Developers know which features would be easy to add, but it is users who know which features would be useful to add. This is why, after completing what I thought was the Minimal Viable Product version of Substrate, I decided to trade my Developer hat for a User hat. This turned out to be a very, er, humbling experience.
I wanted to know which lack-of-a-feature was causing the most pain to my non-existent users. To find out, I tried to use Substrate for all the tasks it could handle. And the main conclusion of my experiment was that there were, in fact, very few tasks it could handle. Or, as User hat would put it: What a crappy, buggy, useless software.
I wanted to know which lack-of-a-feature was causing the most pain to my non-existent users. To find out, I tried to use Substrate for all the tasks it could handle. And the main conclusion of my experiment was that there were, in fact, very few tasks it could handle. Or, as User hat would put it: What a crappy, buggy, useless software.
Well, thanks for your feedback, User hat. For what it's worth, Developer hat here is more worried about "useless" than about "buggy". That's because I, too, aspire to be a User some day! I want to eat my own dogfood. Substrate is a text manipulation tool, code is made of text... surely one day a version of Substrate will be useful enough for me to use it while developing later versions?
One day, perhaps, but not yet. The current Substrate is great for twea— ok, the current Substrate is a crappy, buggy program aiming to make it easy to tweak long chains of bash commands. But even if it wasn't buggy, the bigger problem is that very few tasks can actually be accomplished through a single long chain of bash commands.
I'm really glad I tried this MVP approach, because this is a major flaw which I could only have discovered by actually using the software, as opposed to merely developing it. I have long paid lip service to The Unix Way, and I am not alone in thinking that a few carefully chained Unix commands can go a long way. But not, it would seem, all the way.
Since my long term vision for Substrate was a GUI for creating complex chains of text-manipulating nodes, I need to revise my approach. And that's precisely what short iterations are for, aren't they?
One day, perhaps, but not yet. The current Substrate is great for twea— ok, the current Substrate is a crappy, buggy program aiming to make it easy to tweak long chains of bash commands. But even if it wasn't buggy, the bigger problem is that very few tasks can actually be accomplished through a single long chain of bash commands.
I'm really glad I tried this MVP approach, because this is a major flaw which I could only have discovered by actually using the software, as opposed to merely developing it. I have long paid lip service to The Unix Way, and I am not alone in thinking that a few carefully chained Unix commands can go a long way. But not, it would seem, all the way.
Since my long term vision for Substrate was a GUI for creating complex chains of text-manipulating nodes, I need to revise my approach. And that's precisely what short iterations are for, aren't they?
Iteration 2
In this iteration, I will focus on adding new features, not on fixing the many bugs User hat found. Hopefully, by the end of the iteration, Substrate will evolve into a crappy, buggy, marginally useful product. Useful enough, I hope, for Developer hat to use.
Story 5 (1 story point): I can enter different inputs for the script.
Story 6 (1 story point): I can run the script on a series of different inputs.
Story 7 (2 story point): I can save the script and its inputs as a single project.
---
Story 8 (2 story point): I can write multiple scripts which call each other.
Story 9 (2 story point): I can write a script which applies multiple inputs to another script.
Adjusting from last iteration, this time I intend to finish the first three stories in two weeks, not one month. I have also added two optional stories, in case I finish early again. This is my personal extension to the Agile process: even if your velocity indicates that you can only deliver 4 story points per iteration, you should still schedule a bit more than that. I'll let you know if it's a great way to empirically measure by how much to increase your velocity, or just another idea which sounds better to one hat than to the other.
Posts
1 comment:
Well, either I'm working exponentially faster as time goes by, or I am exceptionally bad at estimating schedules. I completed the three main stories I had prepared for the entire iteration, and it's only been a day!
Post a Comment