E… ko Blog

[** not proof read yet - so send corrections not complaints **]
As my freelancing work has scaled up into a full on company (of one still). I have had to evolve from being a one-man coding band into a team leader/manager. This introduced, over the last few years, a slightly different way of working.

Phase I

Specification writing, normally involving doing Inkscape interface designs, along with a huge gnumeric code specification, detailing the database design, along with explaining all classes and templates need for a project.

Phase II

Outsourcing, either to third parties, or to team members within the office I work with. Including a roughly 50% complete code review.

Phase III

The oh sh*t, it’s getting urgent, we better fix the delivered code and make it work well enough for the client to start testing.

Phase IV

The what seems like never ending bug finding and fixing stage.

Where I am at present.

Two of the larger projects I have at present are in Phase II & III. One is being forced to go live, the other is halfway through development. Both being coded by different teams, however, what is interesting is that the issues that come up in the code reviews both, have been pretty similar.

The specification stage, perhaps the most labourious, and sometimes mind numbing if it gets large, is always interesting to look back at. The more I do it, in hindsight, It tends to make you realize, there is no such thing as a perfect specification. It always ends up as a best guess, based on what you think is needed and what you think the end user probably wants.

Dealing with end users is always fun, thankfully, this process tends to deal with the end user in two seperate phases - The Specification and the Bug fixing. (Although what normally happens is that after the bug fixing there is another process called changes - which gets dealt with almost as a new project)

What has interested me alot in the last few weeks, has been, to see how far some parts of the specification I wrote and designed, had to be dramatically changed During Phase III. It seems that however much thought and consideration went into the concepts, there is no way to totally predict how the look and feel translates to trying to actually get things done using the application. I’ve spent alot of time doing mass culling of parts that I spend considerable time trying to specify down to some detail, as when I sat down to test it, It was completely confusting.

Anyway, what I really want to go into, is some of the interesting code that comes out of the code review. Both half way through the project, and the complete overhall that has to be done as you push a project live. So you can demand payment (or at least beg for it..)

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