mkmurray wrote:I interpreted his words differently. I thought he was saying that on many projects, the coding phase isn't usually the longest phase. Many times the requirements gathering and architecting phases seem to take the longest. I think there is some truth to that.
Well said.
It had to be read in the right context (I was comparing my work situation to the one facing the church over the HT project) where the work is done within an organisation that follows all the steps of software development. As well as the requirements gathering and architectural design there is also the testing phase. And then one also has to consider the environment and in particular security.
TechnoBabel wrote:Very few people can actually build the application. I don't like statements like "coding doesn't take the majority of the time" because it belittles those who are actually doing the job of creating the product and makes it sound easy and unimportant.
When I hear you say "build an application", "Creating an application", "development process" then I interpret you for those to mean the coding stage and thats fine with small projects and/or in small organisations but not with the opposite being the case.
To me ALL the steps of software development are important (research, design, coding, testing). Majority means > 50% and I still think a properly developed application in a big organisation does not have coding taking the majority of the time. If we think coding should take the majority of the time then I think we are belittling the importance of the other stages of the development cycle.
Having said that I am sure we have all seen many different setups. I have seen projects where the developers were "code monkies" as the analysts had done such a detailed job there was no room for creative coding. The developers were depressed due to lack of technical challenges but the product itself was a success.
But I have also seen projects where the analysts had not done a detailed spec so it was up to the developers to put the details into the code. This meant the developers were designing while they were coding. They loved it as they could be more creative. This project had a much higher bug rate.
TechnoBabel wrote:Creating an application is not easy and just because some organization spend a majority of their time talking about an application rather than creating it doesn't mean that it has to or should be that way.
If you mean creating = coding then I would say coding is easy when the design is done properly but when the design is not done properly and not detailed enough then coding is certainly not so easy.
Coding is not easy if the research has not been done either.
TechnoBabel wrote: I'm sure you didn't intend to belittle the job that anyone is doing, but I hear others talk this way about the actual development process and it bothers me.
Then let us take that up with those people.