I have been inspired by a post by Soon Hui to write about my mistakes. I have evolved much on the programming side during these years, but my biggest mistakes have been social and economic: dealing with other people. Thus, I have collect a list of my errors committed as a php freelance developer.- Giving out your personal phone number: no matter what, use separate phone numbers for clients and friends. People have the tendency to call in awkward hours, and having a single number you can shut off after the workday has finished helps your work-life balance .
- Lack of tests: every application you write will be maintained in the future, often by you. Even small tweaks (that you can't honestly charge for) can break an application and the safety net of a test suite will free you from the burden of manual testing.
- Providing fixed estimates: estimates should be given in the form of a range, and the whole process of estimation and planning in software development is more complex than the average person thinks. Counting billable hours just does not work and an application's size should be assessed during the requirements gathering.
- Tasks instead of features: one pillar of Agile processes is that features are the metric of success and accomplishment, and not tasks. Even if you're working on fixed-price waterfall projects, focus on giving out the features requested because no customer has the time to comprehend technical and infrastructure tasks such as "database modelling".
- Thinking that a client knows what he needs: even in porting legacy applications, no customer really understands the kind of software he wants. It is our job to interact with him to distinguish between mandatory and exciting features and providing the highest value in an application, since we have great programming skills but little domain knowledge. Often emphasis is put on gold plated features which are really not worth their cost and can cause disasters in the long run (and maybe you are even forced to prioritize features with high risk and little reward). Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.
- Not defining economic terms early: when you write the first line of code you should have an agreement on your reward. This rule of thumb can seem obvious to us, but remember that customers usually come from a whole different world.
Have you some freelance experience to share? What do you feel you could have done differently during your career?
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3 comments:
Re: "Thinking that a client knows what he needs" - there's also an instance of client who doesn't know what he want, but on the other hand is convinced that he/she knows *always* best. No matter what solutions I try to propose, even if they are coming from my experience and best intentions. Client always "knows" better. :|
It is becoming more and more part of our job to educate clients, especially if you are a freelancer. :) Of course there are always some people who will never get it anyway, so you should not work with or for them.
One thing I've never considered, but which you make to sound so OBVIOUS, is to note features, instead of tasks. It seems so common to break down an assessment based on what the developer has to do (tasks) instead of what the client expects (features). But you're right, the client doesn't care how the job gets done, only that the end result meets expectations. A nice observation!
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