The Savvy CIO

There are two major methods of developing software: waterfall and agile. If you’re considering a development project, you should consider how your software should be made.

Waterfall development goes through distinct stages, with requirements gathering in the first stage. In the waterfall method, a group of decision makers think, imagine, script and whiteboard how the system might be used. These working sessions create a set of requirements for the application. After the requirements are set, the waterfall method flows down to future stages of development, testing and deployment.

In contrast, agile development breaks a project down into small stages. Each stage tackles a small area of the application, gathering requirements, building, testing and then putting the growing application into the hands of users. This process allows requirements to emerge over time, as users and developers learn together exactly what the application needs to accomplish.

Waterfall development assumes the requirements of a system can be fully predicted and codified before any development begins. Agile development assumes requirements only fully emerge during the process.

Waterfall development aims at a stationary target. Agile development aims at a moving one.

So which method is best?

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The primary ways of accessing the Internet are changing. Now that large, wide-screen, flat panel, high resolution monitors are affordable and easily available, they’re being abandoned for tiny screens on mobile phones. Exactly why so many of us would choose to access a website on a screen the size of a playing card (while attempting to walk down a sidewalk at the same time, no less) can be bewildering, but there is no denying the “mobile revolution” has gained critical mass.

The stronger your online presence, the more people there are looking at your website or newsletter or blog on a mobile device. Do you have any idea how it looks?

If not, go ahead and try it out. It’s usually not very pretty.

The bad news is that all of the attention, effort and resources you’ve poured into your website, newsletter, blog, e-commerce site, etc. amounts to almost nothing on a mobile device. Load times are so long and screen sizes are so strange that only the most determined mobile browser will be able to find the information they’re looking for.

The solution? Start providing mobile alternatives. read more »

Check out this great story about how open source crisis-mapping software has saved lives in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere. Two people wrote the program in a few days during the 2008 Kenyan post-election violence. The result?

The Ushahidi program provides a way for volunteers to collect information from sources like text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, and pictures, which are then mapped in near real time. It can be used to plot everything from disasters to wars. And unlike older forms of crisis-mapping software, Ushahidi is advanced enough to paint an accurate portrait of events while remaining incredibly user friendly and easy to build on.

This is open-source software at it’s best: fast, powerful, extensible, user-friendly and leveraging existing platforms instead of reinventing every wheel.

Kudos to the folks at Ushahidi. What great work.

The Ushahidi site and a photo of the software are after the jump. read more »

We develop, customize, build, integrate and host web applications and web sites, and we do it almost exclusively on open source software.

Why open source?

There are several reasons, but here’s a big one:

Open source saves you money.

That’s you, the client. Open source saves you money. read more »