You had me at Hello, World!

At the first ever ASAS Night, I attended a presentation by Wouter Lagerweij on refactoring / rebuilding software projects. If you are interested, you can find basically the same presentation on his blog.

There was a lot in his presentation that I could write about, but I want to stick to this: he had me at "hello".

(Just in case you were born a little later than me: Jerry Maguire - You Had me at Hello full scene). It was not the "hello" when he came in, but after 45 minutes or so when he explained he had convinced his product owner to define this goal for sprint #1: deploy a "Hello, World!" application to production. When you were hired because you promised to deliver value from day 1, this might require some persuasiveness.

I have written about this many times before, and just like Wouter I would like to keep stressing the importance of deployment: do it early, do it often. When you just deployed hello world to production you should be proud. You probably crossed a lot of borders in your organization, you dealt with the IT maintainence department or you simply struggled with Amazon AWS and won. It's not that you delivered much business value, but you just started a habit that will deliver that value very soon and very often.

Derisk, Deploy, Deliver.