Re: Re: A Cautionary Rant

[petethered]

I personally work for a small startup ( VERY SMALL ), and even in small companies this type of thing happens.

A perfect example is the project we are currently working on. Even with 2 programmers, there are a number of steps that we have to go through to code up and running.

Get the project description.

Write some code

Have the results rviewed for changes ( and for some reason, 90% of the time major "oh, can you add this" additions occur )

Write more code, and rewrite/change 50% of code

Get reviewed again

write more code... and rewrite more code

Get reviewed again

HTML guy takes over ( all code we produce is templated , other then table internals ect )

Make a ton of changes for HTML guy

Reviewed again, now with the HTML

write more code...

It goes on and on...

It seems to me , no matter how big or small the company, an inordinate amount of time is spent developing the project compared to actually developing the code.

Pete

[LD2]

That can be very true, the problem is I think.. most times ppl. don't understand or thoroughly understand the whole project until at least half the prottype is ready to be shown to the upper management to gain approval/critisims/suggestions. Sometimes developing the project can be half the battle of a project.. Fastolfe is right about a Project Manager - it does help. It leaves the project leads and other developers free to do their job and allow the administrative tasks to be handled by someone else who is outside of the project development(coding that is..), but who understands what the project must do.. they sometimes can also coordinate with the clients to gain feedback or be the main person of contact via the developers. But, knowing the project and developing it to specs(no matter how many versions down the road) takes quite a bit of time - and communication is really key.