Slowly Becoming More Extreme
Over the last twelve months Ephox has been working with the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology. It's something that we are pretty committed to because at the end of the day XP's focus is on delivering more value to the client more quickly. Hopefully that's a win win situation. We deliver software more quickly to you and you can then give us feedback that enables us to create even better software.
It's been a challenging shift, possibly most of all for me. We're shifting from a fairly traditional, design up front type methodology, it was under this methodology that we begun the development of EditLive! 6.0 and the EditLive! Productivity Pack. It wasn't without its advantages, it did enable me to more clearly communicate with clients about what was coming, but where it fell down was getting the timing right. We blew past our initial estimates and the release was significantly late.
If we'd been following the extreme programming methodology at the time we would probably still have delivered the "finished" product at around the same time. The key difference would have been that we would have been able to deliver more interim releases. We would have been able to let you all see what we'd been working on and, most importantly, we would have been able to incorporate more of your feedback. We will shortly be kicking off a new initiative called LiveWorks! to help address that, but more on that in another post.
The agility of XP doesn't come without a cost though. If we're going to be delivering value more frequently and taking your feedback into consideration it means our roadmaps are going to get a little "fuzzier". By leaving the roadmap somewhat "fuzzy" we can maintain the vision and direction of a release while still taking your feedback into account as we progress. It also allows us to change direction more rapidly if that's what's valuable for you. For instance, if accessibility suddenly becomes the "hot topic" (as it is in Europe at the moment), we can shift our release plans from track changes improvements (for example) to deliver the accessibility functionality you needed yesterday. Well maybe we can't shift quite that fast, but you get the idea.
Sounds great right? Well it does on paper, in practice, many of us (myself included) still love to look at larger scale plans. I would love to have the roadmap planned out perfectly, to the finest detail, for the next two years, yet this is something XP recommends against, and with good reason, afterall all, best laid plans are often laid to waste, especially in a field that moves as swiftly as software development. It's been a difficult move to stop myself from spending time planning all the fine little details (which inevitably shift anyway) but I've managed to restrain myself. What I am going to focus on instead on communicating with you more clearly and continuously. This blog is the start of that, and LiveWorks! will be live soon to give you even more of an insight. 2007 is going to be an exciting year, so stick with us, keep your feedback coming and look out for even more valuable improvements to EditLive!.
[...] I mentioned in an earlier post Ephox follows an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology for our development which delivers us a great [...]