| There has been a lot of talk about agile development. | | | | about bugs as I had software and users to find them |
| In recent years, agile development was surpassed by | | | | for me. I also stopped being concerned about |
| lean development which kept many great practices | | | | scalability because I had no idea which features will |
| from agile development, but added elements of speed | | | | need to be scalable. I also reused the same UI |
| and cost-effectiveness to the overall process. | | | | template and focused on UX instead. |
| In my own software engineering practice I have found | | | | I did focus on creative extremely clear copy for the |
| that the lean development is necessarily theoretical | | | | user to be sure what to do on each page. I focused |
| and general because it is meant to work on a mass | | | | on UX and product usability quality to make sure that |
| scale. For my own development, I made a number of | | | | each page accomplishes exactly the reason a user |
| adjustments which made my software development | | | | ends up there. |
| extra lean and allowed me to iterate over software | | | | In a span of 3 months, using these methods I was able |
| features very rapidly and release features daily to see | | | | to release over 5 sites. |
| which catch on and which features can be thrown | | | | I also was able to monitor the usage with analytics |
| away. Overall I was able to iterate and innovate at a | | | | software to know which features and pages are |
| lightning speed. | | | | functioning well, and which are causing the users to |
| Of course, this came at a cost of many good | | | | leave the site. Each week while developing projects, I |
| practices. What I did was stop programming in Java | | | | was monitoring analytics to immediately tell what was |
| and developed in languages like PHP or Ruby on Rails. | | | | working, and rapidly improve my approaches on the |
| I also did not focus on security other than to validate | | | | spot, which created a rapid cycle of improving |
| input parameters. I dropped a staging server and made | | | | innovation. |
| a 2-server development system where I had a | | | | I hope this helps others and I'd love to hear some |
| development and a production server. I did not worry | | | | success stories. |