Tag: prototype

6 practices that keep your software masterpiece from seeing the light of day

Software engineers switch between two modes: painful perfectionists and band-aid stickers. During the start of a project, software engineers discuss things to painful detail on whiteboards, Post-It notes, restaurant napkins and even glass doors. This eats away precious time that could have been spent on actual development. But as the deadline looms, the whiteboards and glass doors are rubbed, Post-It notes are torn apart and restaurant napkins are trashed. The plans are chucked in favour of anything that makes the application work.

Often, the released solution has plenty of duct tape code that holds the functionality together. After all the over-planning, duct-tape coding is the only thing possible in the limited time that the programmers leave for themselves. Software teams hardly release anything during the early phase of a software project as everything is put in meticulous detail on paper only. But as the deadline approaches, frenetic releases are made everyday or even every few hours, causing confusion among the developers, project managers, testing teams and the clients.

Continue reading “6 practices that keep your software masterpiece from seeing the light of day”

How agile is your project: Part 1

Technology is always riddled with jargon. No sooner have we mastered one jargon term that another twenty head our way. It is just impossible to keep track of all of them. However one jargon has been flying around for too long now and very few people are actually able to make good sense out of it. That jargon term is ‘Agile’. This term is so often used nowadays. Every day you will come upon a company that announces that they have adopted Agile methods. But ask them what they mean and they will not answer in simple English. That is what I want to do in this post. Continue reading “How agile is your project: Part 1”