WITH APPS, FOCUS ON
“GOOD ENOUGH” NOW,
NOT “PERFECT” LATER
By Paul Welty
A digital application, whether web or mobile, is never complete. Devices change, users change,
technology changes. To accept this pace of change is to stop expecting a perfect, permanent
application release. Instead, think of your application releases as reasonable hypotheses,
opportunities for further investigation. In other words, start with your existing knowledge and build
from there. You’ll have some successes, but you’ll find that the failures are just as valuable because
they teach you something about your audience and your business.
NOW AND LATER
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This hypothesis-based model is derived from Agile and DevOps That kind of protracted upfront planning doesn’t pay off. In today’s
methodology. Although it has now become a mainstay of IT rapidly changing market, teams that spend months on concept
development, the Agile Manifesto was created in the early 2000s by development and internal testing are already behind. Today,
thought leaders who were frustrated with long cycle times. They organisations that are winning have increased the frequency of
proposed an alternative that was responsive, flexible and enabled releases from years to months, to two-week sprints, to deploying
by tiny, iterative experiments. This concept ushered in a new way multiple times within a 30-second span, as Amazon does. You don’t
of thinking about development that stood in stark contrast to the need to be Amazon to do this, though—you just need to set up your
long-standing Waterfall method, a linear process in which each teams in a way that supports rapid deployment and continuous
phase of development was completed before moving on to the next. improvement.
DIGITECH Magazine
Summer 2017