Coder to Developer
Chapter One
Planning Your Project
How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a
bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a
bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks?
-Professor Bernardo de la Paz, quoted in The
Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein
So there you are with your shiny new IDE and your coding skills and a vague idea of what
it is that you want to produce. The temptation can be almost overwhelming to dive right in and
start typing.
Don't do it. Even the smallest of projects benefits from at least a little bit of planning up
front, and yours is no different. In this chapter, I'll discuss some of the basic planning steps,
including requirements management and choosing a methodology, that you should consider
before you write a single line of code.
Nailing Down a Feature Set
Before you write a single line of code, there's a simple yet difficult question that you must
answer: What are you writing? You need to have more than a vague idea of the end product
before you can finish building an application. If you don't know what you're trying to produce,
then you're not really writing an application; you're just ... read full excerpt from Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software ebook
