Five Things That Come First

In reading "Writing Secure Code" I was heartened to find the author state "Security is a top priority". The statement as whole is not surprising for the book but the use of "a" as in "a top priority" instead of "the" as in "the top priority" was the comforting part.

Reading Roger Session's blog on code complexity, Roger implies that complexity is more important than security. As in if the code is complex it can never be secured. So that would imply Complexity (or reducing it comes first).

The Test Driven Development movement preaches Test First. It should be noted, code is not testable by default. You will always need to do something to make it testable.

Any book on Scalable Architectures will tell you, you must design from the start for scalability. So add Scalability to the list of things to be done before anything else.

I myself have learned the hard way to do the install first. But having an installer does not guarantee that your software will be deployable. So but Deployable on the list as well.

Thus you end up with Five Things That Come First before you even write your first line of code.

Security
Scalability
Testable
Deployable
Complexity