Tag Archive for ‘agile’ at diversity.net.nz

Don’t get me wrong - agile development is a fantastic concept, but this post over on Mike’s blog got me thinking about things a bit.

His post related to the roll out of Gmail labs, in their release Google said that;

The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break.

Which is all well and good when we’re talking about such trivial things as different coloured highlights, games for email and other such offerings. But how about when we talk about critical services themselves?

A simple (ironically Google) search shows around 151000 results for Gmail malfunction. Some of these are from people who have had major data losses through using offerings created and rolled out while still in beta versions.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a very early adopter that uses beta versions like they’re going out of fashion, but I’ve also seen the pain caused to less technically minded users through being forced to adopt solutions which are still a work in progress (I would mention Ubuntu but Mike would likely crucify me, if not him then many other FOSS folks out there).

So yes, these solutions are fantastic, but alongside it’s adoption we need users to be truly appraised of the weaknesses and threats of using these solutions.

Over to you Mike…..

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