image www.scrumalliance.org
By Alejandro Gomez (@zemogalejo)
How would you build a great product that responds to the rapidly changing needs of your customers and the market? Would you take your time, plan every detail meticulously and wait till all portions of the project were finished before you began testing? Or would you map out your goals, build individual parts of the project first, and constantly adapt your build to react to problems or changes in the environment that occurred while you were completing your development?
If you were a 14 year old kid impatiently waiting for a video to download, you would choose the second option. After all it’s the guiding principal behind BitTorrent. And surprisingly, if you were a best practices digital developer like Zemoga, you would choose the second option as well.
While perpetual Beta has become a commonly accepted practice in the digital world (think of how many years Google labeled Gmail with that status), the idea that projects wouldn’t be built as a wholly formed entity and then tested for quality and performance is a fairly new one. But as our industry has learned more about building products to ever tighter deadlines, an “agile process” has often been identified as the best practice for creating materials.
