Wednesday, October 8, 2014

I'm back blogging. This time more agile

I'm back blogging. After a few months hiatus, I've decided to start posting again. First I thought it was that going on vacations had changed my rhythm, then I thought it was all the workload of an important project, or maybe the summer.

Finally I realized what it was. I chocked trying to do too much at once.

My original plan for this blog was to write my thoughts as they came. Short posts that wouldn't bore people. Over time I would add additional related thoughts. Eventually, those thoughts would be associated by the labels.

In methodology terms: I was planning to write things "agile". Write as much as I had in my mind.

Then I came to the topic of Troubleshooting. I had a simple thing to say but as I wrote, I thought I could add more and more, then I realized I had to add structure, and reword things and... and... I got stuck. Instead of publishing what I had, and later improve it, I went for a big bang approach.

If that sounds familiar it may be because that's how many software projects get cancelled. They start with a simple, great idea but instead of implementing it and making it evolve, we try to improve the idea and add things to make it perfect on the first pass. As the idea gets reviewed by other people, new features are added to the list. We start thinking bigger, and bigger needs better architecture. As it gets better we need more input; after 6 months or a year of reviews and talks and meetings, still, nothing to show for it.

Most likely, releasing early could have shown if the idea was good or not. And the features that were really missing would have been added over time. 6 months or a year later, after learning from our mistakes, we would have a system that we could improve, refactor, even rearchitect, but we would be doing it with real usage data, not pipe dreams in meeting rooms.

So, that's it, I have decided to start posting again. Sometimes the ideas will be raw, most likely I will get some wrong, but as I get feedback and receive comments and discuss with other people, I may come back and review them, or even write new posts with a clearer idea.

May this post be the first where I spill my raw thoughts.

1 comment:

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