David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, gave a talk on the startup school. Take a look at the video, is really interesting:

http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97862/DHH_Talk__Startup_School_2008

He says "Stop trying to create the next Facebook or the next MySpace", "There are a lot of other small apps that can make you earn enough money to make you live in peace"

He's so right, some people spend their lives trying to hit a home run or trying to create the application of their dreams. Why don't just create something good enough for a bunch of potential users and earn some money from them. If it becomes bigger... great, it not, we have another income.

Soooo agree with this article:

http://gojko.net/2007/12/04/waterfall-trap/

In my last project, we decided to follow an iterative plan (without knowing it had a name), focusing on the main features and not on details, just trying to close the entire worklow as quick as possible.

By the end of the second week of development we had the workflow ready (very ugly, with uncompleted forms, no ajax at all, a lot of bugs, etc).

The customer saw it and he couldn't believe how fast we prove his idea.

From that moment we started working on details knowing that we were on the rigth way and with a customer seeing improvements daily.

Everyone was happy from the second week.

At least for me.... it worked