Rethinking Software Development.
As frustrating as it can be to work with the uninspired, sloppy developer, the contrary – the inspired-yet-misguided one – is several magnitudes worse. A few bugs and painful-to-maintain code pale in comparison to the disastrous results an improperly motivated developer can deliver.
Everything from the platform (“let’s try out Ruby!”) to the architecture (“can’t just have two tiers”) to the techniques used in the code itself (“we need an aspect-oriented framework”) can be – and often are – influenced more by the desire to learn the technology than to serve the actual business need. Pick the wrong platform or invent the wrong technique, and the project is inevitably doomed.
Having doomed more than one project as a result of my desire to challenge myself, I’ve come to learn that there are some essential rules that must be followed when developing business information systems.
1. Learn the Business. It’s preposterous to believe that you don’t need to understand the business in order to develop software for the business. Without understanding what their actual needs are, it’s impossible to give stakeholders what they actually need. That’s right: when they say they want a “new database for every day”, they don’t actually mean a new database for every day.
via Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – The Daily WTF.
