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| Developer Gold-Plating
Gold Plating Posted by John, 8th August 2003 What is the worst enemy of any small, independant software company? Arguably it is the continual (and never-ending) addition of tweaks, features and 'cool' code. It is so easy to get bogged down in perfecting the parts of your software that you find interesting, you can become completely distracted from your end goal - shipping your software. I noticed this in particular after working for a succession of large companies and then starting up my own smaller enterprise. Suddenly, there was a major shift in the type of software I was producing. Instead of being asked to write a specific system, specification or design, I had the freedom to develop absolutely anything I wanted to. This is a very liberating process and one of the biggest perks of being an independant. However, this seductive benefit can can quickly turn into your biggest obstacle. More often than not, you'll be absurdly ambitious and start building a mammoth system. Our first project was going to be a ground-breaking subscription service. It involved multiple platforms, a huge level of user flexibility (for this, read masses of time and effort), and a huge amount of resources. Apparently, this reaction is fairly common. We spent an inordinate amount of time on adding features and over-complicating the software until - eventually - it had grown into a massive beast. Progress was slow (compared to the size of the system) and we lost heart. The idea was a good one, and is still commercially viable. But we'd tried to run before we could walk, writing web, windows, and PDA software on a hugely ambitious project. After this episode, we went back to basics. We decided to create small, innovative products, simple utilities that wouldn't stretch the limited resources we had available. It was an important lesson. We could have perservered on the subscription system, but we would have been burnt-out after a few more months, severely de-motivated, and would probably have hated the sight of it by then. Instead, we've kept that idea on a back-burner (and will hopefully one day resurrect it) while creating simple but useful products. |
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