Sprint To The Finish
We practice Agile & Scrum…which is basically tech speak for “speedy development process”. In a traditional development process, developers practice the “waterfall” approach. In the waterfall process, developers spend immense amounts of time at the beginning of the project to plan out and document every little detail of the project. The main purpose to waterfall is to solidify and lock-in the project deliverables in stacks of documentation. This process can take months before any code is even written, and sometimes before any mockups are even drawn. By the time the planning phase is done, the project is outdated and may not even be relevant with to the original vision. Many development shops still practice this inefficient “waterfall” planning process, mainly to define the scope of projects and to protect themselves from risk, in case Clients change their mind about the project later.
Agile
We think the waterfall process wastes time, wastes money, and inhibits good ideas from forming. Our core goal is not to protect ourselves. Our goal is to make awesome websites that rock, and allow for changes in project parameters as projects evolve. That’s why we practice the Agile & Scrum approach. With Agile, the philosophy is “release early, release often”. Instead of trying to predict and account for everything in the project scope at the beginning, we build the website and features iteratively. With this approach, we find things users like and dislike quickly, and we can change accordingly. We’re not locked into a tightly defined course and can test different assumptions.
Sprints
Scrum is the method we use to manage our projects. With scrum, we plan out our deliverables in 2 week or 1 month increments. We call these increments “Sprints”. By breaking down large projects into manageable Sprints, and limiting these Sprints to short time spans, we can focus on building tangible results during each Sprint. So instead of planning for entire project lengths in the very beginning, we just plan deliverables for each Sprint. This makes projects much more manageable and ensures things get done.
