Preparing for a Project

Posted on Thursday, April 14, 2005 in the Flash category.

As I mentioned in my FiTC recap, I have become very interested in how others prepare and manage projects, mainly from the coding aspect. My code usually ends up as a jumbled mess, and is not easy to update/maintain for other developers. I myself find it fairly easy to update, but I worry about what would happen if someone needs to edit it when I am on vacation or a sick day. I know I am not the only one in the community thinking about this, so I wanted to get a couple developers point of views on the subject.

My Way

The way I usually prepare for a project, well, its lackluster to say the least. I usually just dive right into the code, writing and organizing things as I go. There are some good and bad things to this.

For one, I truthfully don’t see how most developers diagram their coding structures beforehand. I have tried, and I usually end up forgetting needed functions, methods, etc. Which just leads me back to the same place I am in now. So how exactly do you go about this, without forgetting things? Or do you just develop a certain naming convention, and go from there?

One very bad effect of this method, is that when you come back to the project, things are usually very un-maintainable, especially for an outside developer. Functions are strewn all over the place, naming structures are non-existant,etc… You are starting to see my need for a new way, right?

File structure

File structure is one area where I have actually found a pretty standard solution, that seems to work quite well. I figure since I am asking for so much support in this entry, I might as well give some advice. The way I usually structure things, is I have an assets folder, which contains any miscellaneous files not directly included in the file. I also have a source folder, which contains all fla files, and as files. the last folder, is a build folder. This is where I publish all my swf files to, and also store all loaded jpgs, swfs, mp3s, xml files, etc… The one major advantage to this way, is you have a build folder to just upload and publish when needed. This helps tremendously.

Improvements?

One of the problems Stacey mentions in her article, is that its nearly impossible for a developer to sit down in a 1 hour conference session or 1 page tutorial, and explain the best way to plan a project. This is where I think the strength of a blog comes in. A good discussion will receive many solutions to a fairly large problem. My questions are as follow…

1) How do you plan a UML document, when you don’t truely know EVERY function you will need? Or am I just too impatient when planning this? I am a noob when it comes to this, so go easy :)

2) When on a short deadline, how do you like to seperate your time between planning and coding? 20/80? 50/50? Does having a short deadline affect your ratio?

3) For the designer/developers, does your planning change if you are developing a project in HTML? PHP, CF, etc? Design work?