Common sense planning: while digging out a basement, don’t worry too much about when and who is going to fix the door lock.
When I read Mike Sigers post Your Customer Are Liars from Simplenomics, it reminded a similar situation in organizations, where employees don't offend their managers and managers shy away from asking the right questions. It applies to every level in an organization, unless you insists (one more time) people always say 'what you what to hear'.
Everyone wants to be heard, but they never going to openup, unless they sense a sincere and honest effort.
Every time we start a new development project, we end up using new set of technologies, some are similar, others completely different. For example the following are the combination for technologies used in our projects in last two years
Each of these combination brings unique advantage to particular projects, but how to get the right set of people in place. Even if you hire, we may not get people with all combination, and it is a few weeks/months process. Exiting people can learn on the job, but can't expect a quality output.
The solution is to organize 'throwaway micro projects' with all the key technologies,
the key aspect of this approach:
This approach allows the team to understand and experiment technologies, quickly tryout some practical scenarios, understand the limitations of used technologies, quickly learn from the failure and identify best practices. Also this allow different individuals to come together as a team.
Groovy and Grails are changing the way we develop software projects. though I personally prefer and use Ruby and Rails for all my personal projects, grails has an edge for developing enterprise applications.
If you are not using groovy and grails yet then you are wasting your developers time as well as your client money.
One of the most discussed subject in offshore development, is bad code quality. various factors contribute to this problem, you can easily blame the developers. But the fundamental problem is with the way we groom individuals in an organization.
We used to have syntactical problems, today, these can be solved by automated code review tools like CheckStyle, FindBugs, FxCop, StyleCop, etc.
But does this enough?
there is a huge difference between a quality code and syntactically correct code. A quality code is much bigger than syntactically correct code,
it is like a poetry.
right use of words, correctly structured, in a shortest form, without affecting the language grammar, conveys the message and make you feel great.
Most of the developers come out of college as literate, they know read and write java, or any language. we can't expect quality code from them, unless we groom and expose them to quality code in a systematic way.