Getting Real About Software Development

I’m reading a great book by the guys at 37Signals. It’s exciting for me b/c their methods for the most part validate my experience and thoughts on software, especially web based software, development. It’s about rapid development; making changes on the fly; rinse and repeat. Rather than coming up with expensive and time consuming scopes that go stale before you finish them, I’ve always just “dug in” and started development. This can be dangerous, but with the web based apps, it’s so easy to fix and re-deploy changes. We let our customers drive the product and we let the ideas flow.

We occasionally let our customers drive us too far with “feature creep”. Sometimes we put to many settings, too many buttons or features. Something the guys at 37signals wouldn’t approve of. Our upcoming enterprise version of the LeadManger will really demonstrate how this works and how to get a handle on feature overload.