Holy hell! It's been a rough five days at work but at least we are near the finish line. Over the past few days I've been working nonstop to deploy a third party integration for our CRM product which, by all accounts, has been the most convoluted process ever. While I'd like to think that I'm being melodramatic, I can not say that I'm exaggerating. Though the technical problems were solved the remainder of the solution, which we outsourced to a contractor, was not fully documented nor fully tested. This created a huge, nightmarish workload for us as we attempted to roll out the solution.

The moral of the story is that while it's beneficial to have outside help when accomplishing project goals it's imperative to keep the deliverable items static and well documented as possible. If your goal is to hit a moving target and then distill the information into a meaningful document you need to keep very detailed notes and to be very organized. If your vendor or contractor does not exhibit these traits then odds are you will end up with a huge mess when it's time to deploy your project.

Having written a lot of code and having worked on many projects I can honestly say that the greatest skill a software developer can possess is not coding proficiency, but a knack for organization. Regardless of whether you practice traditional development or iterative design you still need to maintain order in both code writing and project documentation. While code can be self documenting application function and business processes often are not. When you skimp on explanation about what a program or system is supposed to be doing you risk unintentionally breaking things when changes are made. You also further complicate the process or sunsetting those systems if their role is not explicitly apparent.

At the end of the day I'd rather work with and have work outsourced to developers who are able to document their work and the processes they seek to improve. Anything less means more work for us coders and more confusion and hand wringing for our bosses.