Letting go
Holding tight by jbelluch
How hard should you hold onto your ideas? Do you really need full control of everything happening around you? What about trusting people and finding the answers with them?
It is time to let go. Tomorrow is too late. Now is the time.
Back when I started building my first program, I never thought I would enter a religion war zone by making my initial steps in the software development world. There should be a warning sign for this on every tutorials and introduction textbooks about programming.
Warning ! You are making your first steps in dangerous zone. Prepare yourself or you will get sucked in as well.
Everyone seems to know what is best for everyone else. Client will tell you how you should use the session to get a better performing application. Your colleague will tell you how you should you the database to get the best performance possible. Your boss will tell you which colour you should use to make your application usable.
Developing software the hard way by Cliff Hanger
Let’s start with clients. Most clients I worked with wanted total control over the scope, the schedule and the cost of the project. They know how to do software development. One of the problems, is that they were given that control. More precisely, they were given the illusion of it. Giving that much control to your client is like developing upside down while being tight up. It is not going to work.
I think the first step toward redemption is to educate and explain to your clients what it is to develop software. It is surely not like manufacturing hammers.
One point I would like to emphasis is the requirements. I have seen way too often requirements made of all must-haves. I think it should have a good proportions of must-haves and nice to haves so that the scope become variable and can be adjusted to meet more important schedules or costs.
People in the software industry are known to have strong opinions. They will argue for hours over whether that technology is superior or better than another. They often suffer from the silver bullet syndrome, but the usual answer is it depends. Every solution has a cost, some advantages and some weaknesses. We should learn them and give educated answers about those technologies.
