Access Programming

[mbox204]

Hello,

I am trying to determine what my development times are in relation to
industy benchmark for Access development. Sometimes a form will take me 1
hour to design(including object coding) Or sometimes it may take a couple
hours(including object coding), it is not consistent and it become
frustrating for me when I attempting to establish a baseline for my personal
use.

Is there any guideline that is recognized as a baseline for an individual
creating forms and controls, reports and controls, queries and such. I just
cannot seem to get a handle of my time lines and think that if there is a
target value to aim for, I might be a little more targeted.

Thanks,

Frustrated.

 

[Larry Linson]

Is there any guideline that is recognized
as a baseline for an individual creating
forms and controls, reports and controls,
queries and such.
No.

I just cannot seem to get a handle of my
time lines and think that if there is a
target value to aim for, I might be a little
more targeted.

There is so wide a range of functionality that may be needed in any of those
objects that it would be impossible to have a "rule of thumb" for how long
any should take. A form could be as simple as an Autoform on a simple lookup
table (5 seconds or so), or it could be a form with multiple subforms
dealing with several related tables and complex logic (who knows how many
hours or days?).

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

 

[Mike Painter]

Hello,

I am trying to determine what my development times are in relation to
industy benchmark for Access development. Sometimes a form will take me 1
hour to design(including object coding) Or sometimes it may take a couple
hours(including object coding), it is not consistent and it become
frustrating for me when I attempting to establish a baseline for my personal
use.

Is there any guideline that is recognized as a baseline for an individual
creating forms and controls, reports and controls, queries and such. I just
cannot seem to get a handle of my time lines and think that if there is a
target value to aim for, I might be a little more targeted.

I doubt you'll find anything. I've done applications in a few hours and a
form in many many hours, and that doesn't count the time's I started over.

In general be as lazy as possible.
Make sure you are using the relational model.
Use queries over code whenever possible. (That saved a deal that would have
killed a very profitable project.)
Make sure you are doing it the "Access" way.
Just read through the events, commands and functions available in Access, or
any other language, once in a while.
Most of us have heard "us" say "Damn, I could have used that and saved an
hour."

Steal ideas from here.

 

[Albert D. Kallal]

As mentioned, the difference between one form, and the next can be really
amazing.

If you take a look at the following article, there is a screen shot part way
down. It looks like a VERY AVERY simple screen.

http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn/Articles/WhyClass.html

Here is stats for that simple screen:

700 lines of VB code (this does include blank lines).

It uses a class object I created, and that module has 730 lines of code

So, basically this simple screen that does not even edit data has 1500 lines
of code to make it work?

I can assure you, that this screen took a good 3 days of work, and that does
NOT include the writing of the class object that I used to make this routine
function..