I am currently developing a website for a large company where my major role has been to develop a Flex app that resides in each of the product pages that shows info, swatches, etc for each of the sub product lines. I was given a psd of the comp of two different product pages, and that's it. I looked over the comps and made the assesment that the pages were laid out and functioned the exact same. Great! I can make one Flex app that loads in a different XML file for each product and a different CSS file for some changes in the app colors. Not a problem. So that's what i did. I begin the analysis of the app one morning and by the end of the following day the app was complete. It was a Flex app built on the Cairngorm framework and it looked and functioned just like the comps. (Cairngorm rocks by the way) Awesome, I had finished way before my deadline, now on to the next project. Now we could just give the other products a XML data file and those pages would be complete.
Not even close. I then demoed the app inside those two product pages to the client. The client liked it. The client then preceeded to give me the structure of some of the other product pages. They want it to look and "function" just like the pages that I had just completed, except for the fact that these new product lines are totally different. So now I have spent way more time than was budgeted shoe horning new items and functionality into the original app. Had I known these requirements from the get go, i could have planned for them and made better app design decisions. Thanks to the help of Cairngorm the files have stayed well separated and the app well developed.
Lesson here...don't start app developed until ALL requirements have been gathered from the client and signed off on by them. As developers we have to push back on our AE's, PM's or whoever is handling the requirement gathering until we have all requirments needed for the development process in documented form. If we aren't given the time and/or ability to push back and wait for the needed requirements then the quality of the finished app and the accurateness of our time estimations will suffer greatly. And this will damage our employers bottom line much worse than than taking the extra time to do proper requirements gathering.
