Iteration… Really?
Yep, I’m sure you have heard the word a hundred times; especially if you have been around the industry for a while. As a Developer, Project Manager, CEO, technical or non-technical person.
How many times have you caught yourself discussing in a meeting about an edge case that probably nevermore is going to happen? How often is a project delayed because the programmers want to do another refactoring before even be in Production? How many times had you heard about that well-planned System Architecture being shaken it because of a last-minute feature?
Common phrases you maybe had heard:
- “This new cool technology that is going to allow us to truly scale…”.
- “Planning is better than…”
- “It has to be pixel perfect…”
- “Let’s have another meeting with X or Z person…”
NOOOOOOOOO!!! Runaway. Your users, your clients, your soul, your team; the whole world is going to be very grateful for that little new feature that you are going to deliver in just a few days instead of a few months. Or… maybe they are going to hate it, but at least you are not going to be wasting your precious time working on something that is not useful.
I’m not talking about putting crappy products or features or software out there; it’s all about releasing value as faster as possible, to get REAL FEEDBACK from the world and being able to act as faster as based on real experiences rather than your intuition or some lab data.
Are you not convinced yet? Let’s take a look at some examples.
- Git: The development of Git began on 3 April 2005. Torvalds announced the project on 6 April; it became self-hosting as of 7 April. The first merge of multiple branches took place on 18 April. Torvalds achieved his performance goals; on 29 April, the nascent Git has benchmarked recording patches to the Linux kernel tree at the rate of 6.7 patches per second. On 16 June 2005 Git managed the kernel 2.6.12 release. (Wikipedia)
- Javascript: To defend the idea of JavaScript against competing proposals, Netscape needed a prototype. Brendan Eich wrote one in 10 days, in May 1995. (Wikipedia)
- Humans… 😂
Amazon
Some questions that could help you out to decide when to iterate.
- Is the product going to be better than it was?
- Can this compromise the security or stability of the system?
- What could happen if the competition does it first?
- Can we lose a bunch of users is this goes wrong?
Discovering the power of Iteration has been one of these magic WOW moments that had changed my life forever. At Front10 we are trying to push for it at every moment and it’s giving us amazing results so far, especially when developing React Components for our Clients. I hope you find it useful too.
I’m very thankful to you for having the courage of reading this humble post til the End. So To thank you, I will buy and send you a t-shirt if you are the first person that leaves a comment in this post. Just let me know your size and the technology or thing that you like the most. Some Eg could be: “React, Developer, NodeJS, PHP, RUBY, Scala, Testing, Product Manager, etc”. This does not apply to my team, family, friends or friends of friends 😊😊😊
