Scoping projects

One of the key things when setting off on a project is to figure out what scale things are supposed to be.

If you’re making something only for yourself, you can leave all sorts of sharp edges on the code — only you’ll need to ever deal with it. It’s not ideal, but how much polish do you really need?

On the other end of the spectrum are tools that you are releasing to paying customers. On that side you need to really take the customer’s needs into account. They are your customers, after all.

The middle gets interesting.

If you’re making an internal tool, you need to ask if, and how much, of a front end is needed? What’s the ROI on the complexity that comes with user friendliness? Sure, it’s better, but you need to be able to pay for that cost at some point.

All I’m saying is to think about the overall cost of things before you start gilding lillies.