Mise en place – A chef’s guide to software development, part 1

There is almost always one other common feature of these videos and recipes: you need to get your ingredients and equipment ready to go before you start cooking. Everything comes together so quickly that if you’re whisking up your egg as your first ingredients are cooking, you run the risk of ruining the dish.

Gathering your ingredients like this is often called mise en place—French for “putting in place”—and is a superpower in cooking.

I think it should be a fundamental part of software development, too.

Ass of you, ass of me

I imagine I’m not the only person who enjoys the first part of a new project. There’s a strong temptation to trivialise small-sounding features when storming ahead with the bigger ones.

That approach can rapidly come unstuck, since it implicitly involves making assumptions about a project. So you know what’s even more enjoyable than the first part of a new project?

Finishing it successfully.

Mise en place can help you with this.

Everything in its right place

Let’s say you start work on a feature for a mobile app which needs drag and drop. Quick and tasty done-in-a-morning feature.

But no, it leaves a bitter flavour in the mouth, because the drag and drop library you assumed you could use hasn’t been updated in two years and has security issues. You found another which is more regularly updated, but it works in a slightly different way and you need to tweak your implementation to match.

This could have been resolved by doing a small amount of work upfront. Get your ducks in a row; do your due diligence; mise en place.

At Go Tripod, we make sure that we use workshops, wireframes, and conversations to get as much as possible out in the open. That means we’re doing lots of prep work before we even think about writing our first bit of code.

Be prepared

To learn more about how our experience in custom software development can benefit your organisation, simply email hello@gotripod.com, call us on 0845 475 2487 or complete the form below.