Bug tracker and happiness
Mantis Bug Tracker is free (we use it) as bug tracker. For those lazy people who don’t want to read(like me!)
As software developer myself I dread from any form of formality either that be SRS document or any other document for we see it as wastage ,in fact we rather(though should not) spend 10 hours refactoring the code routine which is essentially used no more than once ,than work on such documents. But I guess it is right decision too at least in some cases when everything is crystal clear and you don’t see working on projects after 2 months.
But what happens if project is actually quite complex, what initially seems to harmless child of yours is now turning into vicious dragon waiting to make you realize that you are not in control. Then we are not in control of each project aspect, rather we think we are. Human brain can store only certain amount of things ,that sooner or later you will start forgetting one or another. Each some feature change is results in good amount of code change. We work on current module and forget the previous one.
Code is something that it is good and enjoyable to work upon if it is properly organized and maintain. But soon you give it in to your laziness, you try to assure you that it is harmless code change so even if you don’t test it ,it wont cause much harm. I have always believed that to maintain the project deadlines along with good software is part of 3 step process namely
- Unit test for something that you will write.
- Write code.
- Refactor to support both DRY and consistent pattern.
I would love to go in more detail on that story for another time for now, let us come back to our topic, how to deal with complex and large software code. Then another factor comes into play apart from good code , that is which feature to work upon rather which one to work upon first and leave others for later. It is like you make work upon rudimentary modules and then slowly after each complete iteration we enhance it or agile methodology. It is like first you make login , then make it secure and then maybe Social Logins and what not. So when you are working upon iteration and see bug or feature that you have not fixed or implemented ,you create issue and put it for later iteration. And when you are come back again on that module, you can look it up in current issues and work on it. Now at this point of view ,we could have used simple work lists, and there are many in market. WunderList ,OneNote and Evernote are some famous to point out, truth be told they can hold good at this point.
What if you are working in conjecture with other software developer? Then it makes even more sense to use Bug Tracker even more. Assign the bugs to other person and let it be him/her worry. In fact you can have different categories of bugs as well,so to better manage. I can go whole day telling you how good it is but frankly this is the gist of it.
Software Estimation is hard
I am try to be good programmer and I personally is very bad at software estimation. How bad , well I rather not tell. But just like TDD indirectly makes you write small functions, Bug Tracker made me show how much time will actually take. Even if I am still bad , at least nowhere bad I was before. You can look at issues and rate at which they are closing and opening and kind of figure it out. It forces you too close issues optimally. Same applies for client as well, if a software programmer had genie wish, after fastest supercomputer he may ask genie to teach clients and managers thing or too about software development. “Site is not working is not bug” , not at all. We programmers think of us as demi-gods in software world, but we just think. But when client see an issue with heading not so technical hey may actually understand you.
So try to use bug tracking or software collaboration. It may save you time and money but most importantly happiness. We know we did .We tried Mantis it is good and free too.
So as leading developer of evildevelopers.com I thank you Mantis.
Nicely written post.
Thank you, stranger!