Comments on: 1 Million Dollars to Succeed

By: Ronnie Mukherjee

Ronnie Mukherjee — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 18:37:00 +0000

I love this idea. I think the two keys to my approach would be regularly meeting with customers for demonstrations and feedback, and having the technical design and architecture, along with the low-level code, reviewed regularly by the best people at my disposal. And if there really were a million dollars at stake, although I could only work for eight hours a day, I doubt I would be able to think about much else and I might not be able to sleep!

By: jsonmez

jsonmez — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 02:46:00 +0000

In reply to Richard Garand. Yeah, definitely true.

By: Richard Garand

Richard Garand — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 17:09:00 +0000

The downside of this approach is that it says nothing about the day after the project is done. Sure, we’ve all done a lot of things inefficiently in the past. But where would be today if we hadn’t taken a chance and tried something new (with the potential of failure) to see whether it was good?

By: jsonmez

jsonmez — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:00:54 +0000

In reply to Buddy. Awesome! Thanks for that link. I have not seen that study.

By: Buddy

Buddy — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:51:13 +0000

Why not look at scientific data? Effectiveness of TDD http://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmurrill/courses/csc625/erdogmus05.pdf

By: cirellolaranjo

cirellolaranjo — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:34:19 +0000

Oh thank you. Last week I was talking about the “old new things”, like UML, XML schemas, RUP, and all others “fantastic” things that nobody remember.

You are not alone. The problem is: The “church” will burn you because you are going against the “bible”. TDD? MVC? If you say you don’t like them you are the worst person in the world.

Your career is at risk if you don’t “love the church”.

By: Brandon Blais

Brandon Blais — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:57:01 +0000

If I were given a million dollar challenge like this I’d try to focus like a laser beam on functional requirements from the business’ perspective. I think Agile is particularly well suited for that task.

I’d probably start with mockups and work my way front end to back end, following some variant of MVC with unit tests and dependency injection.

I probably wouldn’t invest in an ORM. I’m not sure it’d be worth the learning curve.

Am I 100% sure that I’m using the best methods possible? No. No one has perfect knowledge. I wouldn’t even try to get to the perfect solution, because then I probably wouldn’t get anything done. I’d be stuck in analysis paralysis. Perfect is the enemy of good.

For me it all comes down to heuristics and anecdotal evidence. A large body of my peers has concluded that there are certain “best practices”. The ones that I’ve tried and I like, I use. I can’t say for sure that they always yield the best results, but my experience has been they’ve seemed helpful given the types of projects I work on.

Once again you raise an interesting issue. From time to time I do think it’s helpful to step back, look around and ask: Am I doing this all wrong?

By: Ted M. Young

Ted M. Young — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 17:49:20 +0000

This is a great thought experiment, but, alas, is untestable because of the huge number of variables involved. However, it would be great if there was more testing (scientific experiments) of some of the variables, e.g., TDD, or ORM. They’d also have to be longitudinal studies, because you’d need to evaluate the maintainability of the code over time.

By: FrenkyB

FrenkyB — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:03:05 +0000

“you can’t work more than 8 hours a day 5 days a week—no winning by heroics alone.” – for me, this seems quite hard demand. Very often I’ve found myself that I’ve come to something what I was doing in the work and fix that thing when I come home. Or before I go to work. Or during weekeng. Development is a hard thing to do only when you are on your work place.