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Just found an excellent article by David Lanier. He writes that careful planning gives much better results in projects but this is normally underestimated by clients. I found the same: normally clients are willing to pay only for something, they can see. While this also has clear resons (no one wants to pay for nothing!), many clients do not realize that planning and thinking over project goals and implementation ways, may actually lower total project price a lot!
There is a law in programming. It says that price for fixing defects is lowest at design phase, moderate in implementation phase, high in testing phase and enormous when project is deployed. Thus project must be really carefully planned. This helps to avoid errors that has to be fixed at later stages at increasing price rate. When I worked in one large world-known company, we designed even till particular code statements. Design took over 50% of time but it really repaid because we knew what we have to do in details before implementation even started! So it was just mechanical coding at implementation phase: short, error free and effective. We did not made any flaws in design because it was reviewed and any problems corrected before implementation...
Big companies may allow spending 50% of all time just for design. Why smaller companies cannot?.. It repays. It really repays!
