Great! You've created a new, cool application that enables your team to do X! Everyone loves you for about a day, but then things change. Now you have to support it. Now you have to perform upgrades. Now you have to appease people who are complaining that X takes too long (even though X wasn't even possible before you came along). Now you have "The Curse of Innovation!"
Do you stop innovating? Never! You must learn to deal with the curse. Here's how:
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Offload and Delegate
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If it's server based, you need to have it running on a reliable machine that your entire team (or Ops team) has access to
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Train other people in the team about your new app/code/whatever -- this way, they'll be able to help make updates and bug fixes
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Documentation - if you can't train people, they can read your docs! (I'm not saying that training is an alternative to documentation - both are needed)
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If you offload/delegate, you can now move on to new innovations!
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Basically, nothing can depend on you personally, if it does, you've just enrolled yourself in 24 hour tech support (or doomed your app)
- Bug Tracking
- Effectively cataloging everything wrong with your app is a must, otherwise you won't know what to fix
- Other users will be able to see known bugs and work around it (trusting that there will eventually be fixes)
- Updates and New Versions
- Update! Unfortunately where I work, we have trouble making updates and rolling out new versions because, well, let's just say we're too busy. This isn't an option -- your app is just a 1.0 version (maybe 0.5), it won't truly be a great product until around version 5.0 -- so keep at it! Don't let it get forgotten and left behind.
- If you don't have the passion to do this, then see #1.
It just amazes me how quickly people forget that they were never able to do X before your cool app/code came along and instead gripe about how crappy your app/code is -- but, such is the Curse of Innovation. Thankfully I've been dealing with the curse (better to have the curse then to not innovate) and I'm slowly starting to learn to prepare for and prevent the curse from ever happening. Hopefully, this will serve as a reminder to me and to you! Beware "The Curse of Innovation!"