Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. Now,this week I wanna
to talk about why that last ten% of a software project usually takes the longest?.
Okay, so one of the things I hear a lot when people call, you know, Overpass and and discuss
their software projects. I'ts... it's not so much a new project, sometimes it's a new
project. It might be really a well documented, and really well planned out or not, or just
a vague idea and those are all fine, but sometimes we get
calls from people who have a project that's not gone right, or they've hired a development
company maybe overseas or maybe not, and they're just not happy with the way it worked, and
it kinda wanted us to come in at the end and just work on it. And they say something like
"Eric I'm really not happy with what they're doing, you know, they're 90% of
the way done. We really just... you know, I'm just...I just lost confidence and then
I'm kinda wondering if you could come in and take over that last 10%", and that's,
it's really difficult when somebody calls with something like that, and I think they...
they sense my lack of enthusiasm when we talk about something like that, because one of
the things you'll you'll know as as a software... if you're a software developer, you probably
experienced it before, if not you may not is that encode, in writing code and you know
in building apps and any kind of software, there are so many different
ways to do things in, and although there are software standards
out there, in my experience not very many people follow them, so you might have people
using certain design patterns or like certain ways of doing things. He may have some people
who just kind of, you know, crashed through and just build and build and build without
any kind of testing or automated testing or any kind of
testing at all. It was very difficult when you come into a project. Yeah it's
not like if you are a construction worker and you had to finish building a bathroom,
or you're tiling a bathroom or something, 'cause then pretty much you can
look at it and think okay I can see what they've done or what they haven't done. With code
you have to go through, you know, line-by-line, hopefully it's documented, more
often than not it's not documented. Go through and find out what's going on and how to fix
things in. It's a lot of times when you, when you have somebody brings to your project and
say you know it's 90% of the way complete, when you look at it, it basically
knocks it back to probably 60% at least, because you have to go through and
understand how everything worked and, and you have to decide whether or not anything
needs to be rewritten. So my advice always is that, you know if you've lost confidence
in your developers at the very end of a project, you really need to try to stick with
them or maybe you know offer to come in like as it hit an advisory capacity and just say
let's let's have a look at the architecture or, or maybe I can help you with App Store
set up, or something like that something that's not,you know,
we don't wanna check them out because there they may be the only ones who know how the
code works. Now, eventually you may have to rewrite that, or document it or whatever.
But you know I've had the same problem myself where I have code that I'm really not happy
with, but and it's very tempting, you know, 'cause you're perfectionist you wanna get
everything right, it's very tempting to throw everything out and just start again, right?.
However what you really need to do is go live. Go live with an app, you
don't know how well it does and you do not want to rewrite something that's never even
been released, right? It's a..yeah and I know people..I know quite a few people who have
done that where they've had the app released and they basically treated like a or not released
but actually built and they kinda treat it like a prototype and then they'll say you'll
get a new developer and a new developer will say "We just need to rewrite this thing from
scratch" and so that's what they'll do, their job to do that, so it's, it's not an easy
thing to do, although it is possible. So one of the things that I was, when I was contracting
I was very very good at doing was finding those little places where we could tweak without
touching the code and, and there are you know there are applications or applications that
I have that I've had developed for me where there's big chunks of code which I will not
touch because they were just dangerously dangerously badly written but working. So a badly written
but working code is better than not working badly written code, however as soon as you
need to make changes to that it's you know, it's very difficult to do so. Ideally what
you wanna do is have coding standards at the beginning of your project, and if you're gonna
hire somebody else have them adhere to those standards, or to give you a copy of the coding
standards that they used for building... building your application so. So that's that's it . My..
my message this week is that even though you think your project is 90% of the way down
you do not wanna change developers because that actually could take longer to complete
it in the end and that last 90%. That last 10% could take as much as the first
ninety percent did to finish, so it's it's just a strange thing is just always the way
it is. You... when you get out last 10% then that's when you realize that you're actually
have another 30% to go where 40% or 50% so that's a normal thing so. Anyway, that's it
for this week. I hope you've enjoyed it. I'll talk to you next week. Goodbye! Hey! I really
hope you liked that video. Now, I do this once a week so if you wanna hear more or you
wanna hear more about our experiences with the app store either Google Play or iTunes,
please go ahead and subscribe to the channel, and please like this video and leave a comment.
I love reading the comments. I love hearing what you have to say, even if it's just hello
or whatever and like I say before, if you're not sure what to say in a comment, like I
never know what to say in a comment...I'll make it easier for you. If you like it, just
go ahead and say "Gnarley" which is an 80's term, or if you didn't like it...just say
"Bogus", and if you didn't think anything of it, just say "Eh". So that will be a big,
big, big help. And another thing you could do which I'd really appreciate it...if you
are on the app store and you wanna try one of our apps, look up some of the Overpass
apps, applications either on iTunes or Google Play, and leave a review, and let us know
what you think about it, either good or bad, but, you know, it's a ...we are all trying
to build up in the market so... so that will be a big help. So that's it, I'll talk to you next week!