Coding Sprint
Saturday morning. At least one person didn’t sleep – I should’ve given him decaf when I was handing out espresso shots last night. Oops.
Pictures are uploaded: Flickr, Facebook.
Agile methods are much in evidence: scrum boards, quick iterations, pair programming, customer development. A number of teams have gone and enlisted alpha and beta users even before developing product. All of that is well and good.
Some teams are struggling to settle on a product concept. Instead of trying one thing and then the other, they are making the classic mistake of front-loading the design with speculation upon speculation. In today’s world, if you head down the waterfall, you’ll be all wet.
Our technical mentors have disappeared into the crowd, blending into the teams like narcotics agents at a rave, like Vietcong in the jungle. They’re spreading best practices, advising on frameworks and architectures, web services and design philosophies.
Our business mentors are going around quizzing teams on differentiation, competition, value proposition, customer validation. Usually one would say get out of the building but on the weekend Block 71 is surrounded by a dead zone.
