Just Enough Governance for Notes Blog

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In a follow up to a series of posts I made before:

RAD: The Reason the Domino Development Platform Isn't Taken Seriously?
Notes Developers Making Changes to Production Apps
You Change It, You Own It
What's Your Policy on Changes in Production?

I'm not trying to dig all that up again, but I would like to point out that it's not just the Notes/Domino world that is dealing with these problems. The JAVA world has them too, they just happen to be part of a much bigger world with a lot more support from a much bigger community that includes a lot of academic types. The guys over at our sister company Enerjy Software have a blog (and a really cool static code analyzer for Java - and did I mention it was free?) where they post short interviews with industry experts talking about different topics. In the most recent interview (http://www.enerjy.com/blog/?p=260) Bob Martin, the CEO of Object Mentor is talking about programmer professionalism and overall code quality.

The lesson I get from this is that it's up to us as developers to ensure that things are done right. Sacrificing quality for speed by developing directly in production, for example, is only going to look bad on you and Notes in the long run. It is up to us, as developers, to ensure that the apps we are working on are developed and tested in such a way that the speed that Notes affords us with it's RAD aspects. Don't let RAD be taken advantage of and perverted into an excuse for doing things sloppily and not adopting good practices and policies. There is no reason why Notes should be so disrespected when compared with other development platforms.

Good practices should be more than using GetNextDocument instead of GetNthDocument (which isn't as bad as everyone lets on BTW).

Comments

1 - Couldn't agree more on this point. Most notes developers are eager to show how RAD a platform it is and tend to abandon QA practices.It gains us in the short term (how short is dependent on the perspective). We now have companies deciding notes is not the platform because it leads to uncontrolled development or it just does not provide the right amount of controls. With a bit of processes, self discipline it can also take a holistic project approach and create benefits for the longer run. Key skill the development team would have to acquire is "visioning" the large picture.

Start that change in your organization now. Arrest the new development bring them on track and propose that roadmap to bring all your apps in compliance.Risk you might have is that they consider you as "Buddha" of LN development practices and get a promotion saying good bye to full time coding days.

Posted by Prashul At 04:03:31 PM On 03/13/2008 | - Website - |

2 - From my experience... these sloppy applications are due to episodes of "Prototypes Gone Wild!"

Me: "Hey user... I put this together based on your requirements. Tell me what you think and we can go from there."

User: "It's perfect. When will it be in production."

Me: "What? It's not ready for production. It's a prototype."

User: "I don't know what that means. I need this ASAP. I can wait until tomorrow."

Me: (banging head against the desk)

Posted by Tom At 02:25:09 PM On 03/14/2008 | - Website - |