Agile Software Development and Upcoming Journals Releases

Hi folks -- the tech fix I posted to resolve the
"can't
save entries" problem

seems to be working for most people (please let me know if it doesn't

work for you -- I know there are some folks out there who are still

having some problems, including some odd ones -- problems, not
folks).

Also, I don't have any updates right now on
our other open technical issues or the ad
banner controversy, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about
the Journals development process, and what it means for
upcoming releases.

(I'd
originally planned to post this last week, but had to table it for
obvious reasons.)

Now, earlier in the year, the
development team had incorporated aspects of agile software
development, which basically means that instead of saving all
the big changes and new features for one big release
per development cycle (for example, a year or 18 months), we're going
over to more frequent, but smaller releases -- say,
every 4-8 weeks.

(Here is more than you ever wanted
to know about the nuts and bolts of agile
development from Wikipedia.)

Since it's
pretty much a matter of more, smaller sips vs.
one big gulp,

the end result is about the same: The same overall amount of work is done, and of

course, smaller fixes and maintenance work occurs along the way in
both

cases. So why do it?

Here's a recent
Dilbert that asks the question a different way:

The advantage of agile development
lies in its...agility.

That is, priorities can be adjusted based on what's going on in the

world, user requests, new technologies, industry trends,
etc.

For

Journals, it pretty much means we'll be rolling stuff out in releases

(hopefully) every 4-8 weeks (and we will be announcing launches before

we do them, which was the plan this time around, only we
botched it).

We're

aiming for monthly (well, near-monthly) releases that extend out

through the first quarter of 2006 right now, though of course all
dates

are tentative and subject to the real
world.

One Big Caveat: It's
always tricky launching stuff at the end of the calendar year, because
we're subject to staff outages, and more
importantly, moratoriums

-- if a launch date slips a day or two into a moratorium, then you
have

to wait until the moratorium is over, which could be days or longer

(like the week between Christmas and New
Years).

Tying specific features to specific releases
is always a risky business,

since features get reprioritized, dropped and generally moved around

all the time, so I won't go into the specifics of each release until
we

get closer to confirmed launch dates.

Things that
are being worked on include (this is a mix of features from different
releases out to February, in no particular
order):

* Rostering
Improvements: Manage who can read your private Journal,
simply by picking people or groups from your Buddy
List.
* Tagging: The ability to label posts
for easier categorization
* Moblogging:
Mobile blogging, the ability to add photos, text & even
audio/video from a mobile phone
* Skins:

Something to let you change the look & feel of your Journal
via

customizable skins -- we'll probably have a predefined library at

first, followed later by full user customization
*
Draft Posts: Saving drafts of entries
*
Shared Journals: Multiple authors can post to a Journal, or
group blogging.
* Other Things: Making it
easier to blog about someone else's blog entry ("Blog
This"); improving the help resources;
making sure we ping blog search engines (so your
blog entries get picked up in searches and feeds); and making it
simpler to show your online presence in your
blog.

Also, I am trying to get an increase to the
"All About Me" character limit squeezed in somewhere.


I'm cherry-picking

the stuff that I think will be of most interest to you (I'm guessing

you don't care as much about the infrastructure stuff, as long as we

don't break anything). I don't see anything on the map that's likely
to

generate any controversy (unlike the ad
banners).

Anyway, like I

said, I will be talking more about specific features in specific

releases as we get closer to the dates, so hopefully I will be able to

tell you more about what we're going to get with R3
in December.

Let me know if you have any questions
or technical problems with the current
release.

Thanks -- Joe