Monday, May 31, 2010

Starting with Startup - Tools and Technologies Reasoning

For those that read 'Starting with Startup' posts I want to apologize for not writing recently but last months we have been working a lot. You know how it is in startups :)

In the previous posts I have explained processes and tools we have decided to use. There were some comments and questions why this and not that technology and similar.

When you start with the startup everything is completely new. The following list captures the most important new things that each member of the startup team meet:
  • team members
  • project
  • processes (you cannot expect that each team member will have experience with the process you select)
  • technologies (you cannot expect that each team member will have experience with all technologies you select)

As we all know it is much easier to predict result if there is minimum of unknowns. And in the startup company more or less everything is unknown - from the project to the project acceptance from final users. So what you try is to minimize unknowns. And to do that you have to carefully select each aspect of the technology and process.

I would say that selection of agile and Scrum is more or less straight-forward. You want to be able to adapt to each new situation that will come up and what gives you more possibilities for that than agile development.

How to minimize unknowns in the project will be topic of further posts.

And at the end comes technology. And here is reasoning similar. You select what suites the best for the team and the project that is in front of you. And that is reason why we didn't select some upcoming technologies like GIT. We have created list of tools we need and then selected those that are the most known to all of us. And the result of selections are in details explained in the previous post.