@Nicolas – Yeah, that’s possibly a fair point. I suppose the exact same concern can be turned around though. Can your start-up afford to write code that you need to throw away if you don’t take the time to identify if they’re useful features? Maybe your competitor creates a better API and documentation, even if they’re less feature-full, and “wins” because of that? I don’t consider writing documentation, or defining requirements and specifications to be “lost time”.
Horses for courses, though. I’m not suggesting this would work for everyone – but it’s worked for me and my colleagues before, in particular in the case where our ultimate goal was to create a public API that we expect users to be comfortable with.
Frances Berriman
@Nicolas – Yeah, that’s possibly a fair point. I suppose the exact same concern can be turned around though. Can your start-up afford to write code that you need to throw away if you don’t take the time to identify if they’re useful features? Maybe your competitor creates a better API and documentation, even if they’re less feature-full, and “wins” because of that? I don’t consider writing documentation, or defining requirements and specifications to be “lost time”.
Horses for courses, though. I’m not suggesting this would work for everyone – but it’s worked for me and my colleagues before, in particular in the case where our ultimate goal was to create a public API that we expect users to be comfortable with.