early feedback

For the past few days, I’ve asked some friends to start testing what noisyheads has got so far. In my project plan, it’s at Milestone 1 (Milestone 5 should mark a public beta). And what an eye-opener it was. I’m glad I did early testing. They were able to catch some usability issues, and some feature problems. Got some great suggestions as well. Although I’ve invested a bunch of effin’ time on it, I’ve decided to redo a whole crap load of mess in the app. I’ve been rethinking my use-case diagram, and probably throw out most of it and type in new and hopefully way cooler stuff.

I should’ve done testing much earlier though. I know someone told me not to invest too much time on the underlying stuff in the architecture early on, but begin on the surface first, that which humans actually interact with. Because ultimately, that’s the stuff that matters. An arguable statement, but has some sense nonetheless.

Note to self. The Agile Way works! Should try it more often. Now if I could afford scheduling 2 week sprints instead of feature-based milestones..