Planning importance

Even if you’re already a professional programmer familiar with PHP, we encourage you to read the following sections, as they cover the basics for successful development. If you’re already familiar with the discussed topics, take the time to browse through the text anyway; you might discover new  information—new views of problems, new approaches, new solutions. The more you know about approaching different aspects of your future projects, the better you’ll be at nailing down the critical fragments and handling them in a superior way. Many of the following sections also discuss topics that are more questions of belief than commonly accepted rules. We’d like you to trust us as professional developers and rely on our experience before abandoning the content—it will pay later on. 02 0997 CH01  6/16/00  7:26 AM  Page 45 The Importance of Planning Before diving into PHP-specific issues, let’s start from a wider point of view. Some issues apply to application development in general, regardless of which language you’re using and on what platform you’re developing. When working on a professional project, it’s very important that you think about what you’re doing. Know your enemy—never underestimate him. Although your project isn’t really an enemy, the point still applies. Know all your project’s specifications, its target platform(s), its users, and never underestimate the significance of small problems that you haven’t evaluated completely before moving on to other topics.
Judging from our experience, planning takes at least 50% of the development time; the bigger the project, the more thoroughly you should develop its outlines.This principle applies to contacting your customers and working closely with them on defining an overall project outline, as well as talking with your developers about defining a coding outline.The less effort you spend on consistency and maintainability, the sooner you’ll run into problems when reopening old files and trying to fix bugs or
add new features.