Done is better than perfect

The Heroku dashboard is a large client side JavaScript app which was rewritten with Ember last year. Since then the project has gone from a promising greenfield of perfect code to a bit of a mess and lately, back again.

This is a story about the practicalities of working on a large software project. Trying to do the right thing, making trade offs along the way and taking tough decisions to get the thing shipped. We'll talk about balancing conflicting requirements, when to compromise, when not to and how to clean up afterwards.

Transcript

1. DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT a story about shipping software
2. ANDY APPLETON @appltn
3. v5 dashboard
4. REWRITE vs refactor
5. goodness time
6. dashboard v6
7. GUIDING principles
8. 1: SHIP TO USERS as soon as possible
9. 2: SOLICIT FEEDBACK and act on it
10. 3: WORK IN tight iterations
11. START WITH A small beta group
12. APRIL 2014 first commits
13. WIDEN THE GROUP when feedback stops
14. JUNE 2014 private beta
15. SOLICIT FEEDBACK
16. “Stick to the darker look and feel… don’t ruin it”
17. HAVE A vision
18. BALANCE VISION vs feedback
19. WHAT’S THE NEXT most important thing?
20. WHAT CAN WE SHIP by this time tomorrow?
21. DON’T WORRY if it’s not perfect
23. public beta AUGUST 2014
24. SLOWLY MIGRATE USERS but let them opt out
25. “Dark palette was way way way better”
26. ITERATE ITERATE ITERATE ITERATE ITERATE until…
27. FEATURE COMPLETE
28. (mostly) @flipzagging
29. (mostly)
30. TIME TO annoy some people
31. TIME TO kill the old dashboard
32. “bring back the dark theme… the new one looks like the site vomited up bootstrap”
34. WE SHIPPED what next?
35. CLEAN UP all that cruft
36. BUT ALSO, ship more features
37. COMPONENT TEAM & feature team
38. WHAT WE learned
39. FAVOUR SHIPPING you can always iterate
40. USER FEEDBACK is gold
41. USER FEEDBACK ~seriously~
42. USER FEEDBACK listen and let it guide your work
43. …BUT, BALANCE FEEDBACK against your vision
44. AFTER LAUNCH, keep iterating
45. YOU MIGHT NEVER NEED all those features