Evolution of tools

Some purists may argue that man only really stepped up and made progress after the invention of electricity since most major inventions has been made in the last 100 years and no period in time has ever seen the progress made as in the last hundred years.

I, however, feel that man made his biggest evolutionary leap when he first realised that having a tool to help complete work is better than not having any tool at all, albeit the wheel, metal hammer or whatever implement of war you like (queue the overused 2001:a space odyssey reference where the ape realised the POWER of tools when he kills his fellow ape with the bone from an animal)

Apply that principal to development and the same rule applies. The better your tools, the more POWER you have.

In my team, the principal exists that a proper set of base line tools will not only help speed up development but will also help to decrease bugs and other well documented problems in the development life cycle. We have the motto that whenever a new development starts we carefully evaluate what tools we have available, what tools we can buy and ultimately what tools we need to develop ourselves to enable us to do the work smarter and faster.

One set of these tools are our code generators. Now there may be various products on the market that allow you to efficiently generate mass amounts of code, but they are expensive and often customization of specific needs take more time than what the actual benefit may be. So we develop our own. These Code generators then enable us to generate various pages (Data manipulation pages), Search pages, Code snippets and generic usage pages that not only boost development time, but also assist junior developers in understanding certain concepts. One of the major advantages of these generators are the fact that the code that is generated has already been tested, approved and cleaned up to the extent where limited bugs exist, and should a new bug be found, ALL the code can easily be regenerated with the fix and applied to existing code.

So whenever your next project starts or even in your current development / maintenance / QA cycle, keep your eyes open for opportunities to either buy or develop your own development tools. Although you may not see the benefits immediately, once the tools are refined and they start producing results the benefits will not only become clear but it will become an essential part of your development arsenal.

Not having the proper tools is like having a great car with a broken gearbox, you will always be stuck in first. So in the next project you do, PLAN properly around the proper tools and you will find yourself picking up speed in no time.


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