Built It, but Nobody Came: Avoiding Overengineering
Session speaker(s): fluxsauce
Designing and building something that people need is completely different from implementing what they asked for. Engineers don't like to say no; helping is empowering and pride makes it difficult to back down. Product owners don't always have the context to understand how hard a feature is to implement and a throwaway request can add weeks to a project. We're all limited by our perspective, so the trick is to recognize what practically should be built. The goal isn't to say no, it should be to empower. Learn from our successes and mistakes!
We’ll discuss ways to focus on feature development and manage expectations so you can deliver value without compromising effectiveness. I'll show you some real-world examples of technically successful but over-engineered projects.
About the speaker: Jon is an Architect and Engineer at Four Kitchens and a lynda.com author with 13 courses on development. He's spoken at DrupalCon New Orleans 2016, DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015, and dozens of Drupal Camps about performance, site auditing and deployments. He's also the author of multiple Drupal utilities, including site_audit, generate_errors, feeds_import_io, and a co-author of the first version of Terminus.
https://2016.badcamp.net/session/built-it-nobody-came-avoiding-overengineering
Designing and building something that people need is completely different from implementing what they asked for. Engineers don't like to say no; helping is empowering and pride makes it difficult to back down. Product owners don't always have the context to understand how hard a feature is to implement and a throwaway request can add weeks to a project. We're all limited by our perspective, so the trick is to recognize what practically should be built. The goal isn't to say no, it should be to empower. Learn from our successes and mistakes!
We’ll discuss ways to focus on feature development and manage expectations so you can deliver value without compromising effectiveness. I'll show you some real-world examples of technically successful but over-engineered projects.
About the speaker: Jon is an Architect and Engineer at Four Kitchens and a lynda.com author with 13 courses on development. He's spoken at DrupalCon New Orleans 2016, DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015, and dozens of Drupal Camps about performance, site auditing and deployments. He's also the author of multiple Drupal utilities, including site_audit, generate_errors, feeds_import_io, and a co-author of the first version of Terminus.
https://2016.badcamp.net/session/built-it-nobody-came-avoiding-overengineering