

Eliminating Web Development Waste - Isofarro
http://nefariousdesigns.co.uk/eliminating-web-development-waste.html

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mzarate06
"The most common delays in web development are when work passes between
individuals."

Especially when it's completely unnecessary. Some of my recent work has taken
longer than it should b/c I'm having to debug my work _through_ my supervisor.
By through, I mean that he insists on watching the error logs on a remote
server for me, and then telling me what the error is, and then I can adjust my
code. My request to gain access to the entire stack so that I can debug my
work on my own was met with defensive arguments.

"This has been described by Douglas Crockford—the inventor of JSON..."

He didn't invent it.

Source: Douglas Crockford @ 0:55 - 1:10 in this video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc8BAR7SHJI>

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japhyr
Not giving a developer direct access to error reports for the code you are
working on sounds like one of the biggest inefficiencies I have ever heard of.

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tjpick
In some situations, giving developers direct access to remote [production]
servers is unacceptable. (Areas like healthcare, banking.)

Not everything in life is about developer efficiency.

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crosh
Though those in C-level and sales-focused positions do not always understand
the need, every project I have ever worked on has benefited greatly from a
thorough pre-production process.

It is the ready-shoot-aim projects that are the greatest victims of these
issues, even though we are always told to ship, ship, ship!

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ams6110
The piece could be a lot shorter by eliminating the paragraphs of prose about
lean manufacturing, only to halfway through the article state the obvious fact
that manufacturing physical things does not have a lot in common with
developing software. A short summary of lean manufacturing, and then the
discussion of lean software development, would be more efficient.

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steverb
Great article, but the bit about Web Development vs. Software Development
threw me off for a bit. It seems like a pointless distinction.

I'm a software developer, my platform is (usually) the web. Sometimes it's the
desktop, or a mobile device. They all have their own very special pain points.
But what I do is develop software for them.

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theoj
>> The fastest way to complete two projects using the same people is to do it
one at a time, sequentially. Trying to run two projects in parallel using the
same resources introduces a large amount of waste

Is that always the case? I have seen freelancers handle multiple projects at
once using a weekly breakdown of 3 days for one project and 2 days for
another.

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ams6110
Having done freelance work in varying amounts for a couple of years now, I'd
say that task switching between two projects from one day to the next is not
really a big deal. You have an overnight sleeping period for your brain to
process and reset. Switching within the day, or trying to switch among three
or more projects starts to break down, efficiency-wise.

