Assembla Blog

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sun, 07 Jan 2007 21:15:00 GMT

Recently we were called upon to build and launch a new Web product with a hard deadline in a seasonal business. By the time we started our work, only three months remained until the planned launch date. It was a big system. Our mission was to build a new and greatly enhanced version of a product which had taken 15 months to build in its last iteration. So, we had a benchmark.

In this case, we ran more than four times faster than a similar project implemented last year with older tools and development methods. We also came in on-time and under budget, and we ended up implementing features faster than we could figure out how to use them.

How did this happen? Want to try this at home? I will share our lessons below. Good luck.

• Don’t do things that take time to arrange
• Don’t get dragged down by old code
• Establish the data schema
• Pile on with new team members
• Use a ticket list / work queue
• Build something now, even though we know we will have to rebuild
• Don’t split the codebase into components
• Daily releases instead of stabilization periods
• Make a usage dashboard
• Web services are your friend
• Hire users as product managers
• Don’t create obstacles: Users provide the data
• Documentation on a wiki
• Find the one thing people will use

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Posted by andy@assembla.com Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:43:00 GMT

A startup will often live or die based on its first product release. Did it get released? Did people find it useful? Good roadmapping dramatically improves your chance of getting to “Yes!� on these critical questions.

Read about my roadmapping technique over at th On Startups blog.

I think it’s my most immediately useful post so far. It’s a technique that has helped me work with individual entrepreneurs, my own products, venture funded companies, and giant corporations. I gave it to Dharmesh at On Startups because he has a much bigger readership that could benefit from this technique.

So, check it out.

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 20 May 2006 22:53:00 GMT

Jon Udell included me in his Friday podcast series this week with a conversation with Andy Singleton about building global teams . Jon has been putting up with me since 1993, when he edited some freelance articles that I wrote for Byte magazine. In 2003 he coined the term “dynamic development” to describe the work I was doing. He has recently been commenting on user innovation and the power of human networks to do work beyond open source sofware. In this conversation, he turns me on to Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and he cautions against a “walled garden”. Maybe we’ll be able to work together on a universally portable user profile.

Posted by andy Fri, 17 Feb 2006 12:17:00 GMT

We have finally announced the new strategy and releases for Project.net, at OSBC on February 14. Over the next few months we will release open source, hosted on-demand, and enterprise packages based on this product. We picked up some nice articles in the press.

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Posted by andy Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:40:00 GMT

The GOSCON event was a great success, with about 200 attendees, about twice the expected turnout. Below are some observations that might be relevant for for Massachusetts. Linda Hamel, Massachusetts ITD general counsel, was a star of the show. There is a consensus that Massachusetts has set the …

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Posted by andy Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:49:00 GMT

Sakai is a Learning Management System that provides features for students to interact with their professors and their universities on the Web. Why is Sakai important?

• It’s the best example that we have seen of a community coming together to build an industry-specific application.
• The community has generated real …

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Posted by andy@assembla.com Tue, 05 Jul 2005 17:43:00 GMT

User innovation, in the form of open source software, is one of the most powerful forces in the software business today. Will this force propel the software industry to yet another phase of bold innovation? Or, will it cripple commercial R&D organizations and lead to a future of stagnant, commoditized software?

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