How Software Development is Like Finishing a Basement

Last year Carrie and I bought and moved into a new house. Our strategy was to move in then finish the unfinished basement ourselves, building up some sweat equity. Now we're about halfway finished and I see some obvious similarities between building a basement and building a software application.

We decided to be agile in our basement finish, rather than work from a predefined blueprint. Some decisions would be put off until necessary; like the colors of carpet and paint, the style of lighting fixtures, and even the placement of some doorways and size of closets. But some things have to be decided right at the start. What will the end product look like generally? (Modern.) What features are definitely required? (Bar, pool table, salon, bathroom, two bedrooms, toy room.) This is like deciding the overall look and feel of your app and its required features.

Once you've got a handle on the overall look and feature set, it's time for the strategy of how to make it happen. How will you design it? You can design the whole project, creating a detailed blueprint before starting work, or wait to design the bathroom until you are ready to start work on it. But keep dependencies in mind. If you cover the main heating duct with drywall before you run a duct to the bathroom, you'll be redoing your ceiling. Likewise, if you write some Javascript that runs on IE then find out you've got some Linux users, you'll be right back into that code.

We ended up doing the basement much like I write software. Start with a good idea of what features must be in the end product, but save the details for later. Know what has to be done first, middle, and last, but break each part into its details when you come to it.

Test each part well before moving on to the next. You want to find out that one of the electrical outlets didn't get a wire run to it BEFORE you put drywall on the walls. And you want to know that your sql stored procedure works correctly before you start calling it from several different web apps.

For me the greatest lesson learned from finishing a basement is that everything doesn't have to be perfect. A wall stud can be a half inch off and you can still make it work. A heating duct can be a few inches too long or short and be fine. Likewise, sometimes the quick and dirty code is good enough. No function will ever be elegant enough and fast enough and memory efficient enough for me to consider it perfect. Put down the level and tape measure, nail the board into place and move on.