AJ Morris

I thought I’d put out a link to the Washington Post article about Startup Weekend DC. Check it out!! Here’s a picture from the article as well.

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.

So I’m sure most of you by now have seen that DC Startup Weekend and come and gone. We are the third weekend in a row to have a working product in BETA form by Midnight Sunday night. It was an awesome feeling! We had uStreamed the moment that we went live and was glad to see that we had some visitors that shared that moment with us. You can see some more posts regarding the event, and HolaNeighbor!

For those that attended the event I’m glad I met every single one of you and we truly did an amazing job getting everything accomplished that we did. Matthew VB says it best that business owners need to be worried about Startup Weekends.

The last thing I would like to show you is our commercial for HolaNeighbor! So without further ado, Here’s there commercial.

I almost forgot, so I better add this now, but I would like to thank all the organizers, the sponsors, and especially the Viget Labs for housing us for the weekend. Without these fine folks, HolaNeighbor! would not be what it is today. Brian and Andy (co-founders of Viget Labs) were absolutely great. They were just as much part of the weekend as we were. They were the first ones to get there and the last ones to leave. Andy even came back when we had network issues at 11:30 at night.