Timeline for Is it typical for there to be no real design prior to someone being assigned a task?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Jun 9, 2020 at 14:08 | comment | added | Panzercrisis | @ChristianHackl That's what I mean. | |
| Jun 9, 2020 at 12:01 | comment | added | Christian Hackl | @Panzercrisis: When large distributed systems are developed, months or even years of design pass before a single line of production code is written. Such systems often require a lot of financial and legal planning, extensive user studies and competitive biddings for different components of the system interfacing with hardware or other external entities. All of that work is mostly done by enterprise architects, analysts, information security specialists and interaction designers before programmers become involved. Your equation may have its merits for isolated parts of the solution, though. | |
| Jun 8, 2020 at 21:03 | comment | added | Panzercrisis | On a different question, I think on this same Stack, somebody gave an answer basically as to why estimating time for software development is such a difficult, unreliable, haphazard task, compared to the same for other forms of engineering. The answer was that, whereas civil engineering or something spends a lot of time building the desired outcome from a straightforward blueprint, in software, you only spend a few seconds up to several minutes doing so. It's literally when you hit "Build" or "Rebuild" in your IDE. With software, 99% of the effort is spent on the design. | |
| Jun 8, 2020 at 17:20 | comment | added | Frank Hopkins | This. When I need to design something so detailed you can just straight code it down, I can do that myself when doing the design. Unless you have code in the tickets there will always be something that needs a design decision, and if just on the very local coding level: Do we use a variable that can be null? do we log on debug or info level? what to include? You're only done with the design once the code comes out of the pipeline. However, I'd say how much time the initial design phase takes depends on the context, i.e. the top level design can sometimes take as much time as coding it out. | |
| Jun 8, 2020 at 5:48 | comment | added | hobbs | One team that I was a tech lead on, my most valuable skill was being able to cut off premature planning. Without me, they tended towards all-day planning meetings where they insisted on pinning down little details before making an estimate or committing to a task. I honestly think that the most valuable thing I provided for them was knowing the work well enough to say "hey, it's okay, I see a few reasonable ways to do this, and none of them will take vastly more effort than the others. Let's sort it out when we get there." | |
| Jun 6, 2020 at 4:32 | history | answered | Karl Bielefeldt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |