August 2006
Intermediate to advanced
224 pages
6h 39m
English
Content preview from Dynamics of Software Development, Second Edition
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#33: Get to a known state and stay there
This is a conceptually simple yet extremely powerful idea. The corollary is, “Have a shippable product every day.”
Get to a known state and stay there. You pretty much know what your product is when you ship it. By the time you ship it, you know what kind of shape it’s in, as much as you’re ever going to know that—architecture, features, performance characteristics, and so on. At the time you ship the product, you have the fewest unknowns.
If you ask a developer the status of something he’s working on, his answer might be correct, but if it is, that’s just a coincidence.
Now, suppose someone asked you to add one little feature to the product you’ve just shipped. That request would be something that ...