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December 16, 2004
Extreme - rapid prototyping
I am thrilled these days. I am helping this really cool innovation company. They are very much like Ideo but with focus on Marketing. My team has to often prototype some concepts under tight deadlines.
A case in hand: the team started working on Monday for a prototype to be delivered on Thursday. This prototype was for one of the two satellite radio companies. FYI, satellite radio involves near CD-quality audio beamed from space to your radio.
Even under tight deadlines, we are extreme.
For example:
1. Since the scope is highly unknown, we do not do release planning. Instead, we do daily iterations. This helps us travel light and minimize lot of upfront planning. See, we have to often switch directions and toss code. In just span of four weeks, the team has worked with Palm OS native code, J2ME, looked at Symbian native code, Windows compact framework etc.
2. At the end of the day, we do daily retrospectives. We capture our learning on index cards and see if any action items are generated out of it.
3. We make sure all aspects of simple design are being strictly followed. The principles of 'YAGNI'and 'Do the simplest thing that could possibly work' have proved to be instrumental in creating some cool demos in a very short time frame.
4. We make sure all the business decisions are taken by business community and technical decisions are taken by the technical community.
I plan to write in detail someday, about rapid prototyping, the extreme way.
BTW, we got three new Treo 650 for testing. Now, if you excuse me, I have to help innovate.
Posted by gunjan at December 16, 2004 07:29 PM