This post is last in a three-part series on News Mixer — the final project of my masters program for hacker-journalists at the Medill School of Journalism. It’s adapted (more or less verbatim) from my part of our final presentation. Visit our team blog at crunchberry.org to read the story of the project from its conception to birth, and to (soon) read our report and watch a video of our final presentation.
When you made software back in the day, first you spent the better part of year or so filling a fatty 3-ring binder with detailed specifications. Then you threw that binder over the cubicle wall to the awkward guys on the programming team.
They’d spend a year building software to the specification, and after two years, you’d have a product that no one wanted, because while you were working, the world changed. Maybe Microsoft beat you to market, or maybe Google took over. Either way, you can’t dodge the iceberg.
Agile software development is different. With agile, we plan less up front, and correct our course along the way. We design a little, we build a little, we test a little, and then we look up to see if we’re still on course. In practice, we worked in one-week cycles, called “iterations,” and kept a strict schedule.
How we met
Every morning, we scrum. A scrum is a five-minute meeting where everyone stands up, and tells the team what they did yesterday and what they’re going to do today.
And at the end of the work week, we all met for an hour to review the work done during the iteration, and to present it to our stakeholders, in this case, Annette Schulte at the Gazette and our instructors Rich Gordon and Jeremy Gilbert.
Design, develop, test, repeat!
In the following iteration, our consumer insights team tested what we built, our panel in Cedar Rapids. And their input contributed to upcoming designs and development.
And we managed this process with free and open-source tools. With a couple hundred bucks (hosting costs) and some elbow grease, we had version control for our code, a blog to promote ourselves (using WordPress), a task tracking system with a wiki for knowledge management, and a suite of collaboration tools – all of which are open source, or in the case of the Google tool suite, based heavily on open source software, and all free like speech and free like beer.
That’s all for now! Hungry for more on agile? Check out my posts about our agile process on the Crunchberry blog, and read Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin, and The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, and Getting Real by the folks at 37signals.
