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2.4 Administration Payoff | ![]() |
If you picked the year project, go to the top of the section and start again. You missed something. (That something is called 'text'. You should read it.)
I'm not going to make excuses here; this is hard work, and there's a lot of it. You may feel that you're trapping yourself in a bureaucracy. You may even start to feel like a Pointy Haired Boss from the Dilbert comics - doing paperwork instead of doing Real Work.
What did you think the position of 'Administrator' meant anyway? Sitting around and ordering people to wait on you hand and foot?
Stress from work is probably indicator that you're doing things right; the more work you do on this side, paperwork and planning, the quicker your change will go in, work the way you want and will be relatively bug free. Your entire MUD will be of higher quality and run more smoothly. Remember, 80%-90% of the time should be spent planning, and you're probably the one who's going to be doing that!
If you're glossing over these requirements and checks, I want you to take a second and think "What would Microsoft do?" If you're doing the same thing, then you're probably doing it wrong. Skipping requirement approval or discussion so you can get your code in faster or meet some artificial deadline or product ship date (Windows 95? 98? 2000? XP? Anyone?) is a sure way to require continual updates, intermittent crashes, and future compatibility problems. Bad Joss.
You shouldn't think that you're going at this alone either; your programmers need to be involved in this - perhaps they're the ones who are creating these project requests for YOU to approve. I don't know about you, but I'd feel uncomfortable with giving someone else's pet project a go ahead without knowing everything that it's going to do to my MUD. You may even simplify repetitive tasks like skills and spells where there's a certain minimum required amount of information; you can write up a sheet and assign the generation to a junior administrator.
For the truly interested, pick up the book Code Complete by McConnell. It includes actual time/effort consumption studies by IBM and other large corporations and gives real world examples and statistics to back up what I say here about the development process. It's not the most exciting stuff, but it is useful. If you find it interesting, you may want to get Debugging the Development Process by Maguire which I used as a follow-up. It's a bit more schedule oriented, so it may not mesh well with volunteer work, but it is still useful as a general tool for group-related activities, such as project design and implementation.
In addition, you may want to peruse the CVS section below. It covers a specific (easy) way to perform code and project management so multiple programmers can safely work on a variety of tasks on the same code at the same time.
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Index | ![]() |
2.3 Development Examples | 2.5 Programmer Payoff |