There has been a lot of talk about agile development. In recent years, agile development was surpassed by lean development which kept many great practices from agile development, but added elements of speed and cost-effectiveness to the overall process.
In my own software engineering practice I have found that the lean development is necessarily theoretical and general because it is meant to work on a mass scale. For my own development, I made a number of adjustments which made my software development extra lean and allowed me to iterate over software features very rapidly and release features daily to see which catch on and which features can be thrown away. Overall I was able to iterate and innovate at a lightning speed.
Of course, this came at a cost of many good practices. What I did was stop programming in Java and developed in languages like PHP or Ruby on Rails. I also did not focus on security other than to validate input parameters. I dropped a staging server and made a 2-server development system where I had a development and a production server. I did not worry about bugs as I had software and users to find them for me. I also stopped being concerned about scalability because I had no idea which features will need to be scalable. I also reused the same UI template and focused on UX instead.
I did focus on creative extremely clear copy for the user to be sure what to do on each page. I focused on UX and product usability quality to make sure that each page accomplishes exactly the reason a user ends up there.
In a span of 3 months, using these methods I was able to release over 5 sites.
I also was able to monitor the usage with analytics software to know which features and pages are functioning well, and which are causing the users to leave the site. Each week while developing projects, I was monitoring analytics to immediately tell what was working, and rapidly improve my approaches on the spot, which created a rapid cycle of improving innovation.
I hope this helps others and I'd love to hear some success stories.
Alex Genadinik is a software engineer, semantic web engineer, entrepreneur, and an SEO ninja. Alex is the founder of Semantic Valley which holds all his projects and the projects of his clients. The site also further explains his startup and innovation approaches.
The sites I developed in the 3 months were similar to the San Francisco mom, exercise and professional community at San Francisco Women
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