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Sprint based development

26.Aug.2009

I was impressed to find out that the video feature on Facebook was the result of a 2-days coding stretch (see video). It seems that sprint based development is getting more and more popular. Specially around web development, teams choose smaller working cycles to put an idea to practice and test it.

How this correlates with quality is hard to tell. But true engineering can wait until the concept is proven. And the numerous agile frameworks available shorten the time needed to start a new project and build up a simple working version of a concept.

There are tons of events now around this idea. For example, the known Rails Rumble (just happened, their now voting on the best applications), or Django Dash for the python enthusiasts. Here in Portugal we have Sapo Codebits, a great event for building up prototypes and pitching them to a large audience.

This kind of approaches have also gone out of the programming hub into, for example, building business plans. See the Startup Weekend events as an example.

With this in mind, I’m changing a bit my approach on personal projects/ideas. I’m starting to build an ideas’ book, filled with concepts I would like to implement. Until I have time to actually do it, and feel like it, I’ll iterate over the features, design, user experience on my mind and write it all down. Whenever an event like Codebits arrives (or the internal hackaton at jeKnowledge we’ve been discussing), I want to have all planned and ready to start coding and get it done as quickly as possible.

I’m still a bit of afraid of the amount of ideas vs. the opportunities to implement them, but I guess it will help at selecting only the ones I like the most.

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