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We constantly try to provide accurate estimates that we can defend with confidence. But there are situations where we end up making mistakes. And this post describes one such situation.

One of our clients asked us to estimate a feature. As usual, we sent back an estimate without much delay.

After few days, our client asked us to implement this feature. When we started to think about implementing the feature we found that it would take at least double the time that we’d earlier estimated. We’d put ourselves in a bad situation. It would of course be very hard to convince the client as to why there was this much deviation – considering we discovered this even before actually starting to implement the feature. We did the 5 why’s to get to the root of the problem.

We discovered the following reasons:

• We hadn’t gone through the usual process of breaking down the feature to the desired level of granularity. Digging deeper, the following root causes emerged:
  • The project had been on ‘pause’ mode for a couple of weeks and we had gotten busy with other things in the meanwhile.
  • The value of the feature [to the end user] was not completely obvious to us.

The solution? We’ve decided to ask ourselves the following question before sending across an estimate to any client in the future:

Is this a confident estimate? Can we defend the estimate with proper reasoning?

The above will force us to think again about the estimate and help us become more consistent.

Oh, and one more thing. Ask the stakeholder as to what value the feature is going to add – if it is not obvious. Don’t assume that you’re right!

If you’re curious on what the client’s reaction was, when we sent across the revised [and much larger] estimate, ask us in the comment below We’d love to hear from you!

Step 1: Add these to Gemfile

gem 'therubyracer', :require => false
gem 'barista'

‘barista’ gem takes care of installing coffee-script gem and its dependencies. ‘therubyracer’ is the javascript engine for ruby.

Step 2: Run Bundle Install to install coffee-script gem and other required gems

bundle install

Step 3: Generate Barista initializer file config/initializers/barista_config.rb

rails generate barista:install

Step 4(optional): Lets configure barista to compile all coffeescript code into public/javascripts/coffeescripts/ folder (this is optional, if not configured compiled code will be placed under public/javascripts folder)

config/initializers/barista_config.rb, line 7.

# Change the output root, causing Barista to compile into public/coffeescripts
c.output_root = Rails.root.join("public", "javascripts", "coffeescripts")

Step 5: Create a folder ‘coffeescripts’ under app/ to have all your coffeescripts. All file names should end with .coffee
Example: app/coffeescripts/user.coffee

jQuery ->
 $('form').validate()

Step 6: Above code will be complied to JS file under public/javascripts/coffeescripts/user.js. Example code:

 /* DO NOT MODIFY. This file was compiled Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:13:34 GMT from
 * /home/manoj/my_rails_app/app/coffeescripts/user.coffee
 */
 (function() {
 jQuery(function() {
 return $('form').validate();
 });
 }).call(this);

Step 7: Include these coffeescript js files in your view/layouts using include tag.

<%= javascript_include_tag 'application', 'coffeescripts/user' %>

And you’re done with setup. As the complied code is neat JS code, your page should continue to work fine Going forward you can start using CoffeeScript for writing JS code.

For deployment we can use the barista:brew rake task in the Capistrano script using an “after” hook

Refrences used to create above steps:
http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
http://blog.nicolasblanco.fr/2010/12/13/you-should-already-use-coffeescript-in-your-rails-app/

Convert existing JS to coffeescript:
http://ricostacruz.com/js2coffee/

Setting up Emacs with coffee-mode:
http://ozmm.org/posts/coffee_mode.html

JQT is a family of JQuery plugins comprising of the most common widgets used in “modern” sites.  We’ve used quite a few of the widgets on our sites in the last 3-4 projects and it  has certainly helped us improve the look and feel of these sites – with much less effort that what would have been required otherwise.

Installing and using JQT on your site is also super simple.  Download a JS file of ~6kb and include in your web page.  The documentation and demos provided for each widget is excellent – so you should be on your way to actually getting stuff done very quickly after the download.

Bottom line – you’ve got pretty much no excuse, to not check it out .