BlogJAM Session®PrevisualizationVisualization

Fail Fast, Fail Often. In Other Words, Iterate.

By June 6, 2011No Comments

Iteration is one of the core principles of how we work. We believe you simply won’t get it right the first time. Fast Company has a really great article about how iteration leads to innovation. It tells the story of the Wright Brothers and how they failed, tried again, and failed, and tried again hundreds of times before they found flight.

The article goes on to talk about rapid prototyping, which is simply another way to describe our use of software visualization. Visualization is how we help companies define software. We start with Pre-vis, which is a very low fidelity representation of high-level business requirements and system features. We may take multiple passes to make sure everyone is on the same page about what the project is about, what it will accomplish, and more.

From pre-vis we go into visualization. Now that everyone understands the baseline of the project, we kick into medium to high fidelity and iterate on all the fine details. During visualization, stakeholders see their software come to life. What they see isn’t traditional static wireframes or reams of documentation. They see a fully interactive and functioning “prototype” of their software. During visualization we will iterate on functionality multiple times until we get it right.

Through each iteration and review, the functionality of the software solidifies. We may explore many ideas that we find after testing and review simply don’t work. Making rapid changes to these failures is quick, easy and inexpensive because we’re not writing or deploying code. Changes can be made in minutes, not days or weeks.

Our clients are consistently amazed at how much work we can accomplish over a few days. We are successful because we fail fast, and we fail early.

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