Grillin' Social Sites at microwave speed

I'm not a patient person by nature despite the "immersion learning" lessons from my kids.  Grilling is one of the few activities around food where I actually invest a little time.  Most working days, I toss a frozen lunch in the microwave between meetings and eat at my desk - and that's the pace I really want software development to follow.   Thunk, slam, beep, beep, beep, grab a soda, ding - eat!

This sort of attention-deficit life pacing makes agile development really appealing for me.  But with enterprise software, sometimes it can take a little longer than that.

Not so with the NewsGator Social Sites release that we announced today.  We started this effort two months ago.  In enterprise software development pacing that's the equivalent of having the food cooked before you can close the door on the microwave!

A lot of hard work went into making this possible.  The team had tremendous focus (and has a ton of talent of course).  From an agile product management point of view, the two biggest tools for this release were a couple of powerpoints and the whiteboard.  The real key, of course, was that there was a lot of timely, focused communication. 

Ashley (enterprise product mgt) and I had lots of quick meetings looking over a developers shoulder at a screen.  We pointed, asked questions, and drew pictures on the whiteboard.  We talked through tradeoffs, demo'd the prototype versions to key folks along the way, and used the software on our internal SharePoint server for almost the full time we were developing.

It's pretty rare that even the best of agile practices can produce this much great functionality with high quality in this short of a time period.  And while some releases are best grilled slowly, this was one was just perfect out of the microwave!