(A follow-up to Part I: Why Agile?)

Agile Philosophy

The guiding principles of any Agile methodology are to focus on a small sprint’s worth of work at a time, to engage team members early, and to communicate frequently. In practical terms, this means producing artifacts rapidly so that feedback can be collected, details can be refined, and schedules can be adjusted as needed.

The process of artifact refinement occurs via team planning sessions, with the goal being to produce ever more tightly scoped documents that contain “just enough” detail. These frequent collaboration exercises seek to avoid the common pitfall of having individual team members over-engineer complex problems in isolation. As with any specification process, an Agile team must iterate on artifact refinement until a mutually agreed upon point of clarity is reached. The major benefit of Agile, however, is that by engaging the whole team early during the refinement process, the overall design literacy is increased, and decision points can typically be reached more quickly.

Part I: Why Agile?

ProtoShare was originally conceived of to help the development team here at Site9 to better define and scope our own contract projects. We were literally our own first customer, which meant that the product feedback loop was very short and early versions of ProtoShare evolved somewhat organically, adding features as we realized what we needed. When we eventually released the tool to the public, we quickly discovered that most of our customers also had unique views of how prototyping fit into their organizations’ software development lifecycles. Today, nearly three years later, ProtoShare supports a huge variety of use cases and we have come to depend almost exclusively on customer feedback to drive the product forward.

Our goal with ProtoShare is to support as many common prototyping workflows as possible, while still providing a structured and clear path to success for all types of users. To help us achieve this, we catalog every feature request, brainstorm, and bug report that comes in from our customers. Being a subscription-based product it is absolutely critical that we can react quickly to our customer’s evolving needs. That means capturing feedback from thousands of companies, finding the common denominator, and finding a way to integrate it back into the product in a timely manner. This has proved increasingly challenging as ProtoShare has become an ever more sophisticated tool.

Changing a particular feature or workflow in order to benefit one group of users can often lead to frustration and confusion for others. Additionally, as new features inevitably snowball, large amounts of changes are made to the code and a much bigger burden is placed on our QA team. The best way to mitigate these risks is to deploy small changes as frequently as possible, or in Agile terms: “Just enough, just in time”. This allows us to deliver incremental value frequently, as well as to rapidly adjust to any problems that may arise.