Notes by Austin Pocus

Four and Three and Two and One

I get it, I got it, I know it's good -- the rhymes I write, you wish you would!

-- Mike D., Beastie Boys, "The New Style"

I've got a new idea for product development: "use-driven development". What does that mean?

That means I have a specific use in mind, and I try to use the app as-is to carry out that specific use case. No frills, no thrills, just that one user in mind.

Then I build to serve that case. That's it. Nothing else.

Let me clear my throat! ...and let all the fly skimmers...feel the beat...drop?!

This is superior to agile, scrum, or whatever other dogmatic methodology you can throw at this, because it's purely driven by the usage.

In my case, I want to write a fucking interactive story. That's it, that's all. So when things come up that don't matter: I should ignore them. When needs come up: I should address them.

There's not much more to say. Need-driven development, use-case-driven development, is the way to go, no doubt. The hard part is sticking to it!

I mean, any "cool feature" or neat distraction or edge case can come up. This methodology is all about how you deal with those side-tracks, those distractions.

This isn't even a methodology. It's a way of doing, a way of being, a way of thinking. Not to get too philosophical with it, not to stick my head too far up my ass, but I'd like to think it's akin to the Tao.

I say this because the Tao cannot be fully described -- rather, it flows around any attempt at description like water. Likewise, the use-case driven development method is fluid, dynamic, responsive to external stimuli. It changes, with each use case and each product with each moment. It is change.

I'm getting too goddamn philosophical here, so I'll stop. But I'll probably write more at some point about user-driven development. It's the way of the future.

I will say one last thing: this may seem like a lot of fluffy words with little substance, and in large part, it is -- it's philosophy, for fuck's sake. But I will say this: agile is stiff. Agile is rigid. Agile is slow. This, this is fast. This is a highly reactive substance. This is fluid, flowing form around whatever idea you have.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more navel-gazing...