I’m a big fan of Rapid Prototyping – which drives most corporations nuts.
The basic idea is that it is impossible to know ahead of time what the best solution for a problem is going to be when you start. Rather than spend 6 months carefully planning every last detail at endless meetings, whip together a prototype in a day or two with no formal design process. Let people play with it and find out approximately what the right solution is. If it doesn’t work, tear it up and start over.
Only once you have most people nodding their heads “Yes, that’s what I want!”, then you write down the formal design and do things like adding in rigorous edits and creating the documentation.
The huge risk to this approach is the “customer” thinks the prototype is the real system – which you have to caution them before it starts. The prototype probably can’t run fast enough to be real and lacks the test to make sure invalid data doesn’t come into the process.
This approach is very anti-ISO 9001 unless you accept “Our process is there is no process” 🙂
So what that long winded prelude, here is today’s thing to draw up on the chalkboard.
The starting point of any kind of “Bloat Meter” is I have to put things in piles so the similar things are together. (“One of these things doesn’t belong with the other”)
There is my work so far this morning
http://streamingradioguide.com/adm/player-type.php
It should let you in – if not, just yell at me 🙂
This is most of the choices of the flavors of different players. Using my normal convention, the column headings let you “Sort by” this. Sort by number you’ll find interesting, especially if you’re in the streaming business 🙂 Send me a ham for Christmas 🙂 Or if you work for SoundExchange, in which case send me a BMW 🙂
The general end game may go something like this, but I’m still not sure it is the right answer – allow people who are logged in to exclude specific players… similar to the way you exclude individual stations currently. So you don’t want to see uStream streams? Poof, they’re gone. (Did you know saying poof to an English person is offensive?)
You describe the seed of the Agile process here. I absolutely believe in rapid prototyping and you are correct – you must have a small audience who understands what they are seeing is a prototype and not yet “bulletproof”. Most development methodologies are an attempt to put an envelope around chaos anyway.
I like the results.
Okay, this hour’s changes 🙂
Now for each player type, you can click on the count, and it will open a page listing all of the stations that use that particular player.
As a bonus, it shows if the “Prestream Ad” flag is set, and gives you a way to click to set it on. In a lot of cases, you’ll find prestream ads are an all or none thing. Please don’t turn it on though without actually makinig sure first 🙂
I’ve heard building construction has been going down a similar path – if you’re building a big skyscraper you don’t have to know the color of the bathroom on the 80th floor before you start pouring the foundation.
The architect lays out the basic parameters of the bulding – it will be this many stories, these outer dimensions and the elevators and the stairs will be here. What the actual penthouse looks like two years from now you don’t need to know to get started, as long as you have laid down the general parameters – no “let’s add a swimming pool on the top floor” 3/4ths of the way up…. depending on how the tests and changes are working out, you migh add in a few more floors or take a few floors off.
Scary.