Typically for me, I’ve got sidetracked for the last few articles with technical stuff. What platform? Where to develop? Get the development environment set up. All that kind of stuff. Of course, that just hand waves away the fundamentally most important aspect of writing software:

Clearly identifying what you are going to produce, what it is going to do and how it is going to do it.

That is where both bespoke and product development most typically comes unstuck. Not agreeing up-front what you’re going to write and what it’s going to do. Now, for bespoke work, where you’re creating a custom solution tailored to a customers exacting requirements, that’s a massive issue. There are many problems en-route. Such as simple mis-understandings and, even worse, the things the customer thinks go without saying.

These are the things that cause scope creep and late delivery. Much bespoke work involves fixed price and/or timescales, so this is a major issue.

Of course, in the product world it’s not such a serious issue as much of the time. Obviously, there are issues making sure that your software does something that customers want, and does it in a way that will make them want to pay for it. Also, there are issues with making that first release in a timely fashion to start getting a revenue stream. Or some users and feedback etc.

But for product software, the biggest failing at this requirements capture phase is short-termism. You might decide that the software is going to do so and so. All very well and good, and that might lead down a certain path. That path might turn out to be a cal-de-sac when you realise later on that it was obvious that so and so was right, but, implementing it in such a way means you can’t do a natural extension of so and so that could have been an obvious thing to want to do later right at the start.

So, before I get any more carried away with the platform and the development environment, I think it’s time to sit down and figure out what the basic features of Multiblog are, and where the road map will take it in the future.

Popularity: 33% [?]

This is version 1 of this entry and was posted 1 year, 6 months ago on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under MultiBlog, Opinion. It's popularity ranking is Popularity: 33% [?]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. This is the first version of this post.