Stepping back and planning can really help
Posted: Wed Aug 25, 2010 7:11 pm
I tend to be the type of person "just do it" because in the corporate world, I see it way too often where management spends WAY WAY too much time on planning, and adding of red tape, then actually doing.
For example where I work, we racked the RSA appliance 2 years ago and it's still not ready to be deployed to users.
While planning any project is good, often management in big companies tend to overdo it and it becomes a source of delay.
Anyway, when coding I tend to just dive straight in after thinking it up in my head.
On this one particular project I ended up drowning as things were starting to get out of order. I decided to take a step back, analyze exactly what needs to happen, and how, write it all down in word, such as class names, function names, array names for the main working of the app.
I then proceeded to strip out all the old code to basically get to the point where the program can compile (to some extent) without any of that code, and obviously that functionality gone.
Now I am creating all the classes from scratch, adding the code in, and then I can get it to compile with the new code (but no actual functionality) and at that point, I just have to code in the functionality of the app.
If I had done that from the start I could of saved myself a couple weeks.
So always plan big projects, or sections of projects (which is my case) ahead of time before coding... BUT don't overdo it. Basically you want a very rough plan of your class layout and main function/variables, maybe some pseudocode, and that's it.
Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:5198, old post ID:39512
For example where I work, we racked the RSA appliance 2 years ago and it's still not ready to be deployed to users.
While planning any project is good, often management in big companies tend to overdo it and it becomes a source of delay.
Anyway, when coding I tend to just dive straight in after thinking it up in my head.
On this one particular project I ended up drowning as things were starting to get out of order. I decided to take a step back, analyze exactly what needs to happen, and how, write it all down in word, such as class names, function names, array names for the main working of the app.
I then proceeded to strip out all the old code to basically get to the point where the program can compile (to some extent) without any of that code, and obviously that functionality gone.
Now I am creating all the classes from scratch, adding the code in, and then I can get it to compile with the new code (but no actual functionality) and at that point, I just have to code in the functionality of the app.
If I had done that from the start I could of saved myself a couple weeks.
So always plan big projects, or sections of projects (which is my case) ahead of time before coding... BUT don't overdo it. Basically you want a very rough plan of your class layout and main function/variables, maybe some pseudocode, and that's it.
Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:5198, old post ID:39512