AJ Morris

Today I thought I would talk about agile web development with ruby on rails and how we implemented it during Startup Weekend. This past weekend I went to my first Startup Weekends (hope it’s not the last) and had a group of about 10-20 developers work together for a weekend to create a product in a weekend. I found that when working with developers it helps to use an agile approach. It also helps to work in pairs (just in case anyone leaves early).

The agile approach to web development is defined as a conceptual framework for software engineering that promotes development iterations throughout the life-cycle of the project. While there are many methods to agile development, most that I have experienced have been in place to minimize the risk by developing in short amounts of time. This model of agile web development following planning, requirements analysis, designing, coding, testing, and documentation developing stages.

I think that we (for the first time working all together) implemented the agile web development method. The following is a list of what I think we did well and what we didn’t.

What I think worked well for us at DC Startup Weekend was that:

• We had a small timeline to get things done.
• We had our group of developers that were working the entire time on building features, and others that were testing.
• We had a go to person that worked on communicating to our design/UX teams.
• For the most part we worked in pairs, which helped ensure the success of the feature they were working on.

We also had some things that didn’t go so well:

• No real documentation, although we did try to do a little inline with the code.
• Not everyone was working in pairs.
• We didn’t have set goals for certain times.
• Features were only half added.
• No real time to test with a working site that would go through scripts and usability tests.

Over all I would say that we did a good job in the time that we had. There is always going to be things we did good and things that we did bad. I think that if we were to work another straight weekend there would be a list of things that we would change and I think that after experiencing what we did our first weekend we would have some better understanding as what we need to do to get everything done, and would have a list of bugs, design implementation, and some new features to add.

Anyone that is thinking about hosting or attending a Startup Weekend, I think you should really look into this. It was a great experience, and if the opportunity were to present itself again, I would attend. After checking out some of the other developers blogs, I thought I would include them here so that you can read some of what they say as well; Chris Selmer, Matthew VB.

Well it’s Thursday night and I’m getting ready to head out to the airport so I can make my way to DC and get ready for the weekend.  Our final 3 ideas for the weekend are:

• Restaurant-Customer Matchup System
• Job Posting Site
• Condo Buildings Social Network

There’s two that I’m voting on happening.  One thing I’m keeping in my mind is that we have 2.3 days to get this completed and up and running.  So I’m going to start coining the phrase, keep it simple.  If it’s not simple, then we probably shouldn’t be trying to get it done in a weekend.

I’m also looking forward to the weekend because I get to hang out with this guy who I haven’t seen a quite some time. I think the last time I actually saw him was in 2003 at a GLACURH conference.

I’ve also had to think about this weekend, because there’s nothing more than what I’d like to happen (get a web developer job) in the DC area.  I would also like to get Leopard installed tomorrow before the weekend starts, however, I’ve tried something like this before, and I was without my computer and a lot of files for most of the weekend, so I’ll have to hold off on it till Mondayish.

Well if you are in the DC area and attending Startup Weekend I shall see you soon.  If you aren’t and would like to keep in on the updates, feel free to check back here on my blog and here on the DC Startup Weekend’s blog.

I’ve decided to give up on TechTalkNews for right now and work with one domain for all of my personal stuff, blog, portfolio, and my lab of working projects. You will also notice a new template design. I chose this so that I could have screencasts in my posts without having to use a separate page. I am also planning some other pretty big things here in the future so hopefully you will see some other changes around here. I will soon have my feedburner RSS feed setup and working so that you should be able to get that as well. More to come this weekend and in the next week or two.

So I know I recently just made a post about this, but I’ve got it working well so I’ve got to put it back up here one more time. Check out this link to see my xbox 360’s blog.  It’s actually pretty funny!
On another note I finally broke down and bought a NintendoDS Lite and Diddy Kong Racing DS.  Give me a few days to play it and I’ll give you a run-down on what I think about it.