Kevin Cawley Goes Mobile

I Am Really Just A Feature

September 14th, 2006

The other day, on the Windows Mobile Team Blog, Mike talked about the process and life cycle of a feature in the Windows Mobile world.  There is quite an intricate process for a feature to realse to the wild and it explains why it may take a while for a feature to come to life and why that feature should be rock solid when released. 

Let me contrast that to a situation where you are perhaps in a startup w/ very limited resources or even a one man show and you adopt some form of Agile programming.  You hopefully are building an application that solves a problem you face and already have a good idea for the base feature set.  You build it, put it out as an alpha or beta and hopefully get some user feedback.  You then start cranking away on the next version - usually you crank out the low hanging fruit (that which is easy to implement) and then pick the best features and start coding.  During the process you are constantly testing and iterating.  You then put out the next version and repeat the process until the product is ready for release.  This is akin to one aspect in the Web 2.0 way of building software - “release early and release often“.  On a side note, I read the “Cathedral and the Bazaar” right after reading The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks way back when in graduate school and didn’t realize the significance until I started actually attempting to create production software - definitely check these out if you have not already.

What you have is two completely different approaches to building software - each have their advantages and disadvantages.  Which do you prefer?  Or do you do it in a different manner?

Entry Filed under: Mobile