How To Get Paid More As A Developer Part 2 - Check Your Work

This is Part 2 of my series on how to get paid more as a developer from an employer's perspective. Part 1 can be found here http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-get-paid-more-developer-employers-perspective-part-petras-surna?trk=prof-post

The recommendations here, if followed, will reduce the costs I incur to produce work. And if that happens I make more money. And if I make more money, you make more money. At least if I am fair about it anyway :-)

Check Your Code

Check your code thoroughly and stop saying:

"It's really hard to check your work if you coded it"

Checking code is tedious and boring. However the argument that it's somehow not possible to check something that you coded is balderdash. Independent checking by another party should not be used to eliminate the type of bugs you could fix in your code. And in many small agencies there is no external checker. Thoroughly checked work reduces bugs and bugs are expensive to fix. They need to be understood, documented, correspondence needs to occur with the client, someone has to be interrupted to perform the work, new checks have to be made  - it all costs money that you could save.

The best way to check your work is to create a manual list of steps that execute all the functionality it needs to achieve. Then when a bug comes in, add this to the list as well.

e.g.

- Enter an invalid Username and press LogIn - You should see an error that says there are no users with these details.

- Enter a valid Username and invalid Password and press LogIn - You should see an error that says there are no users with these details.

and so on. Once you have made a fix you need to recheck the steps to ensure you haven't added a new bug. As I said, the steps are tedious, detailed and boring to write down and execute. But executing them saves time, potentially lots of time.

You may argue that checking should be the province of automated checkers. However automated checking systems are not always present. In anything other than large systems there simply isn't the time or the budget to build them.

If I don't see developers with check lists I know it's not possible that they could be checking their code. On the other hand, get this right and I can give you a 5-10% salary increase over a coder who avoids them :-)

Connect with me on LinkedIn https://au.linkedin.com/in/petrassurna