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Q. How much planning should I do?
A. As much as you can, until you cannot resist the urge to start coding any longer.
Now this is really important. From the projects I have been involved with, one factor that certainly affects the outcome is how much planning you do. You need to get this about right. Its no good spending 90% of your time planning because that simply leaves no time at all for programming the finished product. However, you do need to spend some time planning.
I would judge this to be about right. On a three-month project, spend 2-3 weeks as a minimum writing out a specification of the concept in as much detail as you need to get the design right in your mind. People laugh at my specifications. In two weeks I can produce around 100 pages of draft text that outlines what I plan to do. I can write fast on account of having spent many years as a technical author and that experience helps me to sort out the concepts and ‘engineer the information’ into a form that I can write up quickly. I do it this way because the programmers who’s work I admire do this as well and I want to emulate them - at least in so far as they are successful and turn out work that they are proud of.
Out of this planning exercise, you can gain a good insight into how the program will hang together and you get an idea of how to attack it. For example, you’ll know by the end of this, roughly how much memory it will need to run in and how much space on the CD-ROM it will require.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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