Games and gardens are immersive environments that are designed for aesthetics and enjoyment: goals that are difficult to quantify and harder to engineer. They take years to complete, and it is hard to evaluate success without the user’s viewpoint from inside the immersive environment.
The hurdles: quickly, constantly and cheaply acquiring user, system and process data; preventing defects and implementation gaps from compromising the data; and continually shifting from rapid prototyping to fielded, highly complex systems over years of development and operations.
A cyclic, incremental evolution strategy that draws metrics from the current cycle to guide the next cycle is discussed. This Measure / Change / Measure model provides better focus on tangible problems than the traditional Guess / Change / Hope model, more predictable progress and manages continual growth.
The integration of several agile development strategies is proposed, ranging from test driven development, short, instrumented sprints, metrics driven development and Kaizen process improvement. The hypothesis is that tightly integrating agile strategies into the core of your project via Automation, Architecture and Analytics produces a hyper-agile software system: one can quickly identify problems and quickly shift both code and process, while also casting meaningful projections of future behaviors from current and historical data.
Iterative Innovation is a force multiplier that augments your entire team. Get more done, in less time, with less blood.
MaggotRanch 