Recently in Development Category

There come a point in a project when you hit 'critical mass' and things just start exploding and growing like wildfire.  We're just about at that point, and there is a strong desire amongst everyone on the team to see this through.

There is this sense of accomplishment I get... I started a project, it's gone through at least 3 complete re-writes from the ground up, and now it's being used in production.  Several components that we prototyped and leveraged other systems as stop-gap solutions (like using MovableType as a content engine), and now we're shutting those down and switching over to the real thing.

Granted, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done, we have a long feature list ahead of us for the 1.1 release, and we're still waiting to roll out the "new" UI.  But we've hit the plateau, and now it's no longer going to be as much of an uphill battle.

What is the application designers best friend?  The whiteboard.  Even though we're developing applications for use in cyberspace, one of the most fundamental meatspace tools still plays a very important role.

I find that when we're fleshing out a new feature or direction for our application/service, it's best to round everyone up, clear off the whiteboard, and start scribbling away.  Working out the process flows, data stores, even writing concept code snippets to better understand the "how" behind the idea.  Then, once everyone has a good understanding of the methods and how the new features work, we walk through the process with example data.

User A signs up for service B, provides data C.  Method X takes data and stores it in Y, and outputs Z.

By going through this process several times, it lets us fill in the gaps of what data stores need to actually go into our model.  Which modules are linked with others, and a general flow for the process.  Then we take that info, create the various models within the application, build the controllers, and establish the views (we use CakePHP, which is a MVC architecture).

Once we have the rudimentary skeleton built for the new feature, we then revisit the whiteboard and start filling it out even more.

All of the whiteboard data can be photographed and cataloged for future reference, and the actual concepts can then be mapped out in software like visio, project, and tasks be delegated in trac.