Flickr.com, which was recently acquired by Yahoo, has undergone many changes since its inception. Before it was the “best online photo management and sharing application in the world”, it was a simple flash-based chat site. According to Flickr developer Eric Costello (interviewed here),its evolution has been the result of developing and releasing newfeatures constently, and using member feedback to shape futurereleases; a process widely referred to as Iterative, or Agile Development:
“because we’re quick to develop and deploy new things, and because we have a talkative bunch of users and a lot of places for them to talk to us, we can quickly assimilate suggestions from thecommunity. We can build a feature and deploy it sometimes within a week of hearing a feature request.”
We’ve been using the agile method for about 5 months now and we’re already seeing the benefits. We’re developing faster, and with betterresults because changes and new features to our software arecustomer-driven. Put simply, there’s less guesswork. And we like that.