kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: February 2008

Scope Creep – A Real World Example

Here’s a real-life example of how scope creep can absolutely kill a project you’re working on. I tend to find that this particular phenomenon tends to take hold of my projects on a regular basis, and I’ve been actively trying to combat it for quite a while now.

The project in question was a very simple installation of TwitterFeed on my blog. In my recent rediscovery of Twitter, I’ve noticed lots of folks seem to be auto-creating tweets when new posts go up… and quite frankly, I wanted in on that action. ;)

First, a description of the problem. The scope creep I talk about tends to come up when a simple project begins to show you options that you just have to could implement. Each option can really be a project in and of itself, and as a result the original project (which should have taken 10 minutes) has taken you the whole night and you’re up until one in the morning working on it and then blogging about the problem! :mrgreen:

Here are the basic instructions for setting up TwitterFeed:

  1. Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
  2. Step Two: Provide OpenID credentials
  3. Step Three: Start using TwitterFeed
  4. DONE!

Here is the example of what happens when you let your curiosity about the extendability of the same plugin get the better of you. Instead of getting this all to work as expected, it causes an evening of frustration.

  1. Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
  2. Step Two: Discover that TwitterFeed uses OpenID
  3. Step Three: Read the OpenID tutorial and discover that you can host your own OpenID server
  4. Step Four: Download the OpenID code
  5. Step Five: Read the roll-your-own-OpenID tutorial and discover that you should use OpenSSL
  6. Step Six: Do trial and error until you find a way to actually get the OpenSSL working
  7. Step Seven: After 2 hours of searching, submit a support ticket and give up on the SSL for now
  8. Step Eight: Go get something to drink. Something strong
  9. Step Nine: Configure phpmyid
  10. Step Ten: Add code to your site.
  11. Step Eleven: Realize that it doesn’t work and use a regular OpenID account until you get more time…
  12. DONE!

I rest my case. So let this be a lesson to you:

  1. Figure out what you need to get done
  2. Get it done
  3. Make notes of the other options along the way
  4. DONE!

Twitter Rediscovery

Image Credit: Thomas Hawk on FlickrI’ve had a Twitter account for about a year now.  Until this past week, I think I’d only posted to it about a half-dozen times.  But recently, I’ve started to see some value in Twitter.  For some of the bloggers that I follow, something that I’ve noticed on occasion is the delay inherent in RSS.  Being able to see immediately when a post is made lets me be the first commenter, or gets me some information just a bit earlier.

I was able to post something to my Twitter account this week to give me some ideas for an issue I was having in my life.  By allowing a few more people to give me some feedback, I was able to get an answer and set up a post about it.

My Twitter client of choice (at the moment) is Twhirl, which I covered for this week’s Global Geek Podcast.

So over the next while, I’ll be giving Twitter a good run and trying to see who I can follow, and what I can learn.  Nuggets.  It’s all about nuggets… er tweets.