Looking back at your mistakes..

After the end of every iteration in a project life cycle, we always think that we could have write our program more smartly. Humans are meant to made mistakes, but great ones are those who learn from them. Making mistakes is inevitable but we can't avoid them completely.

it is often a real good practice that we all do some analysis after accomplishing each iteration. For ex, all the developers can sit together for a coffee and discuss frankly what is best and the worst things they have done so far and what should be done to avoid those in future .But in reality, i believe that most of us never do this kind of practice.So what needs to be done, if we really want to impose this on a team. Any guess ?

Solution 1 :

Every organized company has a issue tracking system(we at Pageflakes never do a task unless it is properly entered in an issue tracker). Issue tracker is a great source for monitoring progress and accomplishment for an iteration. Issue tracker always says , how a bug has occurred or how to do a new task but it is never meant for the word "Why". Developer does his assigned tasks and marks it with some status and forwards it for further processing , but what if before changing a task , we ensure that a developer must answer, "how did i do the task?". If developers are pretty honest , at the end of each project cycle this can help to create a true project metrics that can become a true life saver someday.

Solution 2 :

These days we all use Microsoft outlook . i believe this is the holy grail in modern age to keep you organized round the clock. In outlook we can create an event send it to others as well to keep us synced( For ex: "Send weekly status") . Now, is it possible to send a reminder that will tell a developer to send the mistakes and best things that he/she has done for particular issue? I believe this is great.


So far, these are only two from many tactics that we can follow to rectify our mistakes. But the question is, at the end of the day do we really care?

Finally i leave you with this quote i found(source : http://www.codinghorror.com/)

Look, Mike," Tomas said. "I can hand off my code today and call it 'feature complete', but I've probably got three weeks of cleanup work to do once I hand it off." Mike asked what Tomas meant by "cleanup." "I haven't gotten the company logo to show up on every page, and I haven't gotten the agent's name and phone number to print on the bottom of every page. It's little stuff like that. All of the important stuff works fine. I'm 99-percent done."


Good day!