Requirements are key
Development is a tricky thing. This is nothing new, but it’s been brought to the front of my brain in the last few days. There are so many unknowns – bugs, research, developers, product owners/clients. Sure there is a plethora of other unknowns but product owners/clients, for example, can really be a project stopper. I thought having a technical, even semi technical client or boss would be the best. To me having someone that had a bit of technical experience to bounce ideas off of and even get new ideas.
Through the last 30 months I’ve been attending school at Neumont University. Here we’ve been taught how to follow a pretty specific process when it comes to doing projects. Find out what the client wants, write requirements, create and iteration plan, and to keep it simple finish the product. It’s not the only way to do things but this way is the best example for what I’ve recently dealt with at work.
First things first, a little bit of background. I was brought in under a temporary contract with my official title being “UI Specialist”. From the beginning I was told to redesign the horrible layout of the old system. Along with that I was in charge of implementing AJAX into the new system. From the start I had decided that I was going to make everything CSS. No more HTML, I really wanted to get out of the past and this was my time to do so. So I set off on my own after getting some direction from the CEO and my co-workers. My only guidance was it had to work in IE, “lots of whitespace”, and use the Outlook color scheme and look that Component Art provides. I brought up a lot of my concerns that have to deal with web development. However, they were stifled so I eventually gave up.
Now fast forward about a month ahead. We are moving along just fine with the project and admittedly the UI could use some work. Well our project manager gets a call from the CEO letting him now that a few things didn’t work in Firefox and the UI was now ugly. I was baffled why, after a month that everything had changed. If we had spent a week (more or less) on gathering information and formalizing a standard for the UI we would not be hiring another developer to allow myself to focus on the UI again. To redo everything that has done for IE and FF compatibility is going to take at least a week of refactoring and research.
So in conclusion the real world has a way of sticking it to you when you think you have it all under control. Writing documents is the worst part of the job in my mind. However, now that I truly see the importance of documents I will defiantly make that the #1 thing I do before I attempt to write one character of code.