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Take Care of the Little Things, and the Big Things Take Care of Themselves
Posted on September 3, 2007
Over the years software development has been compared to many different things including house construction, car manufacturing, and widget building. As clever as the comparisons are, they’re partly true. What is true is that all of these projects are built on a foundation, processes/modules are then added to the foundation, detail is added to those processes and finally the project is cleaned up for delivery.
Let’s look at one of these comparisons in more detail.
House construction vs. Software Development
- As houses are built on a concrete or other foundation, software is built on a framework or foundation.
- As houses get plumbing added that often times integrates into the foundation, software gets framework level processes added that integrate into its foundation, i.e. Error Handling.
- As houses get framed, software gets modules/features added to it.
- As houses get siding put on, software gets styles applied to it.
- As houses get landscaped in order to make the entire property presentable, software gets added to search engines, linked from other sites, and advertised.
- As houses get front doors put on and placed in the most appealing and welcoming position, as does software with areas that direct the users attention and splash pages.
- Hallways in the house lead the users to different rooms of the house, where software has navigation to guide the user around the site. Often times a guest in a house will be able to see into other rooms from their current room, where software gives glimpses of what is to come if they navigate to the next page.
- From a project management standpoint, it’s very hard and risky to change the dimensions of the foundation once the house framing is underway. Once software development is underway it is also risky to change the foundation. Each of these processes was built to look like and be a certain way.
In all projects that follow a process it is safe to say that the project could have a perfect foundation but will fail if detail isn’t involved when adding the modules. Houses could be built with a perfect concrete/stone foundation then siding could be put on unleveled or unfinished, which would destroy the appearance of the house. Software could have the perfect foundation, but could be destroyed if the site wasn’t validated against W3C standards.
Take care of the little things and the big things take care of themselves. This is absolutely true. If all web pages are validated against W3C standards, most if not all browsers will render a pleasing presentation of your site.
If all websites have custom error pages, no user will get a glimpse of the ugly code behind it all. This is like having a hole in your drywall and presenting the insulation to the house guest.
If all websites have page titles, doctypes, and language attributes then all other applications that are expected to read your site may do so.
Great foundations are only as good as it’s worst fault. Meaning that your site could have the perfect foundation but have poor styles applied to it.
Feel free to take this piece of advice with you when you journey into other professional or personal areas. Like I told my fiancé today….Mowing the yard on a riding mower is easy, but the presentation of a well maintained yard doesn’t come from mowing each week, it comes from going out there and raking up the grass clippings.
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