Denis' Micro Blog

Hello, hello everyone.

Hope you're doing well so far. 😁

Well... For today I got another cryptic blog title and another development topic for you. Tracer code.

A few years back, a work colleague gave me the following tip.

Always be ready to show off your stuff... You never know what happens.

At the time, I haven't about it too much. But with more and more eyes from all sorts of different directions looking at my projects, I understood more what he originally meant.

Especially when you got people from outside your team, or even customers looking at your things. Well... Try telling someone when he/she wants to take a look...

ehrm... well... I can't... it's in development...

And after that a lengthy discussion on why this can't happen on your side. You feel bad. The other person is often times, "angry", disappointed, and confused because of that.

Trust me. I've been there. 😂

Nobody likes that. So, we introduce tracer code.

But what is actually tracer code? Good question.

It's simply fully functional code, but based on your current knowledge of the required targets, and not fully functional/implemented yet.

This is still production code. Just not the finalized version, which separates it from any prototypes which are done before. The main goal is that you try to make sure that in every stage of development, you got something showable. Something where you can quantify how close you are to your target, or compare differentiating targets with. Your "first goal" is to develop the "minimum basic overall functionality" of your software, where you can later add on your other features, like modules. Remember, it doesn't have to work for the first time. 😉 or the second one... or the fifteenth one...

Besides this better showablity and discussability with other users, this approach also has the advantage of having well-defined software structures, pretty early on and having a better feel for progress since you can see and quantify it and easy interchangeability.

So yeah. Don't be discouraged to miss a few traces. You will see progress very soon. 😊

See ya.