Symbian for Software Leaders: Principles of Successful Smartphone Development Projects

Chapter 14. Simplifying smartphone projects

Beyond difficulty

If you've read carefully through the preceding chapters, you may have formed the view that it is really difficult to complete a Symbian OS smartphone project. There's so much to think about – such a lot of scope for things to go wrong.

To an extent, I will be satisfied if you reach that conclusion. A very common reason for smartphone projects to go wrong is if the project management team is over-confident. You need more than positive thinking to successfully complete a smartphone development project. If you think that you can go sailing through this kind of project, you are unlikely to succeed. You will be tripped up by one or more of the pitfalls described in the preceding pages. Your skills in (for example) feature phone software development or desktop PC software development will fail to transfer into the significantly different world of smartphone software development. So I want you to "look before you leap".

On the other hand, I don't want to over-state the difficulty of running a successful smartphone project. The skills involved are new (in part), but they are not impossible. In a way, the difficulty in running a successful smartphone project can be compared to the difficulty of driving a car in an unfamiliar busy city, or playing golf in a professional tournament and surviving the cut. In all three cases, there's a lot to think about: you need to do many things right, all at the same time. In all three cases, it ...