View Single Post
Old 02-23-2010, 06:19 AM  
nation-x
Confirmed User
 
nation-x's Avatar
 
Industry Role:
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Rock Hill, SC
Posts: 5,369
I agree with the people who spoke about specifications... the number one issue I have dealt with as a developer is that 9 times out of 10 the client changes the spec after the project is already under development... they see what was completed (based on the original spec) and decide they want something different or they hear about buzzword feature xyz and decide they want to add that but they typically don't want to pay more and they typically don't want to change the delivery date.

Secondly, about deadlines... even experienced developers will miss deadlines if the original spec has changed or if there has been a complication during the development process.

A perfect example of this would be a project where the developer is integrating a third party script that he/she is not intimately familiar with. I recently ran into this problem while integrating a script that has very little documentation for a developer. During the development, I identified 2 bugs in the third party script that had to be fixed before we could test the integration and a number of unexpected problems appeared as we developed the integration. I missed the deadline by 4 days...

Developers are not magicians... make sure your deadline accounts for unexpected delays if it's a major project and don't be pissed off at the developer for missing the deadline if he has communicated with you every step of the way. Sometimes deadlines are arbitrary... most developers view them as targets... if your project is large, you have a 90% chance of missing your deadline that was set arbitrarily... a deadline is always subject to missing data when the deadline was set.
nation-x is offline   Share thread on Digg Share thread on Twitter Share thread on Reddit Share thread on Facebook Reply With Quote