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It so happens that you are given a project specs and your knowledge about the language is very basic. There are features in the project that you have never worked with. But you have some ideas and logic on how this can be implemented.
Later on as the development continues you discover that the required features cannot be developed because of some language limitations or any other issues. Now you have to convince your client about this, which is not easy.

Edit: the reason for working with not so comfortable technology is that,Company at times cannot afford to hire someone for this task. Hence relies on existing employees to learn something new and contribute.

So how do I avoid such situations? How do I research about the features before accepting the project ?

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    Your boss says "we just spend x amount of capital expenses on this fancy new compiler, go use it" Commented May 3, 2012 at 6:41

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Well, in most languages you can do most things. All the mainstream languages barely have limitations, or have some kind of work arounds. In the worst case, you can still call external code using some bindings if needed.

Where programming languages differ mostly is what they provide. What stuff is easy to do using this or that language.

Lastly, it is difficult to know beforehand where you'll face difficulties with barely no know-how of the language and of the project. The devil lies in details.

What I recommend is therefore to ask precise questions here, about one or the other specific aspect of the problem and how it is tackled with the programming language. That way you will be better informed to assess its difficulty.

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Later on as the development continues you discover that the required features cannot be developed because of some language limitations or any other issues.

I have learned in risk management that features that may be impossible to be created could be developed as early as possible so you can find out soon that the project has to be canceled before too much money is wasted.

If you have the business goal that is behind a feature maybe you can offer an alternative feature that leads to a similar result.

Example: if an imaginary system does not support comboboxes. But you can implement a popup-dialog to select some item out of a list instead.

The feature "combobox" is not possible but the goal "select a product-time to be ordered" is possible.

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The requirement collection phase in s/w development is crucial. Before accepting project you must take care of certain features like,

  1. Purpose of project
  2. man hours to complete project
  3. design/UX
  4. target audience (here you can filter for your language problem)
  5. project scale

  6. Project cost etc...

    The only way to research is ask as many questions to client as possible and get details out of them. Please refer to this wonderful wiki link on software requirement specification

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  • asking questions to my client will just clear my doubts about their requirements. It wont help me to find components or packages linked with my project.I dont find any research doing it. Commented May 3, 2012 at 6:47
  • if you know above parameters, you can research on it. for example u cannot start project without knowing the language or target audience. Commented May 3, 2012 at 7:01

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