… designing ways to manage an application.

It’s a subject that I’ve broached before, but I still get uncomprehending looks from developers when I explain that an application management interface should be as simple as (if not simpler than) the user facing interface.

Many developers have a blind spot when it comes to this, let’s take the example of updating details in a user account -
Some developers seem to think that it’s simple enough to query the database to get the unique identifier for the user account and then construct an update query – or in really advanced cases paste it into an update form.

What is rarely considered is that constructing database queries IS a simple task for a technically adept developer. However updating user account details is NOT a technical job and SHOULD NOT require a developer’s time to achieve.

An application manager shouldn’t need to have technical skills, if they need to pass on simple tasks to a developer then there is a bottleneck in the workflow and both the manager and the developer are spending time on a task that should take a few moments. Given that interruptions are the enemy of productivity when it comes to development tasks, it shouldn’t be hard to work out that: the amount of productive time lost to simple tasks, very quickly adds up to more that the time required to provide a non-technical interface – allowing the task to be performed by the application manager.

This theory can be carried on into other areas of development, if the HTML guys cannot directly edit the HTML then again the developer has become a bottleneck having to drop his or her own tasks in order to deploy html and css files.

I’m a great believer in the use of external configurations for parts of applications. Ideally an application should be written in such a way that it can be configured and extended by someone who doesn’t need to see any of the main application code. They would only need to understand the format of the configuration files – again, this stops the application developer becoming a bottleneck to productivity and the developer should be happier to have less menial distractions from whatever they happen to be working on.