Notes on Enterprise Application Development Strategy

At the end of the day, technology is an enabler for extracting business value. Some sure fire ways to burn money needlessly, during enterprise application development are noted below. Use it as a checklist to guard against, in your own enterprise development. As always, use your own context, while weighing-in, any generic advice.

• Don't care why and what the end user actually wants. Its more important to impress top management, with a good-looking demo
• Using a particular tech because it is popular at google, netflix or facebook, irrespective of its applicability within your own context, especially NFR context
• No clarity about the WHY, obsessed with only the HOW
• Not able to contain scope creep and needless escalation of complexity
• First thought that comes up becomes the definitive design, no choices, no alternatives considered
• Resume driven or Ego driven, development by tech leads
• Why use a suitable tech, when a tougher, riskier, newer tech is at hand, no matter how irrelevant
• Underestimating integration and dependencies
• Committing to technology choices without understanding the full scope of functionality and the non-functional requirements(NFR) in detail
• Forgetting that no application is an island. Its important that an application can "fit into" the enterprise landscape in terms of security standards, IDAM (identity and access management), audit standards, deployment, reliability and business continuity standards
• No thoughts given for migration path from existing application/s
• Disproportionate emphasis on UI look and feel rather than UX and information models
• Re-invent the wheel, under the guise of tech bravado
• Dev Teaming mistakes
• Thinking that employing 10 mediocre developers, instead of 3 crack devs, will be better
• Believe the myth that application devs, still write framework level code
• Never acknowledge, that app devs now, require to use proper frameworks and APIs, rather than belt out algorithms and complex programs