Everyone is aware of the problem of discovering the causes of a bug when it’s only present in one environment and, if it’s Production, the problem is even bigger, even if you have a solid error logging system in place.

When small software companies get bigger they embark on what can be a bumpy ride of change. One of those changes will probably be to do with the way they tackle the analysis phase of the software development life-cycle (SDL). [...] small software companies with a handful of developers, where the entire SDL for a project is covered by one or two developers, tend not to have a formalised analysis phase. Why is that?

Recently I stumbled upon a couple of articles1,2 and, remembering my experience with EC2, I discovered that utility computing was not what I was searching for: I was searching for something that helped me without adding complexity.

The most expensive phase of software construction is coding and this is because it’s the less intuitive: it requires constant attention and reasoning, errors (logical or not) are difficult to spot because they are immersed in text that often is long, separated in more than one file, and not written by us... What are the solutions to solve this problem, the problem of coding?