Now that 37signals have put their book Getting Real online for free, I’ve finally gotten around to start reading it. And so far, I love it. I think there are a lot of great lessons, reminders, ideas in here that will help me make products I work on that much better.
I have a premonition, even before writing this, that a lot of people will tell me that the book is crap because they don’t believe in functional specifications and even Joel believes in functional specifications. As the authors point out in their Caveats, disclaimers, and other preemptive strikes page, their techniques don’t apply to everyone (though probably to more people than one would think). Also, their ideas are not an all or nothing affair. Gotta have your functional specs, then by all means keep doing it. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Open Source projects are probably in the best position to make use of their guidelines, though I am sure many more projects would be made much better by getting real. Subtext will most certainly gain from many of these approaches. My hope is to use Subtext as a testing ground for the principles in Getting Real, and then using its success to show my clients that they don’t need to be so rigid about product development. We’ll see.
As you might guess, many of my upcoming blog posts will focus on some of these topics.