February 15, 2016

Some checklists for making technical choices

Whenever somebody asks for my help on application technology strategy, I start by trying to ascertain three things. The absolute first is actually a prerequisite to almost any kind of useful conversation, which is to ascertain in general terms what the hell it is that we are talking about. 🙂

My second goal is to ascertain technology constraints. Three common types are:

That’s often a short and straightforward discussion, except in those awkward situations when all three of my bullet points above are applicable at once.

The third item is usually more interesting. I try to figure out what is to be accomplished. That’s usually not a simple matter, because the initial list of goals and requirements is almost never accurate. It’s actually more common that I have to tell somebody to be more ambitious than that I need to rein them in.

Commonly overlooked needs include:

And if you take one thing away from this post, then take this:

I guarantee it.

So far what I’ve said can be summarized as “Figure out what you’re trying to do, and what constraints there are on your choices for doing it.” The natural next step is to list the better-thought-of choices that meet your constraints, and — voila! — you have a short list. That’s basically correct, but there’s one significant complication.

Speaking of complications, what I’m portraying as a kind of linear/waterfall decision process of course usually involves lots of iteration, meandering around and general wheel-spinning. Real life is messy.

Simply put, there are many different kinds of application project. Other folks’ experience may not be as applicable to your case as you hope, because your case is different. So the rest of this post contains a checklist of distinctions among various different kinds of application project.

For starters, there are at least two major kind(s) of software development.

Other significant distinctions include:

*It also influences security, all good practices for securing internal apps notwithstanding.

Much also depends on the size and sophistication of the organization. What the “organization” is depends a bit on context:

Specific considerations of this kind start:

And that, in a nutshell, is why strategizing about application technology is often more complicated than it first appears.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Some checklists for making technical choices”

  1. Barney Finucane on March 4th, 2016 12:28 pm

    > When “adding analytics” … it is common to underestimate the variety of things users will soon want to do.

    This remark is spot on.

  2. Paul Johnson on April 11th, 2016 4:03 am

    Vendors over-emphasise performance.

    Buyers over-depend on Gartner et al.

    POCs are ususally hopeless in terms of proving what need to be proved.

    Internal techies vote for what they already know/love.

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