After a rough weekend, I’m feeling better about my .NET projects.
I’ve come to realize that the approach to planning and project management of a .NET application is quite different from classic ASP.
In classic ASP, it is possible to fly by the seat of your pants, adding and subtracting functionality as you go along.
Customers love this because it provides them with enormous flexibility. Coders and PMs love this because they can make minor changes very quickly, concentrating on a small portion of the application.
The problem comes when application-wide decisions made at the beginning of a project suddently don’t work when a new spec is introduced.
.NET seems to require a more planful and disciplined approach. The pay-off is that changes could be made more easily, including the ability of the application to scale.
I’ve got some conversations scheduled for later this week which I hope will help to outline the kind of questions the project manager and I need to ask.
So far, we’ve been focused on “what the web pages should look like”. I think we need to change our approach to ask more general questions first: will this application work the same for all customers? will there be different access restrictions? do we expect that services will be consumed instantaneously or will there be a delay between request and receipt?
I’m starting to understand why project management in this world is such an advanced skill.
More to follow.