You can always do less

Take a look at these article from 37 Signals: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2106-you-can-always-do-less

That's true and it happened to me a lot. Clients always ask for crazy things and is part of our job to organize and minimize the set of 'required things'. Of course he will never understand at first but is part of our job to make them understand that is more important to build simpler versions of the features first, release them, receive feedback and identify the things that are necessary to make the feature a success.

Building Software as a Service lets you update the app easily and effortless and having a community that gives you feedback lets you test new features and make them perfect in future updates. If you do this you'll not work at nights trying to meet deadlines and users will be happy because they feel part of the software development, in fact, they are part.

Is important to have a good way to receive and organize the feedback and feature requests. I recommend Zendesk for that.

Please take a look at this presentation, this guy from RailsEnvy make you laugh and learn a lot at the same time.

http://www.railsenvy.com/2007/3/22/ruby-on-rails-video-presentation

In my opinion the most amazing thing in the video is the comparative between Adaptive and Predictive software development, and he's right, all developers working in fixed price projects have to deal / fight with clients about improvements and non planned things.

Another true statement is that you can never estimate (guess) how much time the project will take, doesn't matter how much experience you think you have in that area. This is because development processes are living things, there are no sure things, clients change their opinions all the time.

With the Agile technique, implemented in the way this guy explains in the video, make developers go from "Hmmm, that's kind of difficult to do, i don't know if I can do that quickly" (because you're thinking in that moment that you're not going to get paid for that improvement, which is true) to "Yeah, awesome idea, let's try that and see how it looks" (because you know his idea is fine and you don't care how much time it takes, you know you're going to get paid for that too).

In a nutshell, I think this guy is trying to say, get paid hourly and not for a fixed price.

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