Software Development Pearls
25 min
Karl Wiegers shares his lessons on requirements, project management, design, quality and more. Karl’s advice can make you significantly better at what you do. Show Notes Karl Wiegers started programming in 1970 and has collected 60 lessons he has learned in several areas of software development including requirements, design, project management, culture, teamwork, quality, and process improvement. Each of these lessons bring insights that can help you to and your organization to become significantly better at creating high quality, valuable solutions to your customers. The Need to Iterate Almost everything we do takes more than a single shot and design is a good example. The first lesson in the design category of Karl’s book is “design demands iteration”. There’s always more than one design solution for a software problem and seldom a single best solution. The first design approach you come up with is unlikely to be the best option. A good rule of thumb is that you’re not done with design until you’ve created at least three designs, discard them, and take the best ideas from those three and build something better. The same holds true for requirements. It will take a few iterations to get it right. These are cyclical things that you have to plan in your project management approach. You’re going to have to build in some reviews, get some feedback, prototype, and do some modeling to make sure we’re on the right track. Icebergs are always larger than they first appear; that means that there’s going to be growth in the project. There’s going to be new information and new ideas that come along. You have to build in that growth and include contingency buffers into your plans. The bigger the project, the more unknowns and ambiguity and the more likely it is to change. Understanding Stakeholders and Customers Usage-centric development (as opposed to user-centric) is more likely to satisfy customer needs than product or feature-centered development. We shoul...
