Misplaced Priorities

I've worked on quite a few software projects in my career and I always wonder at the people who get hung up on their favorite features regardless of importance to the actual users of the system.

A few years back I worked with a developer who became analyst. At some point in one of his past projects he had created a feature for allowing a user to press some key combinations to "hot jump" from screen to screen. Although he never really elaborated I suspect this feature was more than just the typical shortcut keys you see in most desktop applications. But that's not the point. He became convinced this was THE feature to add to our app. Over the next few weeks he became fixated on "hot jumps". We kept hearing about "hot jumps" over and over. This was going to be the "most used feature" in the system.

But the other developers and I didn't agree with him... We felt "hot jumps" had absolutely no value unless the destinations of these hot jumps actually worked! And that was the problem and the point of this blog entry. We had tight deadlines, and a lot of actual business functionality to develop long before features like "hot jumps" should ever have entered anyone's mind. I'm not saying "hot jumps" would have been completely worthless, but at the time, it was undoubtedly a misplaced priority.

So it's with some surprise (and frustration) that I find myself in a similar situation today, only it's not "hot jumps", it's directory structures, eclipse project files, and (lord help me) Ant scripts. Under normal circumstances I would definitely say these things all have some importance, but what about actually developing the application? We're three weeks into development with five developers but under the direction of our "leader", I find myself spending my entire day renaming things and begging the "gods of Ant" to actually let me get this damn build.xml file right so it will do what I want. And gentle reader this is not just your regular run of the mill ant script. This is the mother of all ant scripts, utilizing every possible ant task available. And let me clarify, I did not write it. I inherited it and have been instructed to "make it work".

But my point again is this, what good is this "hot jump", oops, I mean Ant script if it doesn't have anything to build? At the end of the day, will the users be impressed with the quintessential Ant script or would they actually like to have the features they asked for?