From Oink Closure Raises Questions about ‘Fail Fast’ Development:

Oink’s brief three-month stint seems to instead be a case of an extreme version of Google’s ‘fail fast’ mentality, which led to the shuttering of Google Wave and Google Buzz. Those services were provided with quite a bit more time to catch on; Oink’s rapid exit might leave a bad taste in the mouth of some regarding its future products.

Well, I believe the “rapid exit” might be the fast part of “fail fast,” folks….

A nice article yesterday from Aaron Erickson about the relationship — I would go as far as to say the symbiotic relationship — of agile software development and failure. He provides an overview of methods to identify a failing project and metrics that can help discern failure as quickly as possible. To quote:

Failing fast doesn’t just save us money. The cold reality is that people don’t like working on failing projects. When a project is failing, people generally can smell it in the air. Employee engagement goes down, turnover goes up, and things just generally get worse. The best thing to do — for your people, for your company — is to learn to fail, and create a culture that learns from failure.

I heartily agree, though I would emphasize that failure doesn’t have to relate to the entire project, and ideally it doesn’t. You could fail fast on an architectural approach, a feature, a graphic design, or an idea. As Alan Cooper recently wrote:

Generally, ideas are cheap and plentiful, therefore so are good ideas. Unfortunately, bad ideas are the most plentiful of all. While success depends on developing good ideas, consistently successful companies and individuals are skilled at both identifying and discarding bad ideas to devote resources to the good ones…. You have to be tough enough to nurture your idea to the point where its fatal flaws become visible, then ruthlessly put it out of your misery. The author William Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings.”

Good night, darling.

What a great way to celebrate Bloomsday: Twittering the most hypertext text of all time (before there even was a concept hypertext, though I guess we could argue that a bit). Check it out at Ulysses Meets Twitter and follow @11ysses for the fun.

Darn it. A few days late and the wrong side of the pond:

http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-insider/2011/wired-upgrade-series

Looks like a cool event. Anyone make it?

Follow the series on Twitter here.

Many thanks to Chris Mero for the reference to this short interview with Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist from Arizona State University. Given that “theoretical physicist” was one of the careers I really wanted to pursue, I have a natural soft spot for this podcast. The fact that it also includes this quote doesn’t hurt:

But I think we do a much better job and a much better service to our students if we try and teach our students to fail more effectively.

A little wisdom from Mr. Godin to get your Monday off to a strong start. I particularly like the last suggestion:

When you fail (and you will) be clear about it, call it by name and outline specifically what you learned so you won’t make the same mistake twice. People who blame others for failure will never be good at failing, because they’ve never done it.

Many thanks to Stacey O’Connor for the reference to this fantastic article on how a human-powered airplane was crafted. As technology as an industry or department continues to shrink due to advances in models like cloud computing, I theorize that those workers and models will be transformed into process developers: business process, product design process, fundamentally design process. The key quote:

The first airplane didn’t work. It was too flimsy. But, because the problem he set out to solve was creating a plane he could fix in hours, he was able to quickly iterate. Sometimes he would fly three or four different planes in a single day. The rebuild, re-test, and re-learn cycle went from months and years to hours and days.

It is interesting to me that this story of process and failing fast uses flight as the example, as the original use of the term “fail fast” that I remember was in this Freeman Dyson interview:

Say something about failure in experiments or businesses or anything else. What’s the value of failure?

You can’t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It’s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we’ve been building them for 100 years, it’s very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it’s even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential. The same is true of airplanes.

This brings up an interesting issue of where theory fits in. Presumably there was not a theory of planes before there were planes.

There was an attempt at a theory of airplanes, but it was completely misleading. The Wright brothers, in fact, did much better without it.

So you’re saying just go ahead and try stuff and you’ll sort out the right way.

That’s what nature did. And it’s almost always true in technology. That’s why computers never really took off until they built them small.

Fail fast, my friends, and take flight.

Apparently the CEO gets it:

But that’s part of innovation. You fail fast. You move on.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/business/27corner.html.

In the last year, the Interlochen Center for the Arts has moved from an antique on-premise ERP/ CRM solution to two cloudy offerings: Enrollment Rx for admissions to both our summer camp and arts academy, and Convio Common Ground for our advancement and fundraising department. Both of these solutions reside on the Salesforce.com platform, a delivery model that is providing significant financial and time savings for our IT organization along with process improvements for our business units. Interlochen has also migrated away from on-premise Microsoft Exchange and adopted Google Apps for Education, which provides email, document collaboration, enterprise calendaring, and instant messaging.

At the 2011 Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference (April 16th in Grand Rapids), I’ll provide an overview of how these efforts to move to the cloud have benefited our institution and, just as importantly, outline the challenges we overcame in an effort to save others the same heartaches — or to at least prepare them for similar challenges.

Please come join me for a great day of learning and networking. The Starbucks is on me!

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.