The Need for Speed! Steve Nelson

Internet Startup Failure 2000 More Internet startups failed this year than ever before Why did this happen? How can we (web developers) prevent this next year?

Internet Startup Success 2001!!! Spend less time developing our applications in general. Fusebox has cut our time in half, can we cut it in half again? Produce higher quality applications in less time How?

How Fast Is Fast Enough? What if one person could build a complete version of your ENTIRE application in 5 days? That would be sweet, huh?

That’s Absurd! Come on Steve… Think about this Before Fusebox, you may have been writing messy code. By simply having a system (Fusebox) for writing CF your development time gets cut in half Can we refine our Fusebox process and make development even faster? ABSOLUTELY!

What About the Quality? Don’t rush your application development, that’s not the point Improve your Fusebox development

Software Development Lifecycle

Specifications & Design Fusebox makes Specification and Design incredibly easy Your specifications & designs need to be so good that a developer can immediately build from them without asking major questions

Five Day Development Cycle Specifications & Design are the most important part We need to get Specifications & Design down to 1 day for ANY application Being able to do this will not happen overnight, although with practice it will get easier

What’s the Difference? Specification = “What the client wants” Design=“How you will build what the client wants”

Specification Ingredients 1 cup of CF developer 2 cups of Clients 1 HUGE whiteboard(s) 3 lbs of brains (human is best) 600 lbs of ideas

Focus on One Circuit at a Time Break out all the circuit applications you will need FOR VERSION 1 on the whiteboard Be sure to include the most necessary circuit applications that will take the application to the next level

Draw Various User Flows One by one, go through each circuit application and draw the user Fuseaction flow This should be a downward flow Don’t worry about loops

Determine Security Rules Which users will be allowed to view the various Fuseactions? Place a number(s) for the groups that can access the Fuseaction, and list a reference Use 0 for a “Registered Public User”

Example Specification Here is an example Forums Specification (see attachment)example Forums Specification

Figure Out What Is Missing Now is the hard part. This takes practice. Figure out what you left out of your spec The most commonly left out area are the administrative Fuseactions. Clients will 9/10 times forget to tell you these.

Write Down Full Specification A ‘FULL’ specification is more than just a 2 word description. It is a few sentences describing in plain English what each Fuseaction does. (plug: SecretAgents.com will offer a complete Fusebox Specifications/Design tool early October 2000)

That’s It for a Specification Once the specification is written down you will have a basis for what you are attempting to complete for that particular version From there you can move onto the design

Design Ingredients 1 cup of you 2 liters of the caffeine of your choice 1 brain full of CF/Fusebox experience

Focus on File Break Down Each Fuseaction needs to be broken down into the various necessary files – Does the display require a qry file? Don’t forget those file! – Do your actions redirect the user to another page after an insert or update? Try “url_” files Don’t waste time with psuedo code! Just be able to explain each file in words

Database Design Are you working from an existing database? Or are you starting from scratch? What tables will be necessary to do each Fuseaction? Database design is an iterative process and you will most likely change your database design after building…. Think of those changes as versions, just like your code

File Details For each file in your Fuseactions write out a few sentences on how it will work This is the hard part of design but gives the biggest payoff This will only be viewed by you and your programmers, GET TECHNICAL!

Now Begin Coding! With your list of Specifications you can instantly write your Index.cfm files With your list of files, you can create all the necessary files and simply translate your plain English descriptions into CFML 5 days doesn’t look so absurd anymore!

Conclusion Developers can help to prevent so many businesses from failing next year by speeding up our development process Specification & Design are often left out, if done properly your development process will be cut in half!