Software Development takes time. At least, that is what we hear all the time (or do we tell our end users this?). Software Development frameworks however, are getting more and more time efficient in the last few days. Even ‘old’ development frameworks like Oracle Designer can be extremely fast, if you know what you are doing. An overview of what the suppliers are saying: Microsoft .NET is there to rapidly build great applications, Oracle ADF takes your Java EE productivity to the next level, Oracle Application Express is a rapid web application development tool, Ruby-on-Rails, etc, and we can go on and on.
Development tools are not the issue anymore, any tool can go fast and are developed to deliver rapidly.
So, let’s just deliver as fast as we can. When we take a look at the end-user base of the applications we develop, they’re likely to vote ‘yes’ on whether we should deliver fast and imperfect (with the annotation that we will deliver better software every cycle) or we should deliver in a long time, but better. So where’s the balance?
Developing software is difficult, of course that’s why we are ably to make a living off it, but not impossible. The great challenge is to develop what the end-users wants, or needs. But we can’t guess that. That’s why extensive and expensive courses have to been taken in order to better understand what the end-users actually need. But I say: if we can deliver software as fast as we can do now, why should we document and analyse beforehand, if we can just show them?
(I know, another open door…)
