mlryan blog
My thoughts on the IT industry.
Tuesday 5 June 2007, 10:59 AM
Let's leave things till the last minute
Can you count the number of times that you have been implored to think about an IT issue early in the project lifecycle? I certainly can't. IT professionals are being constantly urged to think about things as early as possible.
Want to improve application security? Capture the need in the statement of requirements and build it into the design.
Application performance? You have to think about it before you start to design.
Testing? Apparently we have to start *conducting* testing before a single line of code has been written [How? By testing the basis of the project and the statement of requirements!]
I'm fed up with this constant pressure to do things in an order which does not appear to make sense. In the world of operating systems activities that can be performed later are executed later (because when you get there you may find you don't have to do them at all). This seems to me to make sense; if we do everything up front, what is left to do for the remainder of the duration of the project?
We are in danger of rushing around madly for the first days and weeks of a project considering all of the peripheral aspects of a project and never actually getting to build the product.
So why are we asked to do so much so early? In my opinion it is because in some project teams the team members lack the skill and experience to do a good job. Getting project managers to think about many different aspects of their project very early on is a way to help prevent problems that occur because the designer doesn't consider security at all, or developers write poorly performing code and so on.
The need to do a myriad of tasks up front or as early as possible is largely unnecessary when skilled people are in key roles in a project team.
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