If you hire independent consultant or company, how’d you know they produce well solution/code for your SharePoint?
- What are the major concerns for you in that case?
- How do you make sure that custom solution well written?
- How do you test performance/hi-load of that solution?
- How do you make sure that custom solution won’t ruin your farm?
- Do you do a code review on the custom solution?
The reason to ask is that if I don’t work on the project from scratch, then I do work as a “firefighter” – I am fixing, refactoring, improving stability, performance and other things for the mess which has been “already done by other ‘good’ company”.
I am just quite shocked as in the most of the cases doubtful strategic decision produces an incredible snowball falling into such a terrible, unsupportable solution you might even imagine. What I can see is that quite often people even don’t know how to write pure c# code (logging, exaction handling, OOP or design patters), or don’t understand asp.net at all. But they “independed consultant/developer/or other sort of INTERNET GURU” 🙂
At the end, it comes to quite interesting experience and projects – “intranet remediation”, “fixing”, “fixing” and “fixing”.
So, how come? How’d you make sure that independent consultant or company produce well solution/code for your SharePoint?
I would also say, that this topic is not about technical stuff. This is more about decision making, influence and getting the right thing done.
The main concern is why questions in the topic are irrelevant for some companies/clients? This might be a good indication of the maturity of the company.
So, the problem actually is not about ‘technical stuff’, but the problem somewhere in the top-management-decision-making-chain?Â
Okay, looks great for the start.
As a client, why would I need all these ‘geeky’ buzzwords to build up intranet solution in the company? Let’s say, we are university, charity, government or something like that without inside experts.
We do have absolutely no idea about all these buzzes, as well as ‘Solution Architect’. We just need a portal/intranet/custom design 🙂 that’s it!
What might be the strategy, then?
Good discussion! However, I think the questions are valid for *any* one developing custom solutions on SharePoint not just independent consultants. I have seen plenty of wrong choices by both contractors as well as permanent employees 😉
That said, having a set of good engineering practices in place is fundamental to producing a quality solution…
- Code Reviews
- Coding Standards
- A good functional testing framework (such as selenium)
- Unit Testing approach (this is always a hot topic in SharePoint)
- Performance Testing (using visual studio)
- Well defined requirements
- Use of an Agile Methodology so issues can be found earlier in the life-cycle.
- many more …
However, one thing I think is essential is to have a good hands on Solution Architect who can enforce many of these principles.Â
