Programming in a crunch

Question

Ideally you want a schedule that's accommodating and flexible but when it comes to paying the bills and working in a business, that's rarely a luxury programmers have.

I have been fortunate to have the grace of Steve McConnell and Frederick Brooks to tell me what to do if I want to screw up my project and I take their work seriously.

And yet there are still times when your back is against the wall and you need to speed up the work. What are some "tweaks" to your process you've used to speed up delivery without sacrificing quality? Is this even possible?

I consider learning good practices to be of higher value than learning the actual code so no "be a better coder" answers. That's a given.

Answer 1

jpgs are faster than html pages

Answer 2

Without sacrificing quality, your best options are pretty much the same best options that you have when it's not crunch time: Eliminate unnecessary distractions, focus on the most important work first, obtain better hardware, and offload any work that you can reasonably offload.