The importance of planning before coding.
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Hello everyone again, I'm gonna be talking in this article about the importance of having planning before coding.
Before we dive into the topic, I really encourage guys to try ⟹Trello.
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First of all, I need you to understand, the more you organize things, the easier it becomes to do them. If you do not agree with that, it’s okay, you might change your opinion. Often timeless experienced software developers tend to have the wrong idea of being productive in software development. They believe that to be productive, they have to be writing code all the time.
Planning ahead means understanding the big picture idea of the software you are writing. … By having a clear breakdown of the project “at least the best possible at the time”, you are able to write code that would make sense together.
When I first started out as a software developer, I was under the same idea as well. However, that is no longer the case. I learned that software development is about thinking/planning more than coding. Therefore, my goal in this article is to go over some of the benefits of planning ahead before coding.
Thinking about the problem you are trying to solve should be your first step in any of your projects. You need to have a grasp of the big picture idea and then from there, you start breaking the project down. Try to break the project down into as many parts as possible because that will reduce the complexity of the project into manageable pieces. When you are working with smaller pieces of a problem, you will find that it is not overwhelming.
With your project broken down into smaller parts, you can start to think about the implementation of each part. At this stage, you should be thinking in terms of pseudo-code and not be doing the actual coding. You are likely to be working with a framework or libraries, so look for what functionalities the framework or the library offers that would help you implement your pseudo-code. Approaching your project in this specific way, allows you to backtrack easily if you do find some issues with your approach. The best part is you did not waste your time trying to code only to find out partway that the approach will not work.
Save Your Time
Secondly, you will absolutely save your time, I’m not saying to make actual planning is easy but it will save you time. Planning ahead will naturally help save you time “maybe a lot of time”. When you plan ahead, you are likely to think about how to implement features and do research. For example, feature X can be done with library X and API X, but if you did not do research and jumped straight to coding, you may end up developing from the ground up. As you can imagine, using the framework and APIs will save you a massive amount of time and headache.
In addition, when you plan ahead, it can help you see potential issues and roadblocks. So instead of running into issues later on as you code, you see them ahead of time and can change your approach without spending time coding.
Producing Clean and Readable Code
By having a clear breakdown of the project “at least the best possible at the time”, you are able to write code that would make sense together. If you are writing a piece of code that does action X only then you might omit essential details that help with understanding how all the pieces in the codebase fit together.
Helps with Complex Problems
Looking at the complex problem as a whole makes it difficult to deal with. However, when you solve each of the problems individually, you find that it is manageable. Once you have a solution to the smaller problems you can work your way back up to the original problem.
I really hope that I could deliver a clear message and I hope you enjoyed my article. If you like it please share it with your friends, by this we’re finally done👏
See you for the next article and keep writing clean code 👏
