…which lasted two weeks and culminated in a full new release of our software. I’ve written elsewhere about what happened in one week of a particular iteration in June 2008. However, our R2 iterations didn’t just involve implementing software. At the same time each team was also working with a business analyst and end-users to … Continue reading
…which was launched in May 2007 and incorporated a huge amount of flexibility to tell the day’s news in different ways. There are two major aspects to the home page’s flexibility. The first, and most obviously, is a variety of templates. In our previous system the home page had almost no flexibility at all, which … Continue reading
…which was not part of the project scope when we started R2. It’s fair to say that when we began implementing in February 2006, the idea of a Guardian America launch was not on the radar. Yet by the middle of 2007 it was being talked about very seriously, and increasingly so. How did we … Continue reading
…which was one of the key goals of the project. This exposes one of the significant aspects of R2: it was neither editorially driven, nor technically driven, nor commercially driven. It was driven by a unity of needs right across the company, and it needed to be successful in all these areas. There are a … Continue reading
…which is one of the features central to the Eduction section. An example is this page of GCSE results. Education tables are a great example of how one specialist requirement can reap rewards for so many others. We decided the Education section couldn’t be launched until we had created the ability to display and manage … Continue reading
…which Mat Wall and I have written about extensively before, However, for this piece let me say this… When you have a huge number of people for whom you are building software (1500 staff, 20 million unique users, and an entire wired economy influencing which way you should go next) then simply following instructions is … Continue reading
…which are a fact of life — certainly if your life revolves around developing software. During R2 there was a 40% churn on requirements. That means by the end of the project 40% of the work we had done had not appeared in our initial plan — some things were dumped, new things were introduced, … Continue reading
…which means different things to different people. In our case it meant extracting requirements and turning them into something that could be implemented. Business analysis is often misunderstood when it’s used in an Agile context. Agile people often think it’s not necessary — after all, they say, the analysis is best performed by the developers … Continue reading
…which is one of the first tools we built as part of the project. And it’s a lot more complex that most people expect, especially if their main exposure to a content management system is through blogging. The main reason there’s so much to it is that there’s so much to the organisation it operates … Continue reading
In September 2008 guardian.co.uk officially finished the rebuilding of our website, which had started (depending how you count it) in October 2005. The project was known internally as R2. Over each of the next 26 working days I’ll be looking at one aspect of the project — one for each letter of the alphabet, for … Continue reading
