Finish your stuff

Some very practical, down-to-earth, solid advice.

Lines I found insightful: "... make it functionally complete in the first place.

... If it can't be made functionally complete it's too big. You've tried to bite off a piece that's bigger than you can swallow. Just get back to the drawing board and split off a piece that can be made functionally complete."

^_^

I really like the idea of splitting a project into phases. You might have Three phases, each one building on the last, but the very first complete phase should be a complete and usable thing in itself.

First the skateboard, then the scooter, then the bike, the motorcycle, and finally the car.

If I ever buy a car with skateboard as a chassis, I'll be very disappointed!

Sorry, just had to =)

> First the skateboard, then the scooter, then the bike, the motorcycle, and finally the car.

I've always found this metaphor incredibly amusing, because, to me, it actually highlights the _problems_, rather than advantages, of the iterative approach. At every step of the process, you're not only increasing complexity, you're also pivoting your product to the point where:

1. your previous clients are unlikely to still be well served by the new product, and are likely to churn as a result

2. the engineering challenges are different enough that most of the components aren't really reusable, and trying to shoehorn one stage into becoming the next will give you a sub-par product.

> You bought a damned chair and you want it to remain a chair, not to find out that it's some kind of protean piece of furniture that's a chair today and partly a table tomorrow and, who knows, maybe you'll be able to humidify your cigars in it next week.

This is exactly my problem with web-services (and software that auto-updates itself).

There's a great list of project management advice by Jerry Madden of NASA that gets posted here occasionally[1]. One of the points is;

"Rule #30: It is mainly the incompetent that don't like to show off their work."

Madden's remark is based on the specific environment he was involved in (NASA engineering); if you're surrounded by people who are good at their jobs and who know how to criticise constructively then there aren't many reasons to hide what you're doing other than it being a bit rubbish. I don't entirely agree with the idea that people who don't show things off are necessarily incompetent, especially if showing off your work means putting it under general public scrutiny (who can be very nasty), but there's a huge amount of value to be gained in getting feedback from your peers as early as possible.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/293253main_62682main_jerry_madden_fo... (Non-PDF version: http://www.altisinc.com/resources/rules/ )