Robert Scoble in a post about Zoomr made a reference to my motto of inch by inch. This phrase has been a part of my vocabulary since the summer of 2002, after seeing a Microsoft internal parody video of Al Pacino’s speech from Any Given Sunday. When success with a certain problem/project seems insurmountable it makes sense to retreat to a shorter term goal. Once you make that goal, move onto the next and eventually you will make that touchdown.
This is why I love working in Evangelism at Microsoft. There are huge problems to solve both with our customers and inside Microsoft. Many of the problems can seem insurmountable, but once you get back to a game of inches you can feel the progress. This relates directly to my team’s recent adoption of scrum. A couple of months back Grace Francisco re-joined my team and has helped us make the move from adhoc development to scrum. Man, what a huge difference. Scrum allows us to be more methodical in our planning, improves our load balancing across the team and ensures realistic schedules. Some folks resist process, but the right amount of process can really help you maximize your results.
Murphy willing, this week my team will make another inch forward with a beta release of Channel 9. Version 4.0 of Channel 9 is a complete rewrite of our infrastructure, moving us to a common code base for everything my team creates. This same code runs Channel 10, Mix Online and is being used for our upcoming student community. The ability to ship this beta is directly related to our adoption of scrum.
The first release (that will run simultaneously with the live site) will deliver a number of things. In this release based on Channel 10, you will see a complete design refresh, updated forums, tag centers, all driven behind the scenes with a templating system. The template system was very important as it enables localization and the ability to easily skin the core code for all of the sites we create. With this we can enable a wiki on Mix Online or a tag center on Channel 10. We’ll now have a supportable core driving our sites in the network allowing us to deliver much more functionality on top and scaling further as a team.
The first beta is not feature complete. We want the community to participate in the the feedback/progress loop for the core code base that drives all of our communities. There is no better place to do this, than on Channel 9. This enables us to practice what we preach in transparency. As you move through the the beta site you can use the new functionality and on pages that are not feature complete we will link to the final design comp. This way you can see first hand where we are headed and provide provide feedback through our forums. As we progress through most sprints we will update the beta site with the results of that sprint and show progress and how we’re incorporating feedback. I say most sprints as some sprints will be used to update other sites in the network. (the student community, Mix Online and Channel 10). For those sprints we’ll be clear on what we’re working on, so the community knows that they won’t see an update to the core.
Should be a lot of fun.
You know it has been a wild ride as we begin our fourth year in the Channel 9 project. Our network has grown from developers to include enthusiasts, the MIX crowd and now students. Along with the growth in scope our traffic has grown dramatically and is at all-time highs. Thank God we’ll have the core behind this to support more growth in the future.
inch by inch.
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