Setting up for success

One of the reasons for the outstanding success of Oracle APEX is that you can build applications really quickly. Within a couple of hours, you can have a development database set up, and using the built-in themes, you've started building an application.

This can be really dangerous for us as developers. At the beginning of a project, particularly when you're using a new or unfamiliar technology, there is a pressure to prove yourself—either as an individual starting a new role or as a team proving a technology to management.

Experienced programmers recognize this; the challenge is convincing everyone involved on what the ultimate goals of the project are, and not just take a short-term, short-sighted approach.

While not a dedicated practitioner of the methodology, some of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) are a great reminder of on what we should be focusing.

The ultimate goal of any project is to write valuable software, and by valuable I mean software that is going to be used and is useful. There is no point writing software unless it delivers real business outcomes—either tangibly in increasing business revenue, streamlining business processes, or less directly by reducing time spent on non-productive activities.

Working software is the primary measure of progress. The more time that we, as developers, can spend on regularly delivering valuable software in short time periods, the more successful our project is.

Regularly deploying working software implies that we need an efficient build process. This is the art of maximizing the amount of work not done! By taking a little extra time at the beginning to set up our development environment properly, it should be largely self sustaining and require almost no ongoing maintenance.