Sometimes, building a software, discussing features over and over, re-working the targets and feature lists again and again, simply looks like wandering through a mace, full of dead ends and false branches. The experiences of many years suggest a different reality: if everyone sticks together, continuing the work, one will notice: it’s not a mace, but a labyrinth – which is just a single, wound-up way, leading to the successful completion of the project. Try it for yourself!

Developing software is much more than just writing code, more than bits and bytes spread throughout the mainframes memory. While the main interest in development mostly centers around functionality, other aspects, which are often overlooked or not noticed, play a much bigger role in writing actually useful and good software. Does the program really fit the customers needs? Is it easy to use and to maintain? Does the software solve problems, or does it cause problems?

While those aspects should be taken into account to make software a better experience for the user, there is much more to code than simply “handling the problems well”. Good code has it’s own life, it’s own beauty – it should be aesthetic, in the first place. This is about much more than business logic, algorithms or data structures. A solution with a good design, thoroughly planned roots and structures might look expensive (in time and money) at first – but it will pay of later. One small change in the customers specifications, and you will get a big payoff for this initial investment – again, both in time and money.

Those little tweaks and changes in the customers mind – and reacting properly to them – really make up most of the success of a great software program. One should always develop for the beauty of the craft – it will do him, and his software, good.