from doing the actual work.
Every decision is a trade off
To make a good trade off one who makes the decision needs all the right information in her or his disposal
Subsequently, management doesn’t have all the information to make every decision and nor they likely to have right information to make a good trade off in each case, but developers cannot spend their time doing hundreds of prioritisation decisions per day instead of producing software, nor do all necessary co-ordination.
Hence the solution is for management to create a simple framework for task assessment and prioritisation and hand it to developers who will quickly apply it on case by case basis, filling the gaps. In management lingo such framework is called strategy; it saves time by removing repetitive redundant decision making, gives focus and consistency to the efforts, and provides direction. It should be detailed enough to remove the burden of re-assessing the situation each time, but loose enough to allow developers to make right choices when it matters.
The framework itself may give very straightforward rules for making decisions or, alternatively, provide some analytical methods such as Pareto, SWOT, Cost Benefit, Expected Return analysis or Porter Five Forces etc. However, it is worth keeping the rules simple, unambiguous and as straightforward as possible.
Joel Spolsky made available to the world several very good internal software strategy documents written in plain English. Not all documents are directly to do with developing software (showing that it viable actually to have a different unrelated decision frameworks for various aspects of the company life). Also since the documents are several years apart it’s actually possible to see how these frameworks kept changing to suit the situation:
Fog Creek Compensation
Our .NET Strategy
Set Your Priorities
Fruity treats, customization, and supersonics: FogBugz 7 is here
If you're intrested in choosing what things to work on from a personal point of view one of the best advices around in my opinion is the one given by Paul Graham in his essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known".
Fundamentally as software developers we are business enablers. Your priorities should be in tandem with business priorities and be pragmatic between quick wins and larger strategic initiatives. Effort and Priority make an excellent matrix in which to score projects taking the least effort/highest priority first.
From the tone of your question it sounds like business priorities are either unclear or there is conflicting direction between stakeholders. This is the place to start and it will make your decisions much easier once it is resolved.
You really need to discuss this with the business because only they can tell you what has the highest value to them. After that, I would go after the items that carry the most risk because if something is going to cause a schedule to slip it's best to know early rather than late.
If you're having trouble with what the business priorities - usually caused by being on multiple projects with different stakeholders who all think that their project is the most important - you can try getting both stakeholders in a room to discuss which project is higher priority. Or you could delegate that negotiation to your manager as that is actually his job.
I tend to work on multiple projects at one time, so I will work on a harder project, make some headway, and when I get stuck and need to think about how to do the next part, I will go to some low-hanging fruit, so that I can continue to make headway, as I give my subconscious time to work on the harder problem.
But, it really depends on your priorities. I have never been good at just trying to impress people, so I just quietly go about trying to get work done.
If we're talking in a work environment, i go through and just prioritise things - what is mission critical, what is urgent, and then anything else just gets put into the list and it gets done in the order it comes in.
As for picking the next big project at work, i like to do what offers the greatest challenge. I had been working as a developer for a year and i had the opportunity to do some work for a very large company working with some security experts and doing things i'd never done. So i chose that, and it looks great on my resume.
In terms of personal development work (not as in self help), again i'll offer something that challenges me. It's got to be something that i haven't done before. It doesn't matter if someone else has done it - i haven't, and i can learn from that.
In the end, it all comes down to what value it holds for you, and what value it holds for the client. Luckily, i've got a few years of sales experience under my belt as well, so i can easily sell the products i need to to clients.
If your problem is one of procrastination, then perhaps you need to focus on getting rid of those jobs that you fear tackling most - or at least making some forward progress on them to reduce the stress of considering how far behind you are.
This book, by Mark Forster, provides some good tips.
Failing that, you might want to produce an iteration plan. Let everyone vote for jobs - whatever gets the most gets scheduled right away. that way every stakeholder, including yourself gets some input into scheduling.
I would ask the boss, if they wont make the decision then I would go for the project which I felt was going to be best for the company, in profit and moral of the team.
If I was torn between too projects i would go for the one that sounds like I can develop my skills more and be interested in most.
If a project sounds exciting I become more driven and determined too :)
Given the nature of your question, I'm assuming this is all work that somebody thinks you should be doing, but there clearly isn't enough time to do it all. Therefore, you are just looking for priority knowing full well that some items are likely not to get done.
Impact/Risk if the item isn't done.
Visibility - Does anybody else really care about this task
Alignment with department goals - weed out things that really aren't your job
Alignment with company goals - weed out things that aren't important to your company's business.
Enjoyment factor
Alignment with career goals - Many people would rank this item significantly higher. Depends how important your career is versus what you do today. I've rank today's enjoyment a bit higher than long term career goals. Some projects may be horrible, but they can move along your career.
I guess it depends on how much is on the list. If there's a lot of low hanging fruit that's been on the list for a while, it may be worth while to take some time and clean some of it off. That way, there would be less demands on the available time and potentially more time or incentive available to work on the big projects.
Plus it can be cathartic to be able to cross a bunch of stuff off the list.
I will usually start working on a larger project first. Then when I feel I need to step away from it for a bit, usually so I can approach it with a clear mind later, I try to kick out some of the quick one-off tasks or simple projects.
I know that isn't very descriptive, but calling the occasional audible for distraction seems to work out well for me when tackling a big project list.
I tend to look at project from a learner prospective. I tend to choose a project that will help me learn something new, I also look for "cool" and intersting as well.
On tthe other hand you can choose your next project according to where it would lead you. Ask yourself if you have a career goal that project X will help you achieve. Perhaps a high profile project is better then intersting - at least for a short while.
One way to defide is to define several key pints that matter to you (i.e. new technology, intersting etc.) and try to rate each opportunity and see which gets the higher score.
Let's say someone asked me to build them a youtube clone with a lot of customizations to support a whole bunch of wacky things they want to do.
How do I decide if it's better for me to build from scratch vs. build off a white label or open source product?
Because of my past work experience, I am biased to build from scratch because then I will know the intimate details of what I'm building. This lends to better post-release support and scalability. I never feel comfortable working on off-the-shelf solution for which no one on my team has prior experience working with. I'm not quite sure what I'm getting. I have no idea if it will do all I want to do, how well documented it is, and whether I'll shoot myself in the head 6 months down the road.
There are so many off the shelf solutions I've never used, how do I evaluate them all before I decide whether it's a good idea to build from scratch?
What if I'm building this for someone on a tight budget, but they also expect a lot of support from me down the road? (ie. buying a solution fits the budget, but i'm worried about supporting it afterwards)
In building a clone i would be more comfortable going from scratch because you have a great and proven example to work towards. (The ultimate spec!) If you try to eval/implement some other system to match an existing product you'll be much more likely to run into serious headaches when the base code doesn't work towards your end goal. i also agree with all of your maintenance considerations.
Also, evaluating systems is time consuming and not foolproof. i once spent a month deciding between a 3rd party grid and in the end it was basically a roll of the dice. i evaluated a dozen products for a month. How how much functionality could i possibly touch? 5% maybe.
From the posted question:
"Because of my past work experience, I am biased to build from scratch because then I will know the intimate details of what I'm building."
No offence intended, but it sounds like you have Not Invented Here Syndrome. This is considered generally "bad thing"(tm).
On the other hand Joel Spolsky has a nice defense with a piece of advice:
"If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what." -- Joel Spolsky
So, is it your core business to make wacky youtube clones?
Question #1: what is the long-term plan for maintaining this site?
Looking back on decades of build/buy decisions this is the single most important question that should have been asked at the beginning.
If you can find an open source project with license terms that you are comfortable with (for example, not GPL unless you plan on releasing your work under the GPL), you should at least look at their code to get a general idea of how some similar projects worked. Then, you should decide whether the open source project is similar enough to what you want to do that you could build off it. If so, build off it. If not, give credit for the ideas it gave, maybe borrow a snippet from it here and there, and write your own (mostly) from scratch.
If the work you would build off of is closed source or open source but so complicated that you'd never be able to understand or modify it, then you should roll your own. To me what it comes down to is whether you'd be able to fix the off-the-shelf solution if something went wrong or it didn't do exactly what you want.
Your having no experience of the off the shelf product doesn't mean no one has had experience with it. Look around the web, ask here, if other's have had good experiences with a particular product you probably will too.
And on the maintenance side the people doing the maintaining a year down the line may not have been involved in the original development anyway, makes no difference to them if the code was made in house or not, so long as it is well written.
Decide a list of factors that are important and go through each product at various levels of detail :D
Collect more information (investigation) if estimation is not possible.
Do the estimation of costs and gains of both solutions, then you will have the decision, even it is possibly not doing the project at all.
Actually, the estimation/investigation includes finding all things you can leverage.
This is how a project starts. Good luck!
You could quantify your options a little more to help your decision.
If you do some preliminary estimation on what you would need to build and rate each part's complexity you can make a rough order of magnitude guess on how long it would take you to build. (This requires a little thought on the design up front.) Next, if you're working at an hourly rate, calculate how much your labor for that would be, increase by 1/3 to account for unforeseen problems, and add in the cost of any tools or packages you plan to integrate.
Do the off-the-shelf parts do exactly what you want, or will they require customization? How much customization? How long will that take? What's the cost of your labor?
Compare that cost to the cost of buying the off-the-shelf components. Is the savings substantial?
If you can identify a package that does about 90% of what your user wants, then go with the package, but ONLY if the user is willing to forgo that 10% that the package doesn't support. Most users are in fact sensible, and will jump at this option, particularly as it will be far, far cheaper than a custom development. But if the user insists on 100% compliance with their needs, then go for custom development, and plan and charge accordingly.
it all comes down to features, constraints, extensibility, and cost
if the off-the-shelf product has all three and costs less than what it would take you to write it, then buy it.
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The question might seem trivial, but it's an actual problem: when you're working on a project, do you do any kind of architecture design before actually starting coding? Do you spend much time working together with a customer to get a detailed specs/usecases/mockups?
During coding, do you alter those architectural decisions made before? Do you go back to the customer with new set of specs/usecases/mockups?
I'm wondering, what's a good balance between all those non-coding actions and coding itself, from your experience?
Update:
Ok, so from the anwsers so far it seems like there are 2 approaches:
design early, then sit and code to avoid late fixes
minimize the design alone part, instead do iterative development (agile methodologies seem to prefer it that way).
I guess which way to go depends on the project, team and customer... am I right?
That which minimises the total time spent ;-)
It heavily depends on the kind of project, but generally speaking it's better to "waste" time over-designing and specifying requisites than finding out later that something was wrong and come the whole way back to fix it.
I read something about quantitative measurements of the impact of poor design decisions in "The Mythical Man-Month" or maybe in a book called something like "Software Requirements Pro Practices" from Microsoft Press, I think the time wasted in a late fix (near product delivery) was about 10x than in early stages.
If you do agile, design and coding are the same thing. In my experience it is good to pair program during the very first stage of the project...
Have a look at scrum, agile and waterfall. This is related to project management not programming per se.
Architecture also becomes easier once you have built enough applications within a domain or a platform. In PHP, if you use Joomla, Symfony or codeigniter then your scaffolding and architecture is already in place. Same for ASP.NET MVC.
My personal experience tells me that you should consider different factors. There's no silver bullet. My personal list follows, grown mostly by experience.
If you are developing something that is well known in details, the development team is sparse and with difficulty to communicate efficiently all together, the team has strong or huge dependencies towards the work of other teams, and what you are developing has a fundamental long term importance that will be difficult to change in the future (eg. file formats), go for a very long design phase, akin to a waterfall model. Also, you should spend a lot of design if you plan to develop a rather complex application, and you have to deeply consider all the possible interactions between features before coding. Coding takes very little time compared to design. Also, you should consider this if it somehow important to keep efficient record of how the application behaves from a very high level point of view, and if your team tends to be highly unstable, so that your knowledge stays on paper, rather than in people's brain.
if you have to implement something brand new and to do research on, you want feature as soon as possible, growing the application from fast feedback, you have a pool of geeks that work in the same room, are very committed to your cause, love programming and they are passionate to share and build together, go for agile methods.
if you are in between to the previous two cases, go for an iterative approach. I normally choose a 3 months schedule. When I code alone, I work agile-like, mostly because I have to cope with frequent disruption, so I add feature by feature. However, I release iterative, namely I don't plan to do an official, stable release before the third iteration. I want space to learn the field, do mistakes, and correct them before committing to maintain some stupid choice.
if you code in academia, you are screwed, because you have some of the issues in 1 without the manpower to accommodate them, and some of the issues in 2 without the easy communication required by agile methods.
roughly 50/50. whenever ive analysed my project schedules, it turns out about 50% of the time goes into design, project management, quality control, and auxiliry tasks. the remaining 50% is coding. if i dont see that 50/50 ratio, i worry.
mind you, this is using traditional waterfall model (which is more suited to custom-app development). agile methods are better for shrink-wrapped software in my opinion.
I would say it's roughly 50/50, no matter the "methodology" or project type. It only varies in how those 50% design are distributed. And that may depend on the project, but most of all it depends on the people who do the work, and how they are "wired". It's more a matter of psychology than methodology.
Some people (I'd say the more cautious characters) need a more detailed mental map before they start coding. If they don't have that map out of prior experience, they will need more "investigation" time up front.
Others yet like to just "jump in" into coding with only a rough mental map, and work out the details as they go.
Somewhere in between is to do the elaboration via spikes and prototypes, and develop the "big picture" on top of that running code. For me personally this tends to yield the best results, and the least waste. (After all, prototyping is, in a way, a test-first approach applied on solution ideas. You get an idea, test it out in a spike or prototype, then implement/integrate it with the main code base.)
My advice is: Find out the style that feels best to you personally, and stick to it. That's going to be pretty sure the style you are going to be most effective with.
Those two things are tightly coupled. Well at first stage, you are definitely will spend some time to make design decision. Then you will have to start coding and almost in all cases you will came up with some improvement decision for your previous design.
After all it will depend on delivery date and how much time you have at all and then to decide accordingly how you going to balance it. In general you make a startup design and then during coding you will update and change it. Also is a good practice to deeply involve your customer in design decision during development stage to force him be aware of it and how much of your time you will spend on each change.
The longer the period between when you write your specification and the time you start coding will increase the chance that requirements will change. So, to answer your question, as soon as possible....
If your suffering from too much requirement creep then I would suggest implementing smaller iterations of releases (if possible) and then creating new requirements/specifcation documents for each of these samller phases.
If you can't do this.... make sure you have a good change management process sin place.
My google-fu is failing drastically, but I recently read something to the effect of:
"Spend 6 months coding, 6 months designing and 6 months testing. The good news is, they're all the same 6 months."
It's important to design enough to have a map of what you are trying to code, and how it relates to the rest of the system. You can't just code most large projects - they're too big, and usually involve multiple components. I've done that when I was young, and you end up with a big ball of mud, or stay up all night for a week refactoring it.
What I tend to do now is design down to the package level, and assign roles to components. On large systems getting to the component selection stage can take several months, and involve some trail and prototyping coding.
Then the APIs and implementations of each package are evolved, based on what messages the functionality require, and how the clients of the packages evolve to cause the emergence of further requirements or constraints. I usually evolve an API by designing a pure interface (by writing the code for it) with unit tests for each known use case, then implement it. So there is some writing of code involved in designing - the best representation of the API is usually the code and inline documentation, and it's easiest to confirm that the client can perform the actions required to satisfy a use case ( and the code to do so is not excessively complex ) by writing code which exercises the API in that way, and that code trivially becomes a unit test for the implementation of the API when it arrives. But the code written during 'designing' isn't the code which supplies the implementation of the API. For APIs with low coupling ( so can be changed without breaking too many clients ), I'll switch between designing and implementing modes rapidly; for ones with higher coupling, I'll typically publish the API and use-case examples for peer review before committing too implementing them.
As aleemb said, this really is a project management question. I suggest you read up on several methodologies, find the useful and not-so-useful parts of each, and evaluate your own circumstances (team size/experience, customer engagement and commitment levels, what's done in your organization, schedule/budget, etc.) and come up with the best schedule you can. It really all just depends on your specific circumstances.
Think about how many people are going to be involved in writing the software.
If it's just a one-developer job, maybe take a smaller percentage for design. If you're going to have 30 people working on it, you probably want a lot bigger fraction for the design.
Getting teams of developers to write software is much like partitioning software up across multiple CPU's - you are going to get the best return for added CPU (read 'developer') when you can minimize the necessary communication between them. You sure don't want to get 10's of k-loc into your project before the developers start discussing architectural issues.
Now you could probably also make the case that, when you do a better job with the design phase, the coding will actually take less time and be less painful. Measure twice and cut once, and all that.
Also, you probably should think about the likelihood of the project being 'put on hold'; design artifacts have much better shelf life than immature code.
Depends on your chosen methodology.
Traditionally with Big Design Up Front or Waterfall you spend 90% of the time designing and 10 % of the time coding. You then spend another 90% of the time handling all the changes that the initial design missed. And another 90% of the time chasing bugs.
With modern Agile development you spend 10% of the time designing and 90% of the time coding. then another 90% handling all the changes that the customer representative forgot to mention and another 90% of the time chasing bugs.
The IT department I work in as a programmer revolves around a 30+ year old code base (Fortran and C). The code is in a poor condition partially as a result of 30+ years of ad-hoc poorly thought out changes but I also suspect a lot of it has to do with the capabilities of the programmers who made the changes (and who incidentally are still around).
The business that depends on the software operates 363 days a year and 20 hours a day. Unfortunately there are numerous outages. This is the first place I have worked where there are developers on call to apply operational code fixes to production systems. When I was first, there was actually a copy of the source code and development tools on the production servers so that on the fly changes could be applied; thankfully that practice has now been stopped.
I have hinted a couple of times to management that the costs of the downtime, having developers on call, extra operational staff, unsatisifed customers etc. are costing the business a lot more in the medium, and possibly even short term, than it would to launch a whole hearted effort to re-write/refactor/replace the whole thing (the code base is about 300k lines).
Ideally they'd be some external consultancy that could come in and run the rule over the quality of the code and the costs involved to keep it running vs rewrite/refactor/replace it. The question I have is how should a business go about doing that kind of cost analysis on software AND be able to have confidence in that analysis? The first IT consultants down the street may claim to be able to do the analysis but how could management be made to feel comfortable with it over what they are being told by internal staff?
We recently decided to completely rewrite large portions of our business code from scratch, and it has not gone as well as we had hoped. I've seen a lot of quotes saying you should never try to rewrite anything from scratch, and now I see why. I would recommend starting small - don't try to rewrite the whole thing at once. Identify the large problem areas and focus on refactoring small portions of the system at a time. Since there is 30+ years worth of work in the system, it will take a long time to get it back to a reasonable state. We had about 5-8 years worth of work to rewrite, and it has been difficult. I can't imagine 30+ years of work!
First, the profile of the consultant you need is very specific. Unless you can find someone who worked in a similar domain with the same languages, don't hire him.
Second, there's a 99% probability (I like dramatic numbers) the analysis will go as follow:
Consultant explores the application
Consultant does understand 10% of the application
Time's up, time for the report
Consultant advices a complete rewrite (no refactoring, plain rewrite)
So you may as well make the economy of what the consultant will cost.
You have only two solutions here:
Keep with the actual source code but determine proper methods to fix problems so that you have a very long run refactoring that is progressly made by those who know the application
Get a secondary team to make a new application to replace the old one
If I talk about a secondary team, it's because you cannot bring just one architect to make the new application and have the old team working with him:
They're too busy on the old application
There will be frictions because the newcomer will undoubtedly underestimate the task at hand
I talk from experience, believe me.
If you go the "new application" way don't put your hopes too high. You'll end up with an application that has less than half the functionalities of the current one, simply because you cannot cram 30+ years of special case and exceptional situation fixes into a freshly design software.
Oh, also, if your developers happen to tell you they have a plan, by all means, hear them out. They most probably know what they are talking about.
The first thing that comes to mind is that you are prematurely addressing the rewrite/refactor/replace argument. The first step two steps I would recommend would be:
Unit tests
QA
It's well within engineering scope to implement these. Unit tests are an essential preliminary step before any reasonable refactor or rewrite could possibly take place. By 'unit test' I mean wrap each function call with corresponding code that proves the code works for all known conditions. In complex retrofits this may not actually happen at the most granular level but any automated tests will help immensely.
And QA - have an independent (and aggressive) quality assurance team that rigorously tests beta releases before production. Their test plans and test procedures become essential for any kind of replacement effort.
Once you've got the code under control, then you are in a position where the business can reasonably consider massive changes.
Just a note about your comment about external consultants - no consultancy will ever care enough about the code to provide realistic quality assurance. QA ends up being married to the hip of business defending the company bottom line. It's an internal function ultimately and an external consultant can't provide much more than getting you started really.
I think that your description provides all of the necessary information on code quality (lack thereof). The fact that so many support resources are required also indicates the high costs involved with maintaining the existing system.
As I answered here, a good approach to consider is refactoring one piece of the system at a time until everything works at an acceptable level. I agree with Joel re not throwing away existing code (see Things You Should Never Do. Parts of your code work, so you should leave those in place whenever possible, and focus on the sections that lead to downtime.
Andy also makes a great point about starting small as well.
Another thing to try, is reviewing the processes around the system. When you do this, you should try to determine what failure situations are caused directly or indirectly by user action?, are there configuration or environment problems? If you are having trouble fixing the code directly, then you can still prop it up by dealing with external issues more effectively.
Read the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code (also see the short PDF version) and surround the code with automated tests, as instructed in that book.
Refactor the system little by little. If you rewrite some parts of the code, do it a small subsystem at a time. Don't try to make a Grand Redesign.
The code has been around for 30 years?
Development paradigms have shifted substantially in the last three decades in many ways, and most relevant to your predicament, I feel, is in terms of the amount of time (in man days) required to create something to input->process->output something.
300,000 lines of code 30 years ago, could probably fit into 100,000 lines or less today, and expending fewer man hours(?) This could seem optimistic/ridiculous to some, but on the other hand is achievable, depending on the type of application in question. You have given no indication as to the classification of system - is it a real-time manufacturing process control system of sorts with sensors and actuators tied to it? An airline booking system ? Does it post-process some backlog of data? In other words could it be rebuilt in something like Java and quickly with an agressive, smallish team? Have the requirements been documented, and if so do they need updating or redeveloping from scratch? Is human safety a factor?
Just a quick sanity check, I think whether or not you should rebuild depends on (any order means the same thing):
Number of code dudes required.
Level of expertise of said dudes.
Which languages do not fit.
Which languages do fit.
How much it costs to use chosen language(s) them in terms of hardware and software.
How much does the business depend on this to stay alive.
Is it really too much downtime, or are you just nitpicking? (maybe they really don't care, but pretend to).
Good luck with that!
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I often find that I do a less than complete work on a feature, especially in the Design phase. I detect several reasons:
I'm over-optimistic
I feel the need to provide quick solutions, so sometimes I fool myself into thinking the design is fool-proof when in fact it's still full of holes, just to get the job done faster. Of course I end up paying dearly later.
I'm aware of this behavior of mine for some time, yet I still find I don't manage to compensate. Have you encountered similar problems? How do you approach solving them?
I use a couple of techniques. The first is a simple paper to-do list. In the morning I write down my tasks for the day. I try to work on a task until I can cross it off. I cross it off only when I'm done to my own satisfaction. My to-do list helps me stay focused. When an interruption comes in, I can consciously choose whether it is important enough to interrupt what I'm doing now.
The second technique I use is to give up on the idea of "done" for a design. Instead, I focus on what I've started calling "successions", where a design goes through predictable stages. Each stage supports the current functionality well and will be succeeded at some point by the next stage. This lets me do a good job, a job I can be proud of, without over-designing.
I have the intuition that there is a small catalog of such successions (like http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/FirstOneThenMany.html) that would cover most of design. In the meantime, I try to remember that "sufficient to the day are the troubles thereof".
I run into this problem a lot.
My solution is a notebook. (The old fashioned paper kind).
I write out how I'm planning on implementing the solution as an bulleted overview list, and then I try and flesh out each point on the list.
Often, during that process, I come across issues I hadn't thought of.
Of course, the 80/20 rule still applies... I still come across things when I'm actually doing the implementation that hadn't occurred to me, but with experience these tend to diminish.
EDIT: If I'm still not sure at the end of this process, I put together a throwaway prototype testbed... It's important to make sure it's throwaway, because otherwise you run the risk of including some nasty hacks in your real codebase.
It's very common to miss edge-cases and detail when you're in the planning phase of a project, especially in the software development field. Please don't feel that this is a personal failing; it's something endemic.
To counter this, many software development methodologies have emerged. Most recently there has been a shift by many development teams to 'agile' methods, where there is a focus on rapid development with little up-front technical design (after all, many complexities are only discovered when you actually begin developing). I'm currently using the Scrum system, which has been excellent in my small team:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_methods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29
If you find that your organisation will not accept what they may regard as a radical shift in approach, it may be worth investigating whether they will agree to the development of a prototype system. This means that you could code up a feature to investigate the technologies involved and judge whether it's feasible, without having to commit to full development, a quality bar, testing schedules etc. The prototype should be thrown away once the feasibility has been proved or disproved, then proper development may begin, including all that you've learned in the process.
If your problem is more related to time management, then I'd recommend the Getting Things Done approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_things_done). This is pragmatic and simple, concentrating on making you productive without overloading you with information that isn't immediately relevant to your current work. I've found that I get overwhelmed with project/feature ideas at times and it really helps to write everything down and file it for a later time when I have the resources available to work effectively.
I hope this helps and best of luck!
Communication.
The best way to not rush yourself into programming mistakes is communication. Yes, good ol' fashioned accountability. If another person in the office is involved in the process, the better the outcome. If a programmer just takes on the task without any concern for anybody else, then there is a higher possiblity for mistakes.
Accountability Checklist:
How do we support this?
Who needs to know what has changed?
Why are we doing this in the first place?
Will there be anybody who doesn't want this changed?
Will someone else understand how I did this?
How will the user perceive and use this change?
A skepticle comrad is usually good enough to help. Functional Specifications are good, they usually answer all of these thoughts. But, sometimes a conversation with another person can help you with it and you can get changes out the door faster.
I have learned, through years of mistakes (though still making them), that almost anything I want to use repeatedly, or distribute, needs to be designed properly. So getting burned enough times will end your optimism.
When getting pressure from management, I tell them I will have to put in the thought anyway, so I should do it when it's cheap. I think on paper as well, so I can actually prove that I'm doing something and it keeps my fingers on the keyboard, both of which provides a soothing effect to management. ;-)
At the risk of sounding obvious - be pessimistic. I had a few experiences where I thought "that should take a few hours" and it ended up taking a couple days because of all the little things that pop up unexpectedly.
By far the best way I've found to manage things is to (much like Andrew's answer) write out the design and requirements as a starting point. Then I go through and look for weak points in the design, gotchas and additional use cases etc. I try to look at this as a critical exercise - there's no code written yet, so this is the time to be totally ruthless and look for every weak point. Look for error conditions you'll have to handle, and whatever amount of time you think it will take to complete each feature/function, pad that amount by a lot. I've had times where I've doubled my initial estimate and still not been that far off the mark.
It's very hard as a programmer to realistically project debugging time - writing the code is easy to estimate, but debugging that into functioning, valid code is something else entirely. Therefore I find there's no exact science to it but I just pad tasks by a whole bunch, so that I have plenty of breathing room for debugging.
See also Evidence Based Scheduling which is a fascinating concept in scheduling developed by FogCreek for their FogBugz product.
You and the rest of the world.
You need more a more detailed design, more accurate estimate, and the willingness to accept that sometimes the optimal solution is not necessarily the best solution (e.g., you could code some loop in assembler to get optimal performance, but that's going to take a lot longer than just doing
for (i=1; i<=10; i++) {}
). Is the time spent doing it really worth it for an accounting package over a missile system.
I like to designing, but over time I've found that much design up front is a lot like building castles into the sky - it's too much speculation, however well-educated, missing critical feedback from actually implementing and using the design.
So today I'm much more into accepting that while implementing a design I will learn a lot of new stuff about it, and need to feed that learning back into the design. Doing that is a skill that is fun to learn, including the skills to keep a design flexible by keeping it simple, free of duplication and cohesive and decoupled, of changing the design in small, controlled steps (=refactoring), and writing the necessary extensive suite of automated tests that make this kind of changes safe.
This seems to be a much more effective approach to me than getting better at "up front design speculation" - and addtionally it makes me equally well prepared for the inevitable moment when the design needs to be changed due to a simply unforseeable change in the requirements.
Divide, divide, divide. List all the steps that will be required to finish the project, then list all the steps those steps will require to be concluded, and so on until you reach atomic items you are absolutely sure you can finish in a day or less. Add the duration of all these values to arrive at a length of time.
Then double it. Now you have a number that, if depressing, is at least somewhat realistic.
If possible "Sleep on your design" before publishing it. I find after I leave work, I usually think of things I have missed. This usually happens while I am lying in bed before falling asleep or even while showering the next day.
I also find it valuable to have a peer/friend that I trust review what I have before distributing it. Somebody else almost always sees something I didn't think of or miscommunicated.
I like to do as others stated here. Write down in pseudo code what the flow of your app will be. This immediately highlights some detailed areas that may require further attention that where not apparent up front.
Pseudo code is also readable to business users who can verify your approach meets their needs.
Using pseudo code also creates a nice set of methods that could be put to use as an interface in the final solution. Once the pseudo code is fairly tight, look for patterns and review some common GOF patterns. They do not have to be perfect but using them will sheild you from having to rewrite the code later during the revisions that are bound to come along.
Just taking an hour or two write psuedo code, yields some invaluable time saving pieces later on:
1. An object model emerges
2. The program's flow is clearly defined for others
3. It can be used as documentation of your design with some refinement
4. Comments are easier to add and will be clearer for someone else reviewing your code.
Best of luck to you!
I've found that the best way to make sure you've chosen a good design is to make sure that you understand the problem, know the limitations you have, and know what things are must-haves vs. nice-to-haves.
Understanding the problem will involve talking to the people who have the need and keeping them anchored to what needs to get done first instead of how they think it ought to get done. Once you know what actually has to happen, you can go back and talk over requirements about how.
Knowing your limitations may be quite easy: needs to run on the iPhone; has to be a web application; needs to integrate with the already-existing Java code and deployment setup; and so on. It may be quite difficult: you don't know what the potential size of your user base is (hundreds? thousands? millions?); you don't know whether you'll need to localize it (though if you're not sure, assume you will have to).
Must-haves vs, nice-to-haves: this is possibly the most difficult part. Users very often have emotional attachments to "requirements" ("It should look just like Excel") that are not actually part of the "has to happen" stuff. You often have to juggle functionality vs. desires to get an acceptable implementation. You can't always give everyone a pony.
Make sure you write all this down! Even if it evolves along the way, or the design is small, having a "this is what we're planning to do now" guide to refer to when you need ot make a decision about committing resources makes it easier to restrain yourself from implementing a really cool whiz-bang feature instead of a boring must-do.
Since you recognize that you feel the need to provide a quick solution, perhaps it will slow you down to realize that you can probably solve the problem faster and deliver it sooner if you spend more upfront time in design. For instance if you spend 3 hours designing and 30 hours writting code, it probably means that if you spend 6 hours designing you might need to only spend 10 hours writing code. (These are not actual figures just examples). You might try to quantify this for yourself on the next few projects you do. Do a couple where you behave as you normally would and see what ratio of design/codewriting/testing&debugging you actually do. Then on the next project deliberately increase the percentage of time you spend on design phase and see if it does shorten the time needed for the other phases. You will have to try for several projects on this as well to get a true baseline since the projects may be quite different. Do it as a test to see if you can improve your performance on the the other phases and thus deliver a faster product if you spend 20% more time or 50% more time or 100% more time on design.
Remember the later in the process you find the problem with a design the harder (and more time-consuming) it is to fix.