With the rapid change of technology there is more and more pressure on developers to deliver quickly – before what they are implementing is perceived as out of date. This pressure ofter results in products coming to market before they are ready – with bugs or other issues , resulting in a poor quality offering to the customer.There often follows a panic period to get the fixes out to the market.
One of the consequences of this pressure is that developers spend less time thinking and planning their tasks. There is always the urge to get started on the ‘real work’ as soon as possible and programme managers are probably less impressed with status reports that say something like ‘spent the week evaluating different ways to implement the task and discarded them all’. However spending that time thinking deeply about a task beforehand is one of the best ways to insure a quality product delivered on time.
I have always found writing software relatively easy – it is designing software that is hard. I believe the same applies to other forms of development, once you have precisely defined what your are doing the implementation becomes a lot easier.
This brings me to process. Up front thinking and designing time needs to be built into the development process. It is often there, but not given the prominence that it requires. Most managers will admit that their processes could be improved, however they probably don’t realise (or admit) that their processes are actually worse than they think they are.
Technology is often bought in in an attempt to improve and manage processes, but applying this technology without prerequisite thought and design can result in disaster.
Spending time and resources thinking is often the cheapest way to achieve goals whether they be improving a process or developing quality product. But in these days of high speed change we are all to tempted to just get on with it.
So please take a break and think about your next task before you head back into the maelstrom of development, process improvement or bug fixing