Matthew Lang

You don’t need to be a complete agile guru to use the practices from extreme programming to develop and ship a successful software application.  All you need to do is make sure your application is heading in the right direction.

After reading a post, entitled “I had that idea years ago!” on the Signals Vs Noise blog and this article on systematic approximation in mind mapping, I came to realise that software projects don’t initially need a big specification or a detailed road map of milestones and tasks.  Instead you need an idea, and you need to develop it using continual feedback from the softwares intended users.

Imagine being a tourist in a city that your unfamiliar with and you want to get to a specific tourist attraction.  You would ask for directions, use a mobile device, or even look up a map of the city (yes, you do get maps on paper!).  The feedback you get from these methods helps you go in the right direction and gets you to where you want to be.

What would happen if you just thought you could get there without any feedback?  Chances are you would get lost.

In software projects, feedback is probably the best thing you can get if you want to stay on target for your software idea.  Once you start developing your software application, get feedback on it as early as possible.  It might take more than one pass at a feature to get it right but with the feedback your getting, you’ll only need to make a few small passes at that feature.

What would happen if you wrote the same application without any feedback and then shipped it?  I can guarantee you would have a massive list of feedback that would take you longer to go through than if you got feedback earlier in the project.

So next time you work on a project for a software application and you want it to hit the mark, get feedback on it as early as you can.  Do this and you’ll be well on your way to a successfully shipped application.