Technovangelism

When developing a software project in a short amount of time (less than 6 months), demonstrating often that you are providing value to your customer is essential. Of course it is important for long-lasting projects, but if you only have three months to complete your project, you cannot afford to miss a demo.

I have learned this over the last two major software projects I have completed. On both projects, the team did not just “demo often,” but we demoed every week. (When you only work 2 hours a day, that is a bigger feat than it might seem.) We were not following the extreme programming methodology or specifically trying to program quickly, we simply found that we could provide enough value in one week’s time that it was worth presenting to the customer. These constant demos had some other beneficial side effects like keeping the build in an extremely stable state. Some people use an automated test suite for that kind of security, but having to demo the code once a week forced us to do more manual user testing that uncovers usability issues that an automated test suite is incapable of discovering.

Agile methodologies preach having shippable code at the end of each iteration/sprint, but how often is that the true outcome? When you demo your code to customers, you are essentially shipping your code. The customer has a chance to look at and try out the code and provide some instant feedback. In the most recent project, we actually did ship the code to the customer each week and they performed their own user testing on site. The amount of benefit gleaned from these each week was incredible and no doubt increased the success of the project. From now on, all projects I am apart of will have regularly scheduled demos in front of the customer or stakeholder. They are that important.