Red Meat

When is comes to what an application is and how developers perceive it, what is the Red Meat? What is it that motivates a developer to WANT to work on that particular functionality? Usually when working on requirements, if the phrase "what is the meat of it" is motioned, it's usually in reference to some critical piece of the functionality. But I think more often that not, that is the mean from product or marketing's perspective and that rarely translates to what the developer will perceive as "meaty".

No, I think that from a developers perspective, the requirements of an application are no more that the skeletal structure, mere bones that give the meat something to hang on. Maybe there is some tasty marrow buried deep inside, but for the most part is something to get around or toss aside.

How then to get beyond simple requirements of functionality and get a developer to see the possible meat to be added to the bone? The easiest way seems to be to tie the functionality to some new technology that's worth exploring. 10 years ago, the key word would have been XML. These days it's probably something like AJAX or SOA/SaaS.

In the long term, using bleeding edge technology as a motivator fro developers will create a hodge-podge application with mixed technologies that are only half implemented and have no hope of ever working together, until the next great tech comes along and provides an excuse for writing some part of the app that's using a now antiquated technology poorly.

No, the key falls more in letting a developer create the functionality AND tie it into some pet project as well. No doubt there are lots of tools that your project needs but has been placed on the back burner as low priority. One of these tools may be advocated by a developer on your team and it may tie closely with the functionality that you are looking to add to your project. If so, you are lucky. Let your developer create the tool and integrate with the functionality. You now have a new tool, new functionality, and a happy developer. If not, don't fret. Just think about your team and your environment. There must be things that developers WANT to do that relate to what NEEDS to be done. Try hedging the NEED to do within what the developer wants to do.