frog design

Goodbye, Waterfall

December 11, 2007

In the running debate over iterative vs. waterfall software development, the promise of using declarative UI markup languages and tools to help minimize churn and waste in the design ideation process, while at the same time eliminating “lossiness” in the translation of visual and interaction design to development, has been a standard pointer for the proponents of iterative process methodologies (think XP, Agile, Scrum, …) for quite a while.

I am a proponent of the 80-20 rule, especially in creating user experiences with rich interactive platform technologies. 80% of an agile-like process so that designs don’t get dumped over a wall to technologists left to fend for themselves and with a healthy amount of flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements …