Joel Spolsky has written a review of Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, a book about the development of a personal information manager called Chandler. Started by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Corporation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one of the people behind Go Corporation (a company whose life and death is chronicled in Startup), Chandler was supposed to be a revolutionary personal information manager that would absolutely change how you handled your information.
Spolsky goes into great detail not only about the book but development processes in general, using Chandler as an example of how not to do things.
Say, for example, that your vision is to rebuild an old DOS personal information manager, which was really really great but totally unappreciated. It seems easy. Everything about how the whole thing works seems so obvious, you don’t even try to design the thing… you just hire a bunch of programmers and start banging out code.
Now you’ve made two mistakes.
Number one, you fell for that old overconfidence trick of your mind. “Oh, yeah, we totally know how to do this! It’s all totally clear to us. No need to spec it out. Just write the code.”
Number two, you hired programmers before you designed the thing. Because the only thing harder than trying to design software is trying to design software as a team.
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Still, it’s a great look at one particular type of software project: the kind that ends up spinning and spinning its wheels without really going anywhere because the vision was too grand and the details were a little short. Near as I can tell, Chandler’s original vision was pretty much just to be “revolutionary.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t code “revolutionary.” I need more details to write code. Whenever the spec describes the product in terms of adjectives (“it will be extremely cool”) rather than specifics (“it will have brushed-aluminum title bars and all the icons will be reflected a little bit, as if placed on a grand piano”) you know you’re in trouble.
You can find the rest of this very enjoyable review here.