Question

1. Have you been in a pre-demo development crunch? What were the key decisions you faced, and how did you address them?

Answer 1

To understand the challenges faced in crunch mode of development, we must first understand what a development crunch is.

Development "crunch" or "crunch mode" are terms used in the software development industry referring to the extra hours of work that are put in for variable periods of time in order to meet a deadline or complete a project. This is usually the case when non-technical managers promise unrealistic deadlines, and those working on the software end up 'crunching' as the deadline fast approaches for a project that should have been given a lot more time. Usually, the management expects the employees to work 50 - 80 hours a week for weeks or even months together during a crunch.

The key decisions that one faces during a development crunch are:

1. Completion over code quality: A software developer must prioritize completion of modules of the project over ensuring the quality of code. This usually means knowingly skipping a lot of edge cases, which, even though maybe a rare occurrence in production, but may prove to be very dangerous when such a case is actually encountered. This, in the worst case, may lead to the whole system failing for extended periods of time.

2. Avoiding documentation to favour completion: Any form of documentation is usually ignored, because completing the code is of utmost importance, and documentation in the code does not affect its functionality as such. This may seem like a good idea to speed up the coding process but proves to be very expensive in the future because any kind of refactoring in the code will require the programmer to go through and understand the functionality of the whole code base.

3. Loss in modularity, increase in code coupling: Coding in a crunch usually means writing code that works for that situation and is meant for nothing else. This means that the functions written in a crunch is usually not modular. This increases the coupling, dependency in code and adds redundancy, which ironically increases the amount of work and time required to complete the project.

These issues can be addressed or mitigated in the following ways:

1. Ensure code quality and modularity: Thinking and planning with a calm mind is very important. There may be cases where a lot of lines of code can be reduced by just making a process/function more modular so that a lot of processes can directly use it. This not only reduces the amount of code but also decreases the number of hours that a developer needs to work. UML diagrams may be useful in this.

2. Write rudimentary documentation, fix it later: Even if it is not possible to completely document the code, small comments stating what does what can help a lot, as this can be later used to build up the full documentation, and can also be used to understand what the piece of code does, so refactoring later is easy.

Hope this answers your question. All the best!