Software Development Decisions

A good decision in a software development project is one that moves you at least one step closer to getting the work completed with the necessary quality.

A bad decision is one where you don’t get a step forward or you trade off a half step forward for one or more steps backward.

Even a fairly small software development project includes millions and millions of decisions. Some decisions are technical, dealing with the creation or running of the work. Some are usability, impacting how the system will solve real problems for real people.

A well running software development project mostly makes good decisions. You would look at the output of the project and have few complaints about their choices.

A poor software development project has long strings of very poor choices, usually compounding into rather substandard output. The code is a mess, the config is fragmented, the interfaces are awkward, the data is broken, etc. It is a whole lot of choices that make you ask ‘Why?’

If you look at the project and cannot tell if the choices were good or bad then you are not qualified to rate the work. If you cannot rate it, you have no idea whether the project is going well or not. If you don't know, then any sort of decision you make about the work and inject into the project is more likely to be harmful than helpful.

Which is to say if you do not immediately know if a decision is right or wrong, then you should push that decision to someone who definitely does know and then live with their choices. They may not be good, depending on the person you choose, but your chances of doing any better are far less.

In a project where nobody knows enough to make good decisions, it is highly unlikely that it will end well. So, at bare minimum, you can't rush the project. People will have to be allowed to make bad decisions, then figure out the consequences of those mistakes and then undo the previous effort and replace it all with a better choice. It will slow down a project by 10x or worse. If you try to compress that, the bad decisions will become frozen into the effort, start to pile up, and then it will take even longer.

That is, if you do not have anybody to make good decisions and you are still in a rush, the circumstances will always get way worse. It’s like trying to run to the store, but you don’t know where the store is, so you keep erratically changing directions, hoping to get lucky. You probably won’t make it to the store and if you do it will certainly have taken way longer than necessary.

If there is a string of poor choices, you have to address why they happened. Insanity is doing the same things over and over again, expecting the results to change. They will not change on their own.